Faith, fitness and a gym with a chapel

In 1857 an English novel called Tom Brown's School Days made a case that sounds strange now and shaped the next century: that a strong body was a Christian duty, that games built character, and that a church without a gymnasium was missing half of the person. Muscular Christianity. The idea crossed the Atlantic and found its home in a building that had been founded in London in 1844 for young men adrift in the city: the YMCA.

In the 1890s a physician and educator named Luther Gulick, working at the YMCA's training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, gave the movement its symbol, a triangle for spirit, mind and body, and its method: the whole person, trained together, in one building. He also had a problem. Winters in Massachusetts kept young men indoors and restless, so he asked one of his instructors to invent an indoor game. James Naismith nailed a peach basket to a balcony in December 1891, and basketball was born. Four years later, in the YMCA in Holyoke, William Morgan invented volleyball for the older men who found basketball too rough.

The key is Gulick's triangle. The YMCA was the first institution in America to say, in its architecture, that a person is one thing: a gym, a pool, a reading room and a chapel under one roof, and a membership that assumed you'd use all of them. That's the Vault Human thesis, built in brick, in 1890.

We've since separated them. The gym is here, the church is there, the library is somewhere else, and the person runs between them. Gulick would ask why.