Across North America and Europe, South Asian religious communities are moving from rented rooms and converted buildings to purpose-built sacred environments. This panel brings together five papers, each on a distinct tradition: Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Jain, and Buddhist. With cases from London, Washington, D.C., Southern California, and northern England, the papers ask what determines architectural form, how traditional canons meet local planning codes, and what happens when ambition exceeds resources. Each engages with visibility, public presence, and duration, investigating how material and space function not merely as containers for the holy but as active producers of South Asian religious subjectivities. Stone mandirs, gold-domed gurdwaras, mosques with minarets, marble derāsars, and vihāras blending Asian and local forms all feature. As conspicuous public objects, religious buildings are read in ways that shape policy, planning, and social cohesion. This transatlantic, multi-faith panel discloses how minority communities move from provisional to permanent spaces.
This presentation draws on the largest study of Buddhist buildings in England to examine how diaspora Buddhist communities move from provisional, improvised worship spaces to permanent, symbolically meaningful sacred architecture (Tomalin & Starkey 2016). Most Buddhist groups begin in private homes, rented rooms, or adaptively reused buildings such as houses, shops, libraries, churches, and warehouses. As communities grow, some develop purpose‑built temples that blend traditional Asian architectural forms with British materials and planning requirements. These architectural transformations reshape religious experience: renovated interiors, dedicated shrine rooms, and culturally significant design elements create places that practitioners describe as spiritually uplifting and identity‑affirming. Renovation itself becomes a form of Buddhist practice and community‑building. The presentation argues that these shifting material forms—whether adapted or purpose-built—mark an evolving civic presence, as Buddhist centres become visible landmarks and heritage sites. This evolution parallels broader Asian diasporic patterns and highlights how built form actively shapes sacred experience.
This paper examines how temple architecture functions as a material strategy of continuity within the American Jain diaspora. Focusing on the Jain Center of Southern California (JCSC), I ask: how does the transition from provisional domestic worship spaces to purpose-built temple complexes reshape religious pedagogy, sectarian negotiation, and communal identity? Drawing on ethnographic research, including interviews and participant observation, I trace the movement from early home-based religious education—conducted in living rooms and garages by first-generation migrants—to institutional temple environments modeled after Indian marble temples (derāsars). I argue that architectural consolidation reorganizes not only ritual practice but also educational programming, authority structures, and generational transmission. Purpose-built temples incorporate classrooms inspired by American institutions while also enabling ecumenical worship that softens sectarian distinctions between Digambara and Śvetāmbara communities. Engaging scholarship in material religion and diaspora studies, this paper demonstrates that built space does not merely contain the sacred; it actively produces religious subjectivity and communal belonging. In the Jain case, architecture becomes a medium through which minority identity is stabilized, pedagogical innovation is institutionalized, and continuity is materially imagined for future generations.
My contribution to this panel will examine the religious spaces created by South Asian Muslims in North America over the past half-century. The first purpose built mosque in the US was built by Albanian immigrants in Biddeford, Maine. The first such mosque in Canada was built by Lebanese Muslims in Edmonton, Alberta. In Toronto, as in Maine, the first mosque was also established by Albanian Muslims. With changes to immigration laws in both countries in the 1960s, South Asians began to be the largest Muslim community, replacing the larger Arab community and those from the Ottoman Empire. They are the largest in Canada, and may well be the second-largest in the US after African Americans. Canada, being part of the British Commonwealth, had a more direct path for South Asian Muslims. After a brief history of these communities and the mosques that they created, I will turn to the South Asian mosque spaces created by Sunni, Shi’a, Ahmadiyya, and Ismaili communities in North America. Particular attention will be given to the work of architect Gulzar Haider, as one of the key South Asian Muslim mosque architects.
On Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., sits Sikh Gurdwara D.C. It hosts regular worship services and langar and claims “civic space” (Tweed 2011) for Sikhs in the nation’s capital alongside other religions. It seeks to complicate a religious landscape primarily defined by White Christianity (Promey 2024). (Its front door is less than three hundred yards from the front door of Washington National Cathedral.) The building illustrates Sikh priorities and the difficulties of erecting a monumental structure in an American city, particularly the nation’s capital. While the building’s founders were among the first Sikhs in the capital, it was completed long after several, larger, suburban gurdwaras. Domes that would crown the building sit in front of it waiting for adequate funding and civic support. The building’s history reveals tensions in the American Sikh community between monumental claims and practical functions. Its structure illustrates the adaptable simplicity of Sikh architecture.
When religious communities erect monumental buildings in urban settings, how those structures are seen matters, shaping scholarship, planning policy, media representation, and public reception. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden, London, this paper takes as its case study a building described on the temple's own website as ‘Europe's first Traditional Hindu Temple’ and widely recognised as one of the most prominent religious buildings in Britain. The paper argues that seeing religious architecture should engage what it terms a ‘depth structure’: the theological, historical, and architectural genealogies from which material form arises. At Neasden, the depth structure reveals that architectural form is oriented not only toward what the building communicates but toward what it does: cultivating affective dispositions in those who enter it and securing the conditions for theological preservation across generations. In doing so, the paper offers new ways of thinking about religious materiality, particularly sacred architecture that is visibly different in the urban landscape.
| Tracy Pintchman | tpintch@luc.edu | View |