Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T17:52:26.362Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Sacred Space and the Mediating Roles of Architecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2012

Thomas Barrie
Thomas Barrie*
Affiliation:
NC State University, College of Design, Campus Box 7701, Raleigh, NC 27695-7701, USA. Email: tom_barrie@ncsu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The creation, roles, and experience of meaningful places in contemporary urban environments can be effectively informed through understandings of pertinent aspects of sacred architecture. To do so, this paper will discuss the mediating roles traditionally performed by sacred architecture and, in particular, its traditional role as an in-between place believed by its creators to establish connections to the understandings they sought or the gods they worshipped. Enduring themes of sacred places will be presented in the context of their communicative capacity and ritual uses, as a means to offer interpretations appropriate to today. The case study of the recently completed Oakland (CA) Cathedral will serve to illustrate contemporary positions and iterations. The conclusion suggests that the sacred place was (and still is), an intermediate zone created in the belief that it had the ability to engage, elucidate and transform, and that a re-introduction and repositioning of the mediating roles performed by the built environment can inform the creation of engaging and meaningful places today.

Type
Focus: Religiosity and Public Spaces
Information
European Review , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , 04 January 2012 , pp. 79 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes and References

1.Perez-Gomez, A. (2006) Built Upon Love, Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), p. 6.Google Scholar
2. For example, adherents of traditional Hinduism view the ordinary world as maya, a scrim of illusion withdrawn only through the perspectives that religion provides. The term yoga means to ‘yoke’ or ‘bind together,’ and yogic practices served to join the separate individual with the universal ‘self’.Google Scholar
3.Barrie, T. (2010) The Sacred In-between: The Mediating Roles of Architecture (London: Routledge), p. 3.Google Scholar
4.Barrie, T. (2010) The Sacred In-between: The Mediating Roles of Architecture (London: Routledge), pp. 4–5.Google Scholar
5. The marking of a center has been much discussed by Mircea Eliade and others.Google Scholar
6. The spatial sequences and symbolic narratives of the entry paths of sacred places often symbolized shared beliefs and facilitated communal rituals. In particular, as I argue in Spiritual Path, Sacred Place: Myth, Ritual and Meaning in Sacred Architecture (Boston and London: Shambhala Publications, 1996), it replicated the path of the hero-redeemer figure that appears in the mythology of many religions and cultures.Google Scholar
7. Traditionally, Hindu temples were proscriptively proportioned as required by the deity they were built to house.Google Scholar
8.Jones, L. (2000) The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, Vol. 1. (Cambridge: The Harvard University Press), pp. 29–41.Google Scholar
9. Among the primary motivations for ritual is its role in allying anxiety, from annual rituals associated with the harvest, to daily religious observances. Because anxiety is part of the ‘human condition’ we need rituals to bridge our separateness, to feel connected to something beyond ourselves, to establish a sense of purpose to our lives. According to Spiro Kostof, ‘Public architecture at its best [is] … a setting for ritual that makes each user, for a brief moment, a larger person that he or she is in daily life, filling each one with the pride of belonging. Kostof, S. (1985) A History of Architecture, Settings and Rituals (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 41.Google Scholar
10.Veseley, D. (2004) Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge: MIT Press), p. 8.Google Scholar
11. See Dewey, J. (1934) Art as Experience (New York: The Penguin Group).Google Scholar
12.Tschumi, B. (1996) Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p. 18.Google Scholar
13.Jones, L. (2000) The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: The Harvard University Press), p. 98.Google Scholar
14. William Coldrake argues, ‘the relationship between architecture and authority, therefore, goes beyond signs and symbols. In manifesting authority, architecture can serve as a potent tool for political and social engineering or for profoundly affecting religious belief.’ See Coldrake, W. (1996) Architecture and Authority in Japan (London: Routledge), p. 3.Google Scholar
15.Jones, L. (2000) The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: The Harvard University Press), p. 99.Google Scholar
16. See Stephens, S. (2009) Architectural Record, 1, pp. 86–93.Google Scholar
17. From ‘Nature,’ Atkinson, B. (1950) The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: The Modern Library), p. 13.Google Scholar
18.Holl, S., Pallasmaa, J., Perez-Gomez, A. (1994) Questions of Perception – Phenomenology of Architecture (Tokyo: A+U: Architecture and Urbanism), p. 45.Google Scholar