David Wang is Professor Emeritus of Architecture at Washington State University. His previous book is A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture Past, Present, Future (Routledge). Dr. Wang has written and lectured widely on design research. His co-authored text Architectural Research Methods (with Linda Groat) is in its second edition. He is also co-editor (with Dana Vaux) of Research Methods for Interior Design: Applying Interiority (Routledge).
David Wang's participatory vision rings profoundly true. When buildings rhyme both with our own, internal moral order and with the harmony of the cosmos, they participate in the very life of God. Architecture and Sacrament is an unapologetic and deeply learned foray into the sacramental zone that results from the incarnation itself. - Hans Boersma, Nashotah House Theological Seminary Architecture and Sacrament argues that architecture today would be understood more truly and fruitfully viewed through the lens of historic Christian sacramental theology, with attendant implications for our understanding of persons, communities, environmental stewardship, and human participation in sacred order. David Wang's thesis is brave, radical, remarkable.... - Philip Bess, University of Notre Dame Professor of Architecture, author Till We Have Built Jerusalem Is Architecture and Sacrament a contemporary argument, foiled in the voices of contemporary thinkers, for Alberti's concinnitas? Alberti wrote: Neither in the whole body nor in its parts does concinnitas flourish as much as it does in Nature herself; thus I might call it the spouse of the soul and of reason. It has a vast range in which to exercise itself and bloom - it runs through man's entire life and government, it molds the whole of Nature (9.5 para.5; trans Rykwert et al). David Wang uses rhyme to signal an affective/cognitive integration that he points to a nestedness of the order in the individual, to the city, to a cosmos beyond: The distribution of the built object in front of me rhymes with an internal moral order within me, which in turn rhymes with an orderliness in the cosmos. We can thank Wang for opening an entirely new, or new again, consideration of ultimate ends in the efforts we should make for places to which we are in the most significant ways suited. - Christopher C. Miller, Architecture Program Director and Professor, Department of Art, Benedictine College