Teaching Religion with Architecture: Toward a Cross-Disciplinary Syllabus

This roundtable explores how pedagogies in religious studies can engage the pedagogies of architectural practice and the study of architectural history and theory. It brings together educators with backgrounds in religious studies, architectural practice, urban and architectural theory, and computing and information sciences in order to do so. Religious studies pedagogy around space and place is often couched in the Eliadean tradition of “sacred space.” The focus is usually on emic understandings of the experience of sacred space, or visual cultures surrounding shrines, temples, and other religious buildings. There is much innovation yet to take hold in such pedagogies, and this roundtable proposes that such innovation must take into account the many nuances of explicitly religious and secular spatialities as well as the particularities of architectural practice. Historically and in the present, architects have not only “read” blueprints and analyzed spaces, but they also have rebuilt texts into materialized form. This double process, turning space into text and text into space, represents a focal point of this roundtable. Our roundtable participants ask: how can the conceptual and methodological tools of the study of architecture help religion scholars and students better understand how spaces perform social values, codify and contest political and cultural rituals, and help institutions assert hegemony? These questions are as intellectually and politically urgent as ever, and the new tools and concepts we propose in this roundtable can help religion professors and teachers at all levels address these urgent questions, while also demonstrating the broad utility of religious studies coursework and methods. The study of religion “and” architecture is not just about sacred space or religious buildings. Any time when those two terms are presented together, the assumption is that the intersection pertains to religious architecture, where “religion” becomes the content and the architecture merely the form. Themes vary, but the structure of the relationship often remains the same: the study and pedagogy of religion and architecture is the study and pedagogy of spiritual spaces as spaces for prayer and contemplation. While the contributions to this roundtable do not shy away from religious spaces, they seek to defamiliarize our usual way of thinking and teaching about them. This roundtable attempts to think of these terms in reverse order, namely, to understand what we are calling “spatial religion.” Whether addressing spiritual spaces or spatial religion, the papers presented here explore how architecture can exert effects upon subjects and enact affective forces, corporeal demands, and a certain habitus. Our panelists draw on their experience teaching architecture in religious studies classrooms, and teaching religion in architecture classrooms, to explore these conceptual and methodological issues. Collectively and collaboratively, we ask what a truly cross-disciplinary pedagogy on space and religion would look like. Our first two panelists focus on how recent turns toward space, mobility, and material culture have enriched teaching and research in religious studies. They ask what religious studies teaching might look like if architectural and spatial terminologies were to become fully integrated in the field’s discursive landscape. Panelists three through five then focus on how engaging the disciplinary knowledge and practice of architecture might expand the epistemologies of religious studies, because it reflects not only their training, but also their commitment to helping our students (literally) see the world in new ways as a result of their religious studies coursework. Our panelists represent religious studies departments and schools of architecture and design, and they approach these issues from a variety of institutional and disciplinary backgrounds. Panelist one, a junior faculty member trained in religious studies and working at a School of Architecture and Design, will share some of the successful examples they have used in their teaching on space, place, and religion: 1. The religious forms of campus blueprints 2. Emilio Gentile’s Fascist architecture, and 3. The ambiguities of the notion of community (fraternity houses as sites of inclusion/exclusion). They will focus on how we can think and teach in new ways about the shifts between the immanent and the transcendental in the built environment. Panelist two, a practicing architect and a graduate student in Religious Studies, will discuss an experiment in bringing studio pedagogies into a humanities classroom, bringing pedagogical discussions on participatory learning and the professional uses of religious studies coursework to new sites. Panelist three (also the presider), a postdoc trained in religious studies who researches architecture and urbanism, will draw on their experience teaching undergraduate courses in “Space, Place, and Religion” using architecture as a topic and as the primary source material for the course. This paper explores using architectural form to teach theories of sacred space and material culture, and the multi-media final projects that resulted from this combination. Panelist four, a distinguished ethnographer of religion working at a mid-sized university, explores new spatial tools for conducting ethnography of South Asian religions. This presentation will offer a comparative analysis of the relationship between body and space in the context of diverse South Asian religious practices. The spatialization of the ritual, patterns and rhythms of movement in processional rites, colors and materiality, and the designed manipulation of vision are part of the discussion on the notion of embodied devotion. Panelist five, a professor of architecture and information systems in a school of architecture, provides examples that underline different conceptions of time-space relationality that undergird ideas about existence and cosmos. The presentation will highlight the link between materiality, tectonics, and conceptualization of time, specifically addressing the structural logic of Gothic architecture, centering around the notion of hiatus for the Goths, the Germanic people of medieval Europe, as antithetical to the linear conception of time for the Romans. [Panelist five is not in the AAR system and will have to be added later, as they are travelling and unreachable at the time of submission]. Rather than select a respondent to repackage the roundtable’s insights, we intend to use the Q&A to collaborate with the audience to help us create, in real time, a cross-disciplinary, open-access syllabus on space, place, and religion.