Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality

Thomas Barrie, Julio Bermudez, Phillip James Tabb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317179016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Architecture has long been understood as a cultural discipline able to articulate the human condition and lift the human spirit, yet the spirituality of architecture is rarely directly addressed in academic scholarship. The seventeen chapters provide a diverse range of perspectives, grouped according to topical themes: Being in the World; Sacred, Secular, and the Contemporary Condition; Symbolic Engagements; Sacred Landscapes; and Spirituality and the Designed Environment. Even though the authors' approach the subject from a range of disciplines and theoretical positions, all share interests in the need to rediscover, redefine, or reclaim the sacred in everyday experience, scholarly analysis, and design.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Thomas Barrie, Julio Bermudez, and Phillip James Tabb

In a world whose complexity is both exhilarating and bewildering, its paradoxes are perhaps the most accessible. This may not be a phenomenon unique to our time but it is arguably one that defines it. Parts of the world enjoy unprecedented prosperity, longevity, political continuity, and energy and food security, while others have very little—and there is everything in between. Communication technologies have connected humans in ways that have rendered traditional notions of space and time obsolete, while ideological misunderstandings and national, cultural, and religious divisions have persisted. Globalized economies have resulted in egalitarian opportunities for economic advancement while also supporting political and economic hegemonies. Technologies formally reserved for a few are now available globally, but resource depletion and ecological consequences threaten the advances they set out to achieve. The rise in worldwide living standards, all of which are dependent on increased consumption of material and technological resources, are also attributable to global climate change and vast environmental destruction, perhaps the most significant imperatives of our time and ones that are most attributable to human activity and the built environment. Complicating matters further is that these transformations and challenges are happening at a speed and scale never before encountered and that our success at resolving these enormous challenges remains fundamentally elusive. For certain, there is a need for more reflective, effective, and insightful approaches to creating and sustaining habitation.

This book, its authors and its chapters, are firmly positioned within this contemporary milieu. The authors recognize that the design professions and built environment can be similarly characterized according to the paradoxes outlined above, yet they often propose that complementary viewpoints, supplemental philosophies, and new means are required to arrive at promising perspectives and appropriate solutions. The focus of the work is the intersection of the built environment, culture, and spiritual traditions, and as such presumes that they retain a certain degree of potency and veracity to address the complexities of our era. Religious and spiritual beliefs, explorations, and practices are brought into focused consideration through the lens of the built environment. The authors do not shy away from the paradoxes inherent in such strategy, and, in fact, many base their arguments on the incongruities that one often finds in contemporary religion and by extension the artifacts built to serve them. However, not all essays are concerned with architecture designed to serve traditional religions, some are more interested in consciousness, culture, landscapes, and the more secular everyday, individual, and indigenous expressions of spirituality in the built environment.

However within all of these contexts some inevitable questions arise. Why study religion and spirituality? Why focus on sacred architecture and sacred places, in a world that many say has rendered them, for the most part, obsolete? How can metaphysical beliefs and practices survive the devastating blows of contemporary empirical science and post-structuralist critique? Isn’t religion at best irrelevant, at worst tribal and territorial? Aren’t the numbers of religious adherents and practitioners dwindling, and haven’t most state religions died, putting in jeopardy the whole viewpoint and strategy advanced in this book? The answers to these questions are yes—and no.

If religion could be rendered obsolete by science or philosophy, it would have happened long ago.¹ If positivism, empiricism and rationalism had proven to be superior approaches there would not be a need for reconsiderations. And, even though the death of religion has been long predicted as the result of a progressive diminishment inverse to scientific, economic, and technological advancement,² it has not come to pass. Rather, it is ever transforming, some say even thriving albeit in different ways.³ Certainly, there is no shortage of religious adherents, believers, and practitioners—from orthodox sects to spiritual seekers, and a good majority of the population today continues to use religious or spiritual beliefs and practices as their compass to assess and guide their lives. For example, a recent survey revealed that a significant percentage of the world’s population identify themselves as religious.⁴ In the United States, polls have consistently shown that spiritual matters are a concern to a large majority of people,⁵ and the success of broadcast programs covering faith issues only affirms this finding.⁶ Lastly, even though religion may have emerged from, at least in part, cultural and territorial claims, at its best it transcends both and may actually integrate, harmonize, and heal such differences.

That said, there is no denying the reluctance of many people to include religion and spirituality in the public arena. A general ignorance (and consequent bias), of the spiritual beliefs of others, the violent expressions of recalcitrant religious fundamentalisms, and the influence of religious groups on governments and economic systems, breed people’s fear, mistrust, and even revulsion towards organized faiths. Consequently, religion appears rather powerful or at least concerning enough to avoid, suppress, or sugar coat with a politically correct but unwise tolerance—all poor if not dangerous responses.⁷ All of which seems to suggest that we are simultaneously dwelling in two seemingly irreconcilable realities: one where we “successfully” conduct our lives dislocated from religious contexts, and the other where spiritual values and practices provide us with meaning. The limited engagement of religions or other spiritual practices with contemporary culture restricts their potential to address today’s pressing problems, which at their root demand an acknowledgment of the ultimate meaning, wholeness, or transpersonal nature of reality and all beings. Concurrently, without some openness to the contemporary milieu, religion remains stuck in regressive perspectives and practices that truncate its ability to address the challenges of the 21st century. Resolving this quandary demands a reconciliation of this dichotomy.

The resilience of spirituality around the world and the number of people that see their lives, situation, or reality in relation to some ‘other’ transcendent (one assumes) realm, suggests, at least, the potential for a broadened point of view. As a result, at least theoretically, such spiritual mindsets may be harnessed to effect positive changes in the world. For example, the contemporary interest in health and wellbeing is partially the reason for growing research in active spirituality in disciplines as diverse as nursing,⁸ health and wellbeing,⁹ higher education,¹⁰ psychiatry, and psychology,¹¹ and brain-mind sciences.¹² The results have been so positive¹³ that many scientific teams, medical centers, and prestigious institutions are actively engaged in research of this type, often with the support of federal and private grants,¹⁴ and the results routinely reported in popular media.¹⁵ Additionally, an increasing number of people have adopted a range of spiritual practices to address a variety of challenges, resulting in the recent growth of new or “alternative” religious interests and movements. Studies show that by providing a transcendental framework, spirituality imbues life with meaning, hope, authenticity, and a sense of belonging, equanimity and compassion. Given this, one might conclude that many consider a proactive reengagement with spirituality to be a means to engage our contemporary paradoxes.

This growing appreciation of spirituality is occurring at a time of recognition that culture is a fundamental force not only shaping quality of life, social change, and welfare, but also economic development, productivity, and environmental responses.¹⁶ Interesting enough, this expanding consideration of culture is not coming from fields traditionally associated with it, such as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and theology, but from architects, landscape urbanists, and city planners, and is grounded in the fact that humanity is increasingly an urban phenomenon. Support for the importance of culture in the life of cities has been growing, both at the theoretical and empirical levels, advanced in recent years by work done by UN Habitat and a number of non-profit organizations.¹⁷ Furthermore, and despite the disagreements, confusing overlappings, and lack of data sources for gauging the function of culture in human settlements, there is accord that the built environment plays a central role in preserving, sustaining, and advancing cultural identity, authenticity, and wellbeing. The coincidental growth in interest, research, and work in both spirituality and culture at this time is not fortuitous, because both are fundamental and interrelated components that address how we aesthetically, ethically, physically, and socially respond to reality—and both are most synthetically expressed in the built environment.

Unsurprisingly, some of the chapters in this book discuss the built environment as a cultural artifact and, more specifically, study sacred places or religious architecture as building types that are so significantly embedded in culture that we can access those cultures in particular and potent ways. Consequently, in a world still defined by territorial, cultural, and religious conflicts, the material evidence of architecture and the built environment may provide certain insights into these contemporary conditions, and perhaps offer more transformative solutions through revealing common grounds that were formerly inaccessible. It may also be a means to challenge our contemporary prejudices and presumptions. One predominant contemporary belief Julio Bermudez sets out to dismantle is that of the irreconcilability of science and religion. Bermudez takes that one step further to illustrate how empirical science can be used to recover and illuminate aspects of the human condition and our inhabitation of the world.

Figure 1.1 Considering the relationship between architecture, culture, and spirituality demands addressing its unavoidable phenomenological dimension and the first-person experiences that evoke the transcendent. Machu Picchu, Peru

Source: Photograph courtesy of Julio Bermudez, 2005.

Overall, the authors recognize that they operate within design professions that, even though they engage in the design and scholarship of religious or spiritually motivated buildings, urban contexts, landscapes, interiors and furnishings, seem truncated in their ability to incorporate the motivating factors underneath these endeavors into their discourse. This, of course, is not surprising given the dominance of so-called “professionalism” in the design professions that privilege the technical, productive, material, and intellectual over the experiential, receptive, immaterial, and emotional—a tendency complicit with the dominant values of contemporary culture.¹⁸ Opposition can also be explained by the risks, misunderstandings, and difficulties associated with engaging the sensitive matters of spirituality and religion, as many scholars have discussed elsewhere.¹⁹ This explains why, despite beginning to identify the relationship between global climate change and the built environment, and the necessity of more sustainable building, the design professions are largely unable to integrate into their considerations religious or spiritual perspectives that may simultaneously address issues unidentified in more technological or material approaches. According to Michael Crosbie this reluctance is almost a taboo, what he terms the “S word,” in contemporary architectural discourse, which relegates aspects of human moral, ethical, and spiritual aspirations and capacities to the backwater of theoretical and professional research and practice.²⁰ You will not find chapters in this volume that instruct how to design a more spiritually-oriented building or landscape, but you will find many that provide perspectives regarding the spiritual and ethical responsibilities, and the benefits of spiritual orientations.

The Forum for Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality (ACS) emerged from the cultural, religious, and professional conditions outlined above. Its founders identified many of the issues that the authors in this book, attendees of ACS symposia, and members of the organization, considered preeminent. The ACS forum was created in 2007 with the expressed intention of addressing what our discipline was avoiding: the interrelationship of culture, spirituality, and the built environment. Its members believed then, and continue to profess now, that the discipline should engage in insightful study, reflective making, critical assessment, and open dissemination regarding the transcendent in the built environment. By “transcendent” they mean considerations associated not only with the sacred or metaphysical, but ones that also facilitate human health and wellbeing, caring for the environment and other beings, and nurturing interpersonal connections and community. They also understand that, by its very nature, ACS has to engage an international audience and operate under a process that is inclusive, integrative, interdisciplinary, diverse, ecumenical, multicultural, and rigorous, and on the leading edge of scholarship and practice, while also remaining humble, and open to new approaches and conclusions.

Figure 1.2 Scholarship on architecture, culture, and spirituality has traditionally included the empirical study of sacred buildings with the purpose of learning what “measurable” attributes make them successful at facilitating visitors’ access to what architect Louis Kahn named the “immeasurable.” Oculus, the Pantheon, Rome

Source: Photograph courtesy of Julio Bermudez, 2004.

This book constitutes an acknowledgment and celebration of this vision, made possible through the efforts of many people. More concretely, it summarizes the scholarly findings an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Being in the World
• Part II Sacred, Secular, and the Contemporary Condition
• Part III Symbolic Engagements
• Part IV Sacred Landscapes
• Part V Spirituality and the Designed Environment
• Index