LaSalle Road Prayer Room

The new administrative headquarters for the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus includes this small space for prayer and contemplation, a refuge from the commotion of day-to-day business, and a reminder of the fundamental spiritual matters at the heart of the Jesuits’ work.

This former corner office is embedded in the mix of spaces that make up a very conventional suite of business offices, but is set apart from them by its thick, deeply colored plastered walls, its enclosing, gently vaulted white oak ceiling, and especially by its uniform lining of etched white glass, suspended in a delicate framework of black steel. This glass scrim connects the space to the world beyond by displaying on its inner surface the traces of exterior movement and changing light, but at the same time shields it from its office park surroundings, turns the space inward, and transforms it from an ordinary room into a fundamentally different place, a protected inner world that rests comfortably apart from the outer world.