Hasta La Ideas

Thanks to our randomly stumbling across this story in Peoria, Illinois’ local paper, the JournalStar, this weekend, now on our must-read list is Lance Factor‘s new book Chapel in the Sky: Knox College’s Old Main and Its Masonic Architect. As best we can describe it, the books sounds like The DaVinci Code for the architecture set, telling the story of Factor’s discovery that the Illinois’ college’s centerpiece building, home to one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, was designed by a Freemason-connected Swedish architect who secretly built it using Masonic principals despite the fact that the college was rabidly anti-Masonic (this was all in the mid-1800s, so that explains why people would have strong Masonic leanings one way or the other). Factor, a professor at the college, had noticed how odd the building’s architecture was, like “why there were precise triangular grids in the transoms above doors” and finally headed out to crack the code. Everything about the book/story sounds fantastic, and as soon as we’re done typing these words, we’re going to order our copy. And you should too. If it’s an indication of how good it is, although the book is being published through the small Northern Illinois University Press, it’s been so wildly popular locally that it almost immediately went into a second printing as soon as it was released.

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