Architecture: Want to walk on water? Step this way, madam

Just how do you keep all the major religions happy under one roof? The Dome's designers have got just 46 days to find the answer.

PAVED WITH more rocks than the road to Damascus, Faith Zone in the Dome threatens to give rise to a holy war about its contents. It has already shed the definitive article - "The" Faith Zone was seen to be too exclusive by Moslems, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Bahaians, Jains, Zoroastrians and Christians on the Lambeth Group, who were advising the New Millennium Experience.

The architect of the zone, Eva Jiricna, fears that video footage of explicit religious rituals, and provocative religious paintings from the 20th century, will offend everyone.

The zone's "godfather" (every zone has one, a trouble-shooter for the project), is Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art. He is unmoved by Jiricna's anxieties: "She's a minimalist and probably sees it all as clutter," he says. "`Faith in Conflict' will show some of the nasty things that have happened in 2000 years, including [the situation in] Northern Ireland - there's no point in wishing it away."

So will it offend anyone? "No doubt," he says. There was a certain point, about 18 months ago, when the Lambeth Group all tried "ever so hard not to offend anybody. We turned spirituality into something nice, without the conflict, the tension and the force of its life-changing dimension."

Now, all that has changed. They have had a conversion. By no accounts is the Faith Zone going to be solemn or cloying.

Eva Jiricna won a competition to build the zone - then known as "Spirit Level". First, she designed a triangle that in its smoky glass exterior reflected all that was going on within the Dome and left the interior white and light-filled. In both form and function, this was a modern celebration of spirituality. The floor was flooded, then covered with toughened glass; visitors could experience walking upon water. Simple bench seats were designed to encourage visitors to "hold hands and think what they have in common rather than look at historic clues to what went wrong", says Jiricna. "Elegant" is a word often attached to her work; it can be seen at Joseph shops in London, and at Le Caprice restaurant.

First to go was the top of the triangle, representing Three in One; it was banished by the Lambeth Group. Jiricna and her model-maker just snipped it off and, to stop the model falling down, pasted on to it a bauble like a Comic Relief nose. That was all BC, or "Before Christopher", as it was dubbed after Christopher Frayling had been appointed godfather.

The Pyramid had to go because of its associations with ancient Egypt, as much as with New Age pagans. "Pyramidiocy" is how Christopher Frayling describes it, claiming that it "brings out the worst in people". He should know. As presenter of a five-part series on BBC 2, The Lost World of Tutankhamun, his mailbag was full of pyramidiocy. One letter from a viewer insisted that his cat had been converted to vegetarianism inside a triangle.

Now Faith Zone has six great steel armatures sculpted like angels' wings, standing tall over the rest of the Dome, which will be dressed with taut, fine gossamer fabric. "Fantastic, that fine yet massive form landing so lightly, as if it were insubstantial," Christopher Frayling enthuses. Around their tips a curvy wall snakes. This is the Dome's very own "Wailing Wall". The planned videos and voice-overs make Eva Jiricna shudder, especially as they show religious rituals from different faiths beamed on to screens in the middle of a cruciform pattern, running the length of the wall.

The rituals are Birthings, Rites of Passage, Marriage, Adult Life and Endings, "as sociological as it is theological", says Christopher Frayling, talking hoarsely after recording "2,000 years of Religious Art" for a three-minute video for the zone. It is tough stuff, some of this material, especially in Endings (a euphemism for death) in which there are recordings from people who have had near-death experiences or been bereaved, or believe in reincarnation. There is some fear that this will be too strong for family fun on a day out; but perhaps the generation raised on Michael Buerk's accident-prone TV programme, 999, are made of stronger stuff.

One huge wall at the end of the exhibition, called "How Shall I Live?" has quotes from moralists and philosophers, including Marx and Gandhi. The public are invited to post their beliefs in special boxes designed by Jiricna.

With just 46 nights to go before the third millennium dawns, the New Millennium Experience is talking to James Turrell, America's most celebrated artist and, by his own admission, a "lapsed Quaker", to create a lighting installation for the centre of Faith Zone. His exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London came with a health warning: visitors in his intensely lit light-boxes could lose all sense of direction and fall over. Like Eva Jiricna's original proposal, they manipulated space with light. So the triangle, it seems, has come full circle.