Every Day Geometry

Yesterday, I attended one of the local churches.  It's been here for many years.  The inside caught my attention as its built in such a way as to be filled with geometric shapes.  I spent the time during the sermon looking at the various shapes.

Most of the opaque windows were filled with square pieces of bubbly glass.  I saw those windows and automatically though of how we usually show area that way.  Some of the windows had one to three squares in a darker yellow than the rest and my mind saw how fractions could represent the windows.  The fractions could either represent the number of darker colored squares, the lighter ones or light to dark.  So many possibilities.

In the front, behind the pulpit, there was an alcove with a parabolic top.  The figure on the left of the hand drawn ones represents the general shape.  I thought of either calculating the equation of the parabola at the top or figuring out how many degrees the arced area between the sides.  I would have drawn a three dimensional picture but I am not that great at drawing.

The raised ceiling in the middle was held up with a trapezoidal piece made of wood.  It appears to be an isosceles trapezoid broken up with smaller isosceles trapezoids except for the middle area which is made up of two right angle trapezoids. My eyes wanted to make them into isosceles triangles but the legs didn't meet so they weren't.

The sides of the raised ceilings were rectangles between each trapezoidal support beam but from an angle some looked more like parallelograms but they weren't.  It was only the angle that changed the perspective otherwise they were rectangles that were physically tilted inwards.   The flat ceiling at the sides was composed of rectangles formed by strips of wood. When the wooden strips met the wall, there was a triangle made up of more wood.  It looked like a scalene triangle.

The carpet also got some attention from me because it was made up of carpet squares.  Each carpenter square was composed of lots of parallel lines and the squares had been put down at 90 degree rotation so one set of lines ran up and down and the next ran left to right.

The walls were composed of planks of wood running lengthwise down the church from back to front on the sides below the windows before switching to boards running up and down perpendicular to the bottom ones.  In the front and pack it appeared all the boards ran up and down so they were perpendicular to the foundation.

I don't think I've been in another church that captured my attention as mathematically as this one did. I was thinking of all sorts of activities I could have students do with the architecture of the building.  I'll try to grab some pictures to share another time with people.

Let me know what you think,  I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.