Emil Henning was born in Boston, MA in 1946 but grew up in
Baltimore, MD, where he attended public schools and one year of college at
Johns Hopkins University. Many happy summer vacations were spent at his mother's
family cottage on Cape Cod when there were two miles of undeveloped woods,
marshes, and pristine bays to explore between the cottage and Nantucket Sound.
Though he was raised in a Christian home and went through a church confirmation
class, Henning recalls that day only for a friend's being paid fifty dollars to
endure it, while he was getting “nothing.” One day he looked out a window and
shook his fist in defiance of God. In high school, he often ate lunch with Bill
Murray, son of Madalyn Murray O'Hair and a principal in the 1963 Supreme Court
case ending public school prayers.
Henning received A.B. (1967) and Master of Architecture
(1974) degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. Working one summer
between college and grad school at a Boston firm noted for pioneering
“wayfinding” concepts to help people navigate complex subway systems, airports,
and hospital complexes, Henning assisted in the design of orientation maps and
signage for a major urban university campus of over one hundred connected
buildings. That summer in Boston, Henning was exposed to new developments in
the field of linguistics and started to think of architectural forms and spaces
as “words” in a visual “language.” Back in architecture school, he told another
student that he saw himself as a “priest” in a “secular religion” of
architecture meant to bring back meaning from the rituals and forms of the
pagan past to make buildings “speak” to alienated modern man.
Henning served three years active duty in the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, receiving the Army Commendation Medal in 1972 for his work
coordinating disaster relief operations following Tropical Storm Agnes in
Pennsylvania. He then worked for architects in the Carolinas, where his parents
and two brothers had moved. In 1977 he was finally converted to Christ, at the
age of thirty, after reading the 47th chapter of Isaiah, in which he
saw himself in the idolatries of wicked Babylon and embraced the Savior he'd so
long rejected. He shortly saw the architecture journals filled with secular
buildings with “naves” and “altars” and “baptisteries” and “window crosses”
celebrating a panoply of “strange gods,” and realized that the neo-paganism
he'd formerly championed had become the rage in the sophisticated circles of
his profession. He wrote salvation tracts about this and distributed them at
national architectural meetings in Phoenix and Chicago, after which he
self-published Sacred Spaces: Post-Modern
Architecture and the Christian's World-View (1987, currently out of print.)
Henning became a registered architect in South Carolina and
went into solo practice in 2002, designing new homes, addition/renovation
projects, and a few shop interiors, in addition to doing code analysis studies
for commercial projects and artistic renderings of proposed projects for
developers, homebuilders, and other architects. He is a Ruling Elder at Second
Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Greenville, SC, and is active in street
evangelism. Henning published his second book, Ezekiel's Temple: A Scriptural Framework Illustrating the Covenant of
Grace (Xulon Press, 2013, second revised edition 2016). This book fulfills
an interest he has had since his unbelieving teenage years, when he
unexpectedly discovered the bewildering temple description in Ezekiel's last
nine chapters. Ezekiel's Temple
culminates Henning's long search for meaning in that description---more complex
even than the hundred-building campus for which he made orientation maps---and
shows with original diagrams how the two crossing axes of that temple portray
in symbolic form the Old Testament work of God in saving his covenant people
Israel, and its fulfillment in the Person and work of Jesus Christ.
