“Interreligious Prayer Rooms.” An Interdisciplinary Didactic Experience

Abstract

If the sacred is an anthropologically (and spatially) unavoidable theme, where and how do curricula in architectural education deal with it? Starting from these issues, the paper aims at investigating some questions that arose from the teaching experience developed for the interdisciplinary course entitled “Interreligious prayer rooms,” held at the Katholisch-Theologische Fakultät Seminar für Liturgiewissenschaft at the University of Bonn. The course was promoted by Albert Gerhards, Emeritus Professor of Liturgical Sciences, and developed with Mariateresa Giammetti. The main objective of the seminar was to transmit knowledge, skills and abilities for a more conscious reading of the architectural prayer space aimed at developing a liturgical support to design inter-religious spaces. The course was developed starting from a theory of sacred space based on two criteria. The first one encompasses self-awareness and action, as categories belonging to the contemporary aesthetic dimension of the liturgical space, and useful tools so that every truly participated celebration becomes an existential challenge inscribed in a circuit of community character. The second one makes use of silence, light and empty spaces as tools for designing the interreligious space, a place open to multiple semantic interpretations whose identity can be based not on style, but on the categories of character and atmosphere.