Designing Sacred Spaces

Sherin Wing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317755890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Religious Architecture

Sacred spaces exemplify some of the most exciting and challenging architecture today. Designing Sacred Spaces tells the inside story of seven architecture firms and their approaches to designing churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, monasteries and retreats. Twenty beautifully illustrated case studies located in Asia, Europe, and North America are showcased alongside discussions with the designers into concept and design development, materiality, and spatial analysis. Complementing these are essays on the cultural, historical, and theoretical meaning and importance of sacred spaces. By exploring the way we see religion and how we understand secular and sacred space, Designing Sacred Spaces reveals how we see ourselves and how we see others. A tour-de-force of first-person narratives, research, and illustrations, this book is a vital desk reference.

PART 1 Introduction

Sherin Wing

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315798226-1

The genesis of this book is simple. My husband was working on a project with a colleague to design a Shaolin temple in California. The design needed to include a workout space, a sitting (meditation) space, an altar, some changing rooms, and a small store. His colleague, unfamiliar with the traditions of Buddhism, was nevertheless certain that his own religious faith would ensure a respectful design. Except that it didn’t. The altar was put to the side of the interior to make way for other programmatic elements.

You can’t put Buddha in a corner: the altar must be in alignment with the North–South axis. It was a mistake that anyone might make. Especially if an architect relied solely on instinct to accommodate the necessary symbolic and practical aspects of a religious space: worship, socializing, educating.

In secular spaces, plans and circulation frequently rely on practical considerations since components are often of similar or equal importance. Religious spaces are different. Planning religious program requires not only design skill but also cultural knowledge. For architects who deal primarily with secular spaces, this can be a challenge.

For one, many religions involve a hierarchy of spatial necessities that must be maintained. These necessities cannot be moved simply because a programmatic element might be more conveniently placed in one location over another.

Even more bewildering is that the hierarchy of programmatic elements differs widely from religion to religion, depending not just on doctrine combined with individual interpretation, but also on a given community’s specific needs.

So I began to investigate. How are sacred spaces produced? How do you design a space if the culture is unfamiliar but nevertheless requires a skilled approach to symbolism, tradition, iconography, and rituals? How do you address the larger metaphysical issues materially? And is religious space created during the design process by an architect or designer? Or is it determined by its users, including the people who commission them? What programmatic elements must be present in order to designate a space sacred? Is it necessary to research the historical meanings of symbolic ritual objects and program?

Builders and architects have grappled with these issues for millennia and their responses have been unique and varied. Over the years, clients and donors have become more culturally and intellectually sophisticated. They require designs that evoke religious symbolism while reflecting the plurality of intellectual and design possibilities. Shifting conditions in social, economic, and political spheres¹ has created “new relationships between… people and objects used for their… religious identities.”² Rather than rely on intermediaries as they did in the past, practitioners now emphasize “direct access to the sacred through ritual mediations with objects and in spaces that engage the senses.”³

To explore these issues, this book examines the sacred space portfolios of seven architecture firms. Under three major sections that include churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, monasteries, and retreats, each chapter examines a single firm’s work within that category. Firms within each typology are organized alphabetically.

We will find that every project differently combines the way and to what degree secular and religious symbols, values, and practicalities manifest. Investigating how each firm approaches these variables—client needs and agendas, religious doctrine, spatial necessities, and materials—and combines them with their own enduring aesthetic sensibilities and design philosophies will reveal how unique this process is.

Doing so exposes how the values that define us interact on individual and institutional levels to produce religious spaces. We will discover that sacred and secular spaces are neither empty containers nor inherently vested sites. Rather space becomes activated through human interaction.⁴ All spaces are culturally constructed arenas that are constantly (re)produced.⁵ In other words, one way to express individual and institutional values is through built space. And as the projects in this book demonstrate, there are different secular and religious ways to establish spatial relationships.⁶

While the narratives provided by the architects themselves are enlightening, it is equally important to contextualize the projects and their narratives culturally, historically, and theoretically. Many of the old architecture historiogaphies are limited by discourses that are essentializing. Too often, they reiterate erroneous opinions that have become authoritative merely through years of repetition. Worse, many today will rely on opinion pieces found on the web, mistaking the proliferation of opinion-based information with true knowledge, and even more elusive, wisdom. Foregrounding individual narratives with larger intellectual constructs advances better insight into the cultural and spatial implications of their projects.

To provide a better insight, each of the sections is interspersed with essays on culture, epistemology, history, religions, and space. Each academic discourse contains a “specialized discourse[s] represented in discussions among scholars… [that] foreground themes overlooked by research steeped in [other scholarly] agendas.”⁷ In anthropological terms, historians must illustrate what they represent as much as how they represent it.⁸

However, each discipline privileges certain methodologies and stances that are based on an accepted canon of “authoritative” narratives and works. These in turn canonize certain concepts and terms. Their authority often rests merely on a willingness to accept them as authoritative.⁹

It is important to “employ methods and theories suited to study collectivities and suprapersonal patterns of meaning” that encompass societies, economies, polities, and structures.¹⁰ New methodologies will uncover new insights. I therefore examine multiple perspectives and disciplines to correct the elisions inherent in using only one or two analytical methodologies.

The designer narratives, together with the essays, will advance a fundamental epistemological shift on how sacred spaces function materially and symbolically. These intellectual examinations are interspersed throughout the book, imparting a deeper understanding of the issues raised. Epistemology provides the cornerstone that anchors these insights into the meanings and functions of sacred spaces.

What remains is the exchange between constancy and flux. Fluidity in design coexists alongside necessary, fixed symbolic elements. Moreover, underlying the heterogeneous nature of these projects are non-religious themes that also remain fixed, including each architect’s design principles that work with necessary programmatic elements which are dictated by religious doctrine. All these factors become activated and adjust as they interact with client needs, principles, and ideals.

Notes

1. Paul Eli Ivey. Review, Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century by Ryan K. Smith; American Sanctuary: Understanding Sacred Spaces by Louis P. Nelson, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 67, No. 3 (September, 2008): 456.
2. Website: Ivey, 2008: 454.
3. Website: Ivey, 2008: 455.
4. Michael J. Walsh, “Efficacious Surroundings: Temple Space and Buddhist Well-being,” Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Dec., 2007): 475.
5. Website: Walsh, 2007: 476.
6. Marilyn E. Heldman, “Architectural Symbolism, Sacred Geography and the Ethiopian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 22, Fasc. 3 (August, 1992): 223.
7. John Corrigan, “Spatiality and Religion,” in The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Barney Warf and Santa Arias (New York: Routledge, 2009): 159.
8. While Hackett examines how the study of religion itself must remain aware of its methodologies in the collection and presentation of concepts and facts, the insight is heuristically useful here (Rosalind I.J. Hackett, “Anthropology of Religion,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, edited by John R. Hinnells [London and New York: Routledge, 2005]: 155).
9. There is no prediscursive authority as such. Instead, what is “accepted” is often mere replication and thoughtless repetition of earlier conclusions, conclusions that contain unacknowledged, political, interested, agendas. See, for example, James G. Crossley and Christian Karner, “Introduction: Writing History, Constructing Religion,” in Writing History, Constructing Religion, edited by James G. Crossley and Christian Karner (Burlington and Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005): 3; see also Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1994): 77.
10. Robert M. Gimello, “Chang Shang-ying on Wu-t’ai Shan,” in Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, edited by Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü (Berkeley and California: University of California Press, 1992): 89.

Chapter 2 New Terms

DOI: 10.4324/9781315798226-2

Simply put, words have history. And with that history comes power. To use a linguistic distinction, words are signifiers that point to an entire context. The context—the meaning of words, as well as that of concepts, objects, and spaces—are all created through the action and interaction of people. Meaning, then, is achieved through re-assertion and re-inscription.¹

That said, certain words and meanings become privileged over time through constant repetition and usage. In fact, authors will often use a term simply because they read it elsewhere and assume it must be prediscursively authoritative. After all, writing tends to confer an unquestionable authority and over time, repetition cements that authority.

One example is the terms “sacred” and “profane.” Many are familiar with these terms, made popular by Mircea Eliade’s book, The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion. Even if they are not familiar with his work, for most academics and even the general populace, the sacred/profane dichotomy is authoritative and prediscursive.

However, a closer examination of these two terms reveals several problems. In Eliade’s view, sacrality and its opposite, profanity, are permanent. They embody inherent, qualitative characteristics which may even appear self-explanatory: sacred is associated with religious, transformative activity, and profane encompasses the rest of people’s activity and the environs they occur in.²

More important is the context that produced these static definitions. Eliade used a very Eurocentric interpretation of cultural traditions for his anthropological study. Unlike early Enlightenment enthusiasts, he actually traveled to distant lands, watched people, and then made observations based on those observations.³ That seems acceptable, but there is a catch: he failed to research the histories, cultures, and traditions of the peoples he examined prior to encountering them in person. Without a proper cultural or historical context to frame what he saw, he instead relied on his own Eurocentric biases about “others” and how their religions functioned.⁴ In other words, Eliade projected a Eurocentric framework of what religion means and how it functions onto non-European peoples. For those things he could not explain in European terms, he made biased assumptions about the “other.”

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