Carving Eternity in Mountains PhD
Anchor Church, Derbyshire
Bhaskar Dasgupta [PhD Year 1]
Supervisors: Kate Jordan & Rosa Schiano-Phan
Why did ancient civilisations carve their most sacred spaces from rock when they could have built upward, stone upon stone, instead? My research follows that question across cultures and continents: Christian catacombs beneath the Mediterranean, rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia, monastic warrens of Cappadocia, and the hermitages and cave chapels of England. These are spaces made by removal rather than addition, sculpted from the mountain instead of assembled against it.
I came to architecture after more than three decades in banking and financial markets, and I bring that regulatory habit of impertinent questioning to very old buildings. What did carving cost, in labour and meaning? What does a community signal when it commits to stone it cannot unmake? The result is a study of permanence, of devotion measured in subtraction, and of why some sacred ideas demanded the mountain itself.
KEY WORDS: rock-cut architecture; sacred space; subtractive construction; sacred space; comparative archaeology