Sacred Spaces: McGreal Center Architecture Project

The “Sacred Spaces” project at Dominican University seeks to preserve and digitally archive architectural spaces of the Dominican family across the United States. This project takes an innovative approach to historic preservation by creating interactive 360 degree captures of significant sacred spaces of the Order of Preachers in North America using gigapixel panoramas and drone photography. This is a new initiative of Project OPUS.

These spaces will be curated by community members, archivists and historians to enhance the scholarly value for future study. The result is an interactive, deeply-sourced, community engaged, and historically rigorous digital artifact that can provide depth for future scholarly study. Visitors can not only visit the location digitally, but can hear about the history, life, and meaning of the place through labels and other audio-visual content. Oral histories and digitized archival material can be accessed through the tour. The resulting tour will be accessible via the McGreal Center website, and with our partner, the Yale Center for Material and Visual Cultures of Religion’s Digital Spaces project. We can work with communities to have these tours accessible through their own websites. Interested communities can apply for consideration by writing the McGreal Center: mcgrealcenter@dom.edu We are actively seeking grant funding from national foundations to help fund this initiative. We encourage communities to write internal grants to help support this work. You may give to Project OPUS and the McGreal Center here.

Resources for Other Religious and Cultural Communities

As a part of our interfaith initiatives in the Division of Mission and Ministry at Dominican University, we also offer this service for a suggested donation to other religious and cultural communities. Please contact mcgrealcenter@dom.edu for pricing and work samples. We have been actively working with Chicago-area churches in danger of closure to preserve their spaces. All proceeds go to supporting our scholarly projects and graduate student interns.

All of our content is made available for fair use under United States copyright law.