Architectural heritage
 In form, the building is basically a stack of three diminishing cubes with ancillary spaces added at the sides. Maguire and Murray’s defining geometry was that of two bounded areas – contained by the exterior and barely broken bounding walls and also by the inner ‘transparent’ encircling line of columns.
These columns surround the worshipping area around the altar, and outside the columns are areas serving the varying needs of the Christian community - a space in which the whole common life of the worshipping community could be lived out - and from which they would then go out into the world.
Benches were designed to be easily moveable so that they could be set aside or reâ€arranged according to need.
The roots and antecedents of this building’s design run deep; to classical forms and the Renaissance Revival, to the fundamental geometry of square and circle, influences owing a debt to Brunelleschi, Palladio, Bramant, and further back, to the churches of Torcello, to Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and to the great Pantheon in Rome.
| 
