What a Quarry Taught Me About Why God Excavates a Human Life

By Cordila Jochim, Spiritual Architecture

“Everything starts off from the knowledge of materials. Because if you know materials, if you learn how the material is processed, this is a game-changer.”

- Arch. Andrea Vaccari, A7design

On the opening day of Yacademy's 2026 Spiritual Architecture course, architect Andrea Vaccari of A7design gave that advice during his lecture on Restoration and Modernization of Sacred Architecture. It would eventually shape how I viewed the entire course.

He also said, “We usually start our projects with a sentence, which is our value, our orientation.”

His statement would come to be mine.

Our assignment seemed straightforward: design a spiritual space in an abandoned quarry and use marble to do it. 

The site was one of the most extraordinary, excavated yet abandoned quarries within the Apuan Alps of Carrara, Italy. And marble - in partnership with marble supplier, processor, and sponsor of our course, Franchi Umberto Marmi - our main material.

So Vaccari’s instruction seemed practical on its face: know the material, know how it is processed.

What I did not understand was where that instruction would lead me.

Because the more I learned about marble - its origin, extraction, processing, restoration and eventual destination - the less marble seemed like simply a material with which to design.

The material itself was telling a story. 

And by the end of the course, that story would make its way out.

The Material

Carrara marble begins hidden. Before the cathedral, before the sculpture, before the altar, before the polished slab beneath someone’s hand, there is a mountain. And inside that mountain is something beautiful that no one can see. But the quarry exists because someone knows it is there.

The Quarry

The quarry itself can initially look like an act of destruction. The mountain has been cut and hollowed. Enormous quantities of material have been removed. Its history is written visibly across its surface. 

But excavation is not undertaken simply to make a hole in a mountain. Something hidden is being brought to light. And once extracted, it is cut, processed, and selected for a purpose. And then it leaves the mountain. 

Carrara marble has traveled from these mountains into the world for centuries. It has become sculpture and architecture, floor and facade, monument and altar. Material formed in darkness inside a mountain has become beauty encountered by people worldwide. The mountain does not remain the mountain. Pieces of it are sent out. 

With that realization, suddenly, I was no longer thinking about the marble. Or the mountain.

I was thinking about God.

The Maker

While the design brief called for the creation of an “interreligious space,” and my workshop group included a New Ager, a Buddhist, a Sikh, and me, my Christian worldview refused to stay silent. 

Considering the marble formed in the mountain - inexplicably beautiful, veined, unique, magnetic - I thought of a God who hid it during its creation in the same way he hides us during ours. Scripture says:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

before you were born I set you apart.”

- Jeremiah 1:5

Encountering a marble mountain makes it difficult to regard beauty as a human achievement.

We can expose it.
Polish it.
Illuminate it.
Design with it.

But we did not put it inside the mountain.

God did.

And he knows it the same way he knows us.

The Process

Once I began to see marble in this way, I had to step back and look at the quarry itself as a metaphor for human life. And I began to wonder:

What if God also excavates us?

We spent a lot of time in our workshop group talking about loss. It's hard to look at a gaping wound and not think about removal. Gutting. Hollowing. Extraction. Within our own group, we knew loss too well. 

But if Jeremiah was right, and we were set apart for a purpose, what if the excavation and quarry process in a human life was not about loss, but about liberation? 

That’s when the quarry stopped being, for me, a metaphor about trauma and became a metaphor about purpose - one that ultimately extends beyond the individual.

During the course, architect David Adjaye of Adjaye Associates spoke about the role of narrative in shaping architecture, a philosophy he deploys in all of his projects, including the religious and sacred spaces of the Abrahamic Family House and the National Cathedral of Ghana. He said:

“Everything follows the narrative. Once the story is clear, the architecture bends to the story.”

- Arch. David Adjaye

That unlocked something within me. 

If everything follows the narrative, what happens when the narrative is God’s? 

The Narrative

Throughout our design workshop, at every single critique and to every single group, our tutor, Giuseppe Zampieri, Partner and Director at David Chipperfield Architects Milan, repeatedly challenged us to justify what made our proposals spiritual. 

“How do I know it is spiritual?” 

- Arch. Giuseppe Zampieri

It became a question we began to dread. 

A quarry can easily be made dramatic, and the architecture we create within it can be beautiful and contemplative. But how does one make something spiritual, especially without the ability to leverage symbology used by a specific religion? Without that anchor, any architectural response seemed to gravitate toward a meditative journey into the interior of the self. But a journey toward the self seemed to stagnate at a human end-point: knowing oneself, understanding oneself, being with oneself. 

But if the narrative was God’s, and the word the prophet Jeremiah received was right - that a person is known and set apart before they are born - then the narrative didn’t bend inwards, but out.

Spiritual Architecture

Christianity has architecture built into its entire narrative arc. The Bible’s Old Testament opens with the phrase “in the beginning” and repeats it in the New Testament to reveal the nature and divinity of Christ. That phrase, in Greek, is en archē. Archē means origin and governing principle and gives rise to the root from which the words architect and architecture were formed.

Christianity also references believers as temples of the Holy Spirit, and Christ himself as the chief cornerstone, by which that entire living temple takes its orientation.

In this worldview, we are the spiritual architecture. It’s not something we stand inside. It’s something we become. 

The Purpose

What if the purpose of spiritual architecture isn’t to exist inside the core of a mountain as a fixture, but to be mobile and encountered?

During our second critique with Giuseppe, I asked, as a point of clarification:

“Our specific instructions are to create an intervention that is transitional rather than permanent, but you seem to be encouraging us to build a different dimension, which feels fixed and long-lasting.” 

They felt juxtaposed to me at the time, but maybe they are not. The purpose of the Christian life is the same as the marble: we are to leave the mountain. After we are known, excavated, selected, commissioned, and processed for a purpose, we are sent out to carry the presence of God into a hurting world.  

I was looking at architecture as a fixed structure in a static site, but marble itself is neither fixed nor permanent. Architecture, whether human or material, will not last. It can only ever hope to capture the light of the eternal for a temporary window of time until it returns to the dust from which it came.

In the end, the architecture goes back to its origin. And only the spiritual remains.

Dedicated to my Aunt Siggi, who transitioned during the course from the earthly to the eternal. The light she left behind, I will carry forward.