The requirements of liturgy have generally demanded that the church should extend beyond a single meeting room to two main spaces, one for the congregation and one in which the priest performs the rituals of the Mass.

One of the earliest of adapted residences is at Dura Europos church, built shortly after 200 AD, where two rooms were made into one, by removing a wall, and a dais was set up.

Its destruction was recorded thus: When that day dawned, in the eighth consulship of Diocletian and seventh of Maximian, suddenly, while it was yet hardly light, the prefect, together with chief commanders, tribunes, and officers of the treasury, came to the church in Nicomedia, and the gates having been forced open, they searched everywhere for an idol of the Divinity.

The Roman temple, on the other hand, was only suitable as a design for smaller chapels, as it only had a small cella inside, to which only the priests had access, but not the congregation, as in Christian churches.

[5][full citation needed] As numbers of clergy increased, the small apse which contained the altar, or table upon which the sacramental bread and wine were offered in the rite of Holy Communion, was not sufficient to accommodate them.

In the case of St. Peter's Basilica and San Paolo Fuori le Mura (St Paul's outside the Walls) in Rome, this bema extended laterally beyond the main meeting hall, forming two arms so that the building took on the shape of a T with a projecting apse.

The Emperor Constantine built for his daughter Costanza a mausoleum which has a circular central space surrounded by a lower ambulatory or passageway separated by a colonnade.

The circular or polygonal form lent itself to those buildings within church complexes that perform a function in which it is desirable for people to stand, or sit around, with a centralized focus, rather than an axial one.

Other than Santa Costanza and San Stefano, there was another significant place of worship in Rome that was also circular, the vast Ancient Roman Pantheon, with its numerous statue-filled niches.

At Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, there is a central dome, the frame on one axis by two high semi-domes and on the other by low rectangular transept arms, the overall plan being square.

These churches were in origin martyria, constructed as mausoleums housing the tombs of the saints who had died during the persecutions which only fully ended with the conversion of Emperor Constantine.

This projection allowed for the erection of an iconostasis, a screen on which icons are hung and which conceals the altar from the worshippers except at those points in the liturgy when its doors are opened.

The architecture of Constantinople (Istanbul) in the 6th century produced churches that effectively combined centralized and basilica plans, having semi-domes forming the axis, and arcaded galleries on either side.

[12] The cruciform constructions provided a more rigid structure and larger churches, but view to the pulpit and altar was obstructed by interior corners for seats in the transept.

[16] There are remnants of the Byzantine inspired architecture in many of the churches, such as the large domed ceilings, extensive stonework, and a maximizing of space to be used for religious iconography on walls and such.

Despite this resemblance, the interiors are quite different in how their rooms are laid out, based on a three-part division of: Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese architectures have been integrated into church building design.

These traditions had to adapt to the tropical climate and earthquake-prone environment, which resulted in a new types of arquitectura mestiza unique to the archipelago developed over three centuries.

[28][29] Convents and monasteries were primarily built in the bahay na bato tradition, which had the architectural principle of native Austronesian framework which was improvised with Chinese elements.

These intricate structures, often of immense size, required great amounts of planning, effort and resources; involved large numbers of engineers and laborers; and often took hundreds of years to complete—all of which was considered a tribute to God.

Through this newly implemented skill of being able to design complex shapes churches consisted of namely pointed arches, curved lights and windows, and rib vaults.

Therefore, Catholic churches were redecorated when they became reformed: Paintings and statues of saints were removed and sometimes the altar table was placed in front of the pulpit, as in Strasbourg Cathedral in 1524.

A new Protestant interior design scheme was established in many German Lutheran churches during the 18th century, following the example of the court chapel of Wilhelmsburg Castle of 1590: The connection of altar with baptismal font, pulpit and organ in a vertical axis.

Around 1880, two decades after the Neo-Gothic recommendation, liberal Lutherans and Calvinists expressed their wish for a new genuinely Protestant church architecture, conceived on the basis of liturgical requirements.

These protestant ideas have also had an impact on modern Catholic church architecture: When St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin was rebuilt after the Second World War, a similar arrangement was chosen, which was also retained in the most recent redesign of its interior.

The Église Notre-Dame du Raincy near Paris by Auguste Perret is cited as the starting point of process, not only for its plan but also for the materials used, reinforced concrete.

Inspired by the Dessau Bauhaus and his studying under the master builder Hans Poelzig in Berlin, the architect Rudolf Schwartz designed the interiors as well as many of the furnishings of the castle chapel.

Another notable building is the chapel Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp by Le Corbusier (1954) with an open altar facing east and an outer pulpit.

[44] Similar principles of simplicity and continuity of style throughout can be found in the United States, in particular at the Roman Catholic Abbey church of St. Procopius, in Lisle, near Chicago (1971).

Three spaces, one for the baptism, one for the liturgy of the word and one for the celebration of the Eucharist with a congregation standing around an altar, were promoted by Richard Giles in England and the United States.

Perhaps most obviously, architects rediscovered the expressive and symbolic value of architectural elements and forms that had evolved through centuries of building—often maintaining meaning in literature, poetry and art—but which had been abandoned by the modern movement.