HAGIA SOPHIA, THE great cathedral church of the Byzantine world, once made—that is fundamentally formed—Byzantine or Orthodox Christian subjects (Figure 7). It gathered them in under its great dome or consigned them to side aisles and balconies in order to bring them into being that properly bodied a medieval Orthodox subjecthood. The building created its own unique environment, an environment larger than any human participant. Emperor and patriarch, it has been said, were the only humans fully able to understand the cosmos under the dome, because their importance for the empire ensured them places at key moments in the centre of the building, from where all components of the building coalesced into a perfect capture of God’s creation. That visual supremacy can’t be quite accurate; no one standing beneath the dome can see and, more importantly, comprehend the relationship among the diverse and rich constituent parts of the building: the main and subsidiary domes, the withdrawing secondary spaces and levels, and the deceptively porous surfaces that seem to be primarily for streaming light, for making the interior a special kind of outside. In this space, every human scale is reduced to, well, human; no one feels outsized in relation to the cosmos there.

In this great church, sound, voice, matter, subjectivity formed around and within the architectural space. It happened with the liturgical performances memorably enacted there and with the movements and attentions of human subjects fundamentally made by the sound, light, and elements, such as water, actively in concert there.

I am purposefully moving around the human-centred descriptions of agency normally assumed to be in play in a building, or anywhere, for that matter. I am trying to expand the subject-making potentials of a Byzantine building to include all entities in this made world, beyond just us and comprising buildings and objects and nature (which is never out of these buildings), the very stuff from which the building is composed.