Fluid Sanctity is a church intervention project that aims to recognize different approaches to spirituality. Located in Harlem’s Little Mexico, the existing Baptist church faces a decline in attendance, leading to the underutilization of its space. Meanwhile, the church’s front staircase has been popular and highly utilized—essentially a street furniture on which people casually rest, regardless of the church’s service hours—embodying a generosity absent in regular storefronts. Leveraging this generosity, the project aims to provide more of such hospitality to serve the neighborhood. With the existing staircase extending itself to eventually form a Mexican pyramid, the church space humbly decreases in volume to accommodate other programs, including a scuba diving school offering an alternative spiritual experience to baptism, a water treatment plant purifying the facility’s water as well as serving the nearby neighborhood, and an abundance of public toilets enjoying a view of a waterfall, with the waterfall filtering out noises for meditation. By incorporating facilities that serve a larger population and providing various sensory experiences with water, this project redefines the conventional sacred space, transforming the church into a hub where diverse activities coexist, fostering a sense of community and spiritual connection amidst the urban landscape.
