Call for Papers

3^rd International Architectural Studies Conference | September 9-10, 2027

Call for Papers: SACRED SPACES
Building Identities, Sharing Heritage

The Department of Architecture at Yeditepe University and Centro de Estudos Nuno Portas – Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto invite contributions to the third edition of their biennial international conference on Sacred Spaces, which will take place in Porto between 9-10 September 2027.

Sacred spaces exceed religious institutions and heritage practices. The sacred constitutes a spatial condition, advancing a broader understanding of the sacred as participating in the constitution of human existence, shaping relationships between body and world, memory and place, community and territory, materiality and meaning. Because sacredness participates in the construction of collective meaning, it also becomes a site of political struggle. Throughout history—and with renewed urgency today—sacred spaces have been mobilised to legitimise territorial claims, construct national identities, reinforce institutional authority, preserve cultural memory, and increasingly serve economic and technological agendas. Processes such as accelerated urbanisation, ecological crisis, geopolitical conflict, migration, and digitalization are transforming both cities and the conditions under which sacred spaces emerge, persist, or disappear. Sacredness is therefore neither timeless nor politically neutral. It is continually appropriated, instrumentalised, and contested by states, institutions, markets, and ideological projects. Rather than treating sacredness as an intrinsic property of particular sites, this conference calls for approaches that take the idea of sacred space as something continually produced through material practices, political institutions, embodied rituals, cultural representations, and architectural interventions.

Sacred space constitues a critical field of inquiry within architectural and urban discourses. Architecture occupies a distinctive position within these debates as it gives material, spatial, and sensory form to the sacred through construction, orientation, light, landscape, thresholds, ritual movement, and atmosphere, shaping how sacredness is experienced, interpreted, and inhabited (Harries, 1998; Norberg-Schulz, 1971; Pallasmaa, 2015; Pérez-Gómez, 2006). Architecture also participates in the continual production and interpretation of cultural meaning through spatial form, materiality, and lived experience. Sacred spaces are embedded within regimes of power, systems of representation, and material processes of production. Their formation is entangled with cosmological orders, territorial claims, institutional authorities, and, increasingly, with global networks of capital and technology. Current debates in architectural studies address the persistence of the sacred within ostensibly secular frameworks, as well as its mobilisation within nationalist, neoliberal, and post-secular agendas (Beaumont, 2008; Molendijk et al., 2010; Butler et al., 2011). At the same time, renewed attention to indigenous epistemologies and vernacular practices challenges dominant spatial paradigms and opens alternative ways of understanding the relationship between space, meaning, and the sacred. Pilgrimage routes, heritage sites, contested territories, and digitally mediated environments all point to the expanding and unstable boundaries of what may be understood as sacred space today. Conversely, architectural representations, planning strategies, heritage policies, and technological infrastructures also shape the ways sacredness is interpreted, regulated, and instrumentalised.

Within this context, the conference invites contributions that critically engage with the production, representation, and transformation of sacred spaces across different geographies and temporalities. The aim is to situate sacred space as an active and contested field through which broader spatial, political, and cultural processes can be examined.

The conference is organised around three thematic tracks. The three thematic tracks approach sacred space through complementary perspectives on its constitution, political production, and representation.

Foundations

This track examines how architecture and spatial practices constitute sacred space. It explores the conceptual, habitual, historical or experiential foundations of sacredness through relationships between cosmology, ritual, embodiment, materiality, and spatial organisation across different cultural traditions and historical contexts.

Relevant topics may include:

• Spatial ontologies and sacred place-making
• Cosmology and architectural order
• Ritual and spatial organisation
• Materiality and atmosphere
• Sacred landscapes and ecologies
• Vernacular spatial practices

Positions

This track examines how architecture, urbanism, and spatial practices mediate the political production, regulation, and contestation of sacred space. It questions established spatial paradigms and explores how design can negotiate, reinterpret, or transform contemporary understandings of the sacred and also contributes new disciplinary perspectives that reframe broader debates across the humanities and social sciences.

Relevant topics may include:

• Critical architectural responses to contested sacred spaces
• Negotiating sacredness through architectural and urban interventions
• Architecture and the politics of sacred space
• Architectural agency in the politics of sacred space
• Positioning architecture in post-secular cities
• Reframing post-secular urbanism through architecture
• Architectural responses to post-secular urbanism
• Reframing gender and race through sacred spatial practices
• Architectural critiques of gendered and racialised sacred spaces
• Architecture as a lens for transnational sacred networks
• Computational approaches to rethinking sacred space

Words

This track focuses on how architecture represents, communicates, and interprets sacredness. It examines the narrative dimensions of sacred space, addressing how meaning is constructed through symbols, texts, stories, and oral traditions.

Relevant topics may include:

• Architectural representation of the sacred
• Drawing, mapping, and visualising sacred space
• Symbolism, iconography, and architectural language
• Narrative, memory, and spatial storytelling
• Sacred texts and architectural inscription
• Light, sound, and atmospheric design
• Media, photography, film, and sacred environments
• Digital representation and immersive sacred experience

References

Beaumont, J. (2008). Faith action on urban social issues. Urban Studies, 45(10), 2019–2034.

Molendijk, A., Beaumont, J., & Jedan, C. (Eds.). (2010). Exploring the postsecular: The religious, the political and the urban (International Studies in Religion and Society, Vol. 13). Brill.

Butler, J., Habermas, J., Taylor, C., & West, C. (2011). The power of religion in the public sphere (E. Mendieta & J. Van Antwerpen, Eds.; Afterword by C. Calhoun). Columbia University Press.

Harries, K. (1998). The ethical function of architecture. MIT Press.

Norberg-Schulz, C. (1971). Existence, space and architecture. Praeger.

Pallasmaa, J. (2015). Light, silence and spirituality in architecture and art. In J. Bermudez (Ed.), Transcending architecture: Contemporary views on sacred space (pp. 19–32). The Catholic University of America Press.

Pérez-Gómez, A. (2006). Built upon love: Architectural longing after ethics and aesthetics. MIT Press.