Alcôve - From Arabic al-qobbah, "the vaulted chamber"

In sacred space—a temple, an artist’s room, a scholar’s library—we feel atmosphere: the presence of the devotion and art, study and ritual, that have taken place within it over decades or centuries, and whose traces permeate its walls. On Alcôve, we enter into auratic places to explore aesthetics, spirituality, history, magic—those qualities we perceive in sacred space, and which open up that space within us. By talking with their keepers, descending into their foundations, and researching their objects and texts, we try to understand what is in the atmosphere of these extraordinary places.

Alcôve's producer and host, Alisa Carroll, is a writer who works at the intersection of aesthetics and poetics. Over the past two decades, she has interviewed and profiled artists, curators, gallerists, historians, conservators, and many others, chronicling their philosophies and practices in essays, articles, and books. Her most recent books are Art House (Assouline, 2016) and In the Making (Limited Edition, 2019).

“…I am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and thus of taking on a specific richness…a consciousness of time passing and an awareness of the human lives that have been acted out in these places and rooms and charged them with a special ‘aura.’”

Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture

"...what could be more overwhelmingly mysterious than Presence, than the fact that it exists, that there is something rather than nothing."

- David Hinton, Hunger Mountain