Commodification over Beingness: Studying Spatial Transformation of Religious Space
Personal Biography
I am, Ar. Md Raihan Khan, have been working as a faculty member in the Department of Architecture, KUET since 2017. Engaging in academia gives lot of scopes to work with issues that are related to sustainability from social, economic and environmental perspective. As an assistant professor, currently involved in the undergraduate thesis supervising and some research works, as well as conducted various theoretical & lab courses.
Paper Abstract
Space has its soul to establish a connection between humans with nothingness related to spirituality. Amidst the core purpose of relating humans with his creator, the spatial articulation of religious space has been transformed based on time-specific ideology. Collective or individual perceptions have been reflected in the design and overall arrangement of these spaces, like the mosque. Often, religious spatial production delivers barriers to the community, although a shared quality is evident in many areas of the world that significantly contributes to human-creator relationships. However, the spatial research of religion has come up with two broader focuses poetic meaning and political power/material production. Taking a poetic stance, the study aims not to evaluate the spatial quality of mosques but to critically narrate how commodification has dominated spatial conceptualization over beingness in the contemporary era. The context of Bangladesh has been taken as the case area for this typological study. In this Muslim-dominated area, the people consciously maintain religious lifestyles by following every scopes and prohibitions. Numerous mosques have deployed with collective or individual contributions, even with international organization funding. In most cases, domination, privatization, and authoritative-controlling mechanisms guide planning and organizational aspect of these religious spaces. Developing qualitatively and reviewing empirical literature on religious space, the study attempts to unravel various disciplinary views on religious space. Going beyond the conventional material-oriented design ideology, the study further explores context-specific factors significantly shaping the religious spatial distribution, which merely satisfies inner peace. Additionally, the case studies were illustrated in the study context following the spatial analysis process. In the contemporary era, diversified ideological standpoints have evolved in spatial production following context, climate, and culture. However, ignoring the philosophical ground of space-making to its core purposes makes that physical layout meaningless, which is only a tool for showing something else.
Keywords: Commodification, Poetic space, Material-oriented, Religious space,
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