Florence Baptist University Chapel

Hidden somewhere behind the grand facade of Florence Baptist University was one of the building’s most intriguing spaces: a chapel large enough to seat approximately 750 people. While historical records tell us that the chapel existed, they leave much of its appearance to the imagination.

This piece asks a simple question: What might it have looked like?

Rather than attempting a literal reconstruction, this drawing reimagines the university chapel as it could have appeared at the height of the building’s life. Its architecture was designed to feel at home within the enormous nineteenth-century university, a space filled with light, symmetry, and the sense of grandeur that the exterior of the building suggests.

Students once gathered somewhere within those walls for a part of university life that photographs have not preserved for us. When fire destroyed the building in 1911, that space disappeared with it.

The Chapel is an exercise in imagination rooted in history, not an attempt to say exactly what was there, but to give form to something we know once existed.

Sometimes preserving a place means drawing what remains.

Sometimes it means imagining what was lost.