PANEL 1: IDEAS Paradise on Earth: Imagining Structures for Religious Experience
Chaired by Abbas Nokhasteh, Openvizor
- Lukas Feireiss: Amazing Grace - On the Religious Building as Bearer of Meaning in the 21st Century (20 mins)
Sacred buildings, more than any other type of construction, are
essentially about ideas. It seems as though the sacred space, the
abundance of ideas it contains and illustrates, sets it apart from the
secular environment. The function of the sacred space is to materialise
an abstract spiritual principle through the interplay of form and
content. In this process, the building itself becomes the bearer of
meaning. Over and beyond its metrical demarcation, the sacred space
contains a narrative spatial value per se that cannot be accessed at
first glance. Against this backdrop, the talk offers an entertaining
overview of recently built religious architectures of all faiths and
denominations from around the world, and questions their appellative
callings.
- Charlotte, Foreign Architects Switzerland: Another Shitty Day in Paradise (20 mins)
“Mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets,
believers our soldiers. This holy army guards my religion.” - Recep
Tayyip Erdogan /former Turkish Prime Minister.
Miss-using such statements as evidence, conservative Swiss politicians
launched an all-out assault on what they perceived as an ideological
invasion, the “Islamification of Switzerland.” Swiss voters shocked the
world in 2009 with a nation-wide ban on the construction of minarets,
ending centuries of neutrality and effectively declaring a figurative
war with Islam, all through symbols, gestures, and underhandedly
bigoted propaganda. Upset that architecture was being misused (and
under-utilized, considered only as a symbol) in this phony war, FAS
launched an ideas competition for an Islamic Center in the center of
Zurich. Charging architects with the task of bringing a Mosque to
Zurich, and bringing Zurich into a mosque; the competition sought to
consider how architecture can expedite social conflict in the city by
stitching together disparate programs and people. This talk reflects on
the political involvement of architects, provides perspectives on the
causes of the notorious ban, and presents select proposals from the
Islamic Center competition that call into question the enclosed nature
of the historical type, the ubiquitous global economy, and the
defensibility of ideas.
- Audience questions