Spiritual and emotional wellbeing is one of the most personal aspects designers must consider when designing. Aspects like noise, light, material, and nourishment are much easier to gauge because there is a tactical and physical element that affects everyone in relatively the same way. However, emotional and spiritual well-being is very internal and different people may interpret or experience things different based on their current emotional or spiritual state. This impacts how people experience all spaces, but especially sacred spaces. Designers must dive even deeper than normal to create spaces that have a positive impact on the emotional and spiritual state of those who experience it. This looks different for every religion, activity, and/or group so it requires a thorough understanding of the specific needs for the space. This is why sacred spaces are so unique and special. They are designed to accommodate these larger-than-life goals, so they begin to feel larger than life when designed well. But this grandness can’t be achieved in every single space so what are some things that designers can do to make even the smallest sacred space feel holy. Many of the space that gave me this sense of wow I experienced in Europe while I was traveling. Some of these spaces include the La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. All of these spaces are very grand and unique, so they feel sacred. But what about closer to home? How do the sacred places in Fayetteville impact the spiritual and emotional wellness of those who experience them? Would making these spaces grander help people have a better spiritual experience? Or is it not about that when it comes to personal spiritual experiences?
Answering any one of these questions would require way more knowledge than I have, but that doesn’t mean I can’t start to chip away at them. By looking at the various spiritual spaces in my community, I can begin to formulate a theory about this.
Fayetteville has a large variety of different religious spaces that range from large churches to small metal buildings. Yet both still serve the same religious purpose so the physical space must not be as important as the spiritual space. I think this stems from the limited resources available for small towns. They don’t have the ability to build some large, extravagant religious space so they build what they can. Then over time it became more about the why instead of the what. Why people are gathering and how their community is made stronger for it. The maps below layout the different religious spaces that I was able to locate in Fayetteville. Just by looking at how these spaces are clustered throughout the city the influence of these spaces starts to show a little. There is a higher concentration in the denser urban areas and then as the city gets more residential and less dense the number of religious spaces also gets less dense. But even in these less dense areas you can still sort of see a correlation of what type of people live in the different areas based on the type of religious spaces there. People are more likely to go to church near where they live. This grouping of people then goes on to indicate and even influence a wide number of things. The presence of spiritual spaces in a city tells you a lot about the general make up and goals of the city. I think this is the key difference between this topic and other topics we have looked at this semester: spiritual spaces tell designers more about people than any one other space.
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