The poetics of Sacred Places

Abstract

The becoming of sacred places can be studied from the pragmatic, politic and poetic point of view. In this project, the third is done, stating that the power and qualities of an architect lie here, more than in the pragmatic and/or politic. Sacred places are therefore approached as places that go beyond themselves as objects. Sacred places have the potential to take the visitor out of the daily life world into another reality and by doing so, evoking a deep sense of being. This is the result of the direct interaction between visitor (subject) and architecture (object) or the experience of atmosphere. For an architect this means that he has to be aware of how the multi-sensory experience of places – specifically in the case of sacred places but with the design of places in general – triggers emotions and feelings and stimulates our imagination, memory and dreams (where we create the ‘other’ or ‘ineffable’ reality). This understanding is sought through the direct personal experience and the translation of this experience (in models, photographs and texts) in order to transmit the experience more than the analytical characteristics of the visited case studies. This project moreover explicates what the experience of sacredness is and what the origin and value of sacred places are in order to argument why humans need these places whether or not they are explicitly religious. Religion is the phenomenon that explicitly refers to the idea of the sacred. Therefore, religious places are taken as a starting point, whereas these are to a large extent built in order to move people, to stimulate self-transformation and transcendence. The design process formed an investigation on how architectural qualities stimulate the experience of sacredness with a chapel in the city centre of Antwerp as final result. Here, twin-phenomena formed the basis of the design since the main conclusion of the research stated that our imagination is triggered in the fusion of opposites; at the moment where the material becomes immaterial ad vice versa, where time and light become sensible, where our mind and body become one, where our persona and our surroundings are experienced as one. This experience is a fundamental human one, far beyond different worldviews.