Spatial Cult—Cult Space, Architecture and Interior in Post-Traditional Communities
Since the 1990s, with the "spatial turn," space has been at the center of art history and cultural studies contemplations. Space, real and imagined, is the object of aesthetic, political, and sociocultural analyses. Moving beyond the concept of architecture as a space-creating shell, space is defined as an event of social relations and acts. Although not visible itself, it is perceptible in the relational arrangement of people and objects. New designations of meaning lead to an upgrading of spatial design within design processes, and to the formulation of new theories about performative, immersive, atmospheric, and coded architecture and spatial creations. At the conference, concepts, practices, actors, cause-effect patterns, etc., will discuss such ascriptions of qualities and meanings. Can we speak of a spatial cult in this context? And what happens when this spatial cult meets the cult space?
Whereas the church fulfilled an identity forming function for communities for centuries and with sacred structures established architectural manifestations in the urban space, the understanding of religion and sacred space has changed in the Modern era since 1800. In post-secular societies, as a consequence of sociopolitical modernization dynamics, categories such as culture, nation, politics, history, sport, and money, etc., have gained auratic appeal and created, in unison or competition with religion, new structures of social order. New concepts of community formation, which frequently incorporate religious reference systems, currently develop new identity-forming and meaningful spaces in post-traditional societies. The conference aims to discuss both religious and auratic, spatial concepts of existing sacral topographies as well as newly constituted cult spaces in their ideological conceptions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Current discussions about the conversion of churches, as well as the creation of multi-religious spaces make clear that the understanding of a traditional cult space with its transcendental qualities is in a state of transformation. The conference’s main line of questioning is, consequently: what spatial concepts arise that are beyond the everyday and to what extent do ideological and artistic strategies shape building creation and interior design.
Up for discussion are the following issues: what architectural-spatial concretizations do new processes of community formation experience, what new staging strategies are cultural sites subjected to in exterior and interior spaces (form, size, furnishings, materials, etc.)? What preservation of historical monument practices must they comply with? What is the relationship of cult sites to social orders and political ideologies/utopias? What transformations and transfer processes do concepts of the holy undergo so that also sites that are independent of traditional and institutionalized sacredness attain a sacral-seeming aura? Can nation, art, culture, education, sport, capitalism, etc., serve as new projection surfaces of community formation and is it possible to establish new building types as sites of identity formation and as new cult spaces (museums, cultural buildings, universities, and schools, as well as governmental buildings, national monuments, banks, and football stadiums)? What diversity of forms of cult spaces emerges in the Modern era and the present day, and what aesthetic cult shapes the creation of space?
The conference is organized by Dr. Maximiliane Buchner and Prof. Dr. Anna Minta, Institute of History and Theory of Architecture, Linz Catholic Private University.
The suggested length of the talks is roughly thirty minutes, in German or English. Proposals for contributions, with a maximum of 3,000 characters should be submitted together with a short CV by September 15, 2017, to: Maximiliane Buchner m.buchner[at]ku-linz.at
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