Design Phi Lo Sophie Papers - Sacred

Challenge of System Change: Sydney's sewers http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/paper4/body...
Soumitri Varadarjan
Could the sacred be, whatever its variants, a two-sided formation?
Julia Kristeva
Religion is important and powerful. We, in design, treat it as a feature of the client’s brief that we have to work around
(organization of spaces) or incorporate as a formal feature (furniture for religious spaces). That is a peripheral way of
dealing with religion and is an example of design in a reactive utilitarian mode or as an aesthetic and primarily visual
discourse. In the modernist project the alignment of design with technology, the analytical and scientific, was proposed
as sufficient for delivering solutions. However now that design has begun to view itself as an agency for deep change it
actively looks for ways to carry people with it.
My task is to propose that design can harness the positive powers of religion to achieve collaborative, and thus
lasting, change. In what follows, I will explore this proposition not via a focus upon religion but upon a key aspect of
religion, the sacred. The exploration begins with three reflections upon my personal experience of negotiating the
sacred in India and elsewhere. Building on this, a four part model of the sacred is put forward, which is then
extrapolated from to develop connections to design and to the secular discourses of sustainability.
Reflection 1 - negotiating religion
My father is an atheist and to be more precise he professes a belief in the Vasisht-Advaita – the Hindu philosophy of
non-duality, oneness, or more precisely not-two-ness – branch of vedantic philosophy in which the world is clearly
recognized as being either completely unreal, or only partially real. He visits the temple down the street from his home
every morning, and on special occasions is the key speaker discoursing upon topics from the Hindu scriptures. His
father, my grandfather, was highly orthodox in his practice of his faith. He maintained order in his house, and among his
nine children, with a firm hand. As a child I looked upon him as stern, highly disciplined and a very religious person.
Years later I wrote about that house of my grandfather as a system of negotiations within a cultural matrix
where the ‘right way’ was implicitly and tacitly known, though not spoken of.[1] I remember never getting satisfactory
explanations to questions about why things had to be done a certain way, such as what could be touched and when. My
grandfather would wake up early every morning, bathe and do his prayers often before we kids woke. Physical contact
with him was to be avoided till we had bathed. This was the principle of madi and as a child the most powerful symbol of
the existence of a malevolent force that could descend upon all of us if angered by violation. Madi thus was for me a
religious principle and it was only later that I could make a separation between the cultural, the sacred and the religious.
Growing up in India, to appear modern,I hid the embarrassing fact of the extreme orthodoxy of my family from
friends. I grew out of it and came to terms with orthodoxy where now it is a source of texts such as this one. But many in
India still reject the orthodox as backward and a shameful fact of their roots. This is potentially one of the inner reasons
for the extreme passion that accompanies the separation of the secular and religious in India. Compartmentalization,
religion-home and secular-workplace, is a fact of life in India.
Reflection 2 – secular renunciation

A few years ago I developed a course in Design with the express aim of challenging students into self-transformation in
the area of sustainable consumption where the eventual goal is a reduction in overall consumption of goods and
services. An initial assignment required each student to give up and live without something that was important to them
for a week. At the presentations almost all of them spoke of a feeling of superiority and of their friends considering them
'cool' simply because they were doing this giving-up though the things they were giving-up were I-pods, and hair wax.
Significantly at the end of the week none of them seemed to want to stop, some went on to give up many more things,
like long showers and cosmetics, and were planning on continuing their abstinence routines either till the end of the
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semester or longer.
In class a few weeks later I read to them from Dumont about the renouncer who feels empowered and uplifted
as a result of his renunciation.[2] We were in this way dipping into ethical consumption and connecting with a global
movement of people who gave up consuming specific things based upon their individual or collective beliefs. If we dwell
in this way on the parallels between ethical consumption and renunciation, in the religious sense, we are loosely in the
territory of the discourse of the sacred. We are also seamlessly connecting ways of thought in both traditional and
modern societies and this inclusivity has powerful implications for behaviour change at a global scale.
Reflection 3 – constructing the sacred

For some years I ran a pilot project recycling waste in a university campus in India. My goal was to prove the concept of
a ‘zero-waste service’. Early in the project I came up against the established practice of waste disposal in households in
India. Traditional households refuse to have a waste bin in the house, a manifestation of the notion of waste as polluting
which was defined by the oppositions pollution-outside/ pure-inside and so waste would spend only the absolutely
necessary time in the house.
For the project to function required two things: one, that the households segregate their waste and two, that I
slow down the circulation of waste so that I did not have to do pickups everyday. My solution was to split waste into a
pure-impure opposition. I asked that the household have a bin in the house for packaging and other non food waste that
could be recycled thus creating a category of "non-polluting" waste, the pure waste fraction, which could be kept in the
house to await less frequent pick ups, while the biodegradable waste could continue to be kept outside the house and
picked up every day. I also opted for a sacred sounding name for recycling, punarchakran, which had a connotation of
eternally cycling, as opposed to jaive, or that which was living, for the organic waste. In this way the waste segregation
by the households took off and the project went on to become a well known service design case study.[3]
I cite the example to show how an understanding of ways of thinking, or knowledge of the social discourse
could effect behavior change in design projects. Read another way the home-pure and waste-polluting categories point
to the existence of negotiations that define the discourse of the sacred, that, though stated as the ways of the people,
may in fact be a discourse of the sacred or the religious. For what makes something sacred is not that it is somehow
connected to the divine but that it is the subject of a prohibition that sets it radically apart from something else. In this the
meaning is similar to the root meaning of the word sacred - to set apart.
“The sacred, by contrast, confers on objects, symbols or values that which results in a feeling of radical
dependence ‘experienced, individually and/or collectively, in emotional contact with an external force’. This
implies that people who experience the sacred obtain a sense of encountering a force or a power that is
greater than themselves.[4]
The Sacred in four parts
The sacred is many things. It is a construct and an attribute that is attached to specific objects and places. As an
artefact it can be subjected to analysis and reconstruction. The sacred is also a language and a particular kind of
vocabulary.
I propose the sacred as a three-dimensional model – as both a way to read into the artefact phenomenon and
as a way to change an artefact with the sacred as a force. Imagine a tetrahedron: resting on the ground the base
triangle denotes the ‘connection-to’ and rising above the base on three sides are the ‘protection-from’ which then
constitutes the essential dual nature of the sacred. [5] Then open out the tetrahedron to derive a diagram where each
of the triangles is charged, as one of the four aspects of the sacred:
1. The sacred is defined through oppositions
2. The sacred is about siting
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3. Anything can be sacred
4. The sacred connects to an overarching scheme
My proposition here is that the sacred can be effectively negotiated by dwelling upon these aspects. What follows is a
further opening out of the meanings and significance of the four aspects of the sacred.
1. The sacred is defined through oppositions
The sacred is described as that which is not profane by Eliade, and herein lies a key to the character of the sacred, that
it sits in opposition to the profane.[6] The description earlier of the encounter with purity-pollution in waste practices of
the households, an instance of the sacred-profane opposition, is particularly charged with a tension for purity is a
delicate and fragile state, accompanied by the notion of danger-pollution. Dumont’s description of the food practices of
brahmin households captures the rules that accompanied the preparation and eating of food in my grandfather’s house
in Chennai, India; “this everyday food whose cooking and eating requires so many precautions, and which is, like the
eater himself, so vulnerable to impurity...is the subject of various rules which apply to the preparation and consumption
of food”.[7] The negotiation of impurity connnects then to the larger discourse:
“For one thing, food, once cooked, participates in the family who prepared it. It seems that it is appropriated like
an object in use (pot, garment) but even more intimately and without even entering the body, ingestion being
only one part of the matter. This is perhaps because, by cooking, food is made to pass from the natural to the
human world, and one may wonder whether there is not here something analogous to the 'marginal state' in
rites de passage, when a person is no longer in one condition nor yet in another, and consequently exposed,
open in some way, to evil influences. In India itself most of these rites de passage correspond to an impurity
which expresses the irruption of the organic into social life ….”
The notion of purity is also crucially about three further aspects; security, vulnerability and access.
One, security amplifies the idea that the sacred exists in the domain of threats. The life, ways, objects are
threatened constantly hence governed by a code of practice that excludes. As Mary Douglas tells it the unfamiliar and
foreign is a threat and gets negotiated as a successive series of exclusions. What is let in needs to be controlled, for the
foreign renders the familiar vulnerable.[8] The Portuguese seafarers who frequented the south of India with food from
the new world would never have had a meal with the local Brahmins of Tamil Nadu. In the house of the Brahmin visitors
were excluded from the eating-room and those permitted in were either family or priests
Two, purity is a state of vulnerability or the pure have a sense of vulnerability attached to them is illustrated in
Dumont's description of the Brahmin eating habit:
“When he eats he is in an extremely vulnerable state, and even if everything takes place without mishap he
rises from his meal less pure than when he sat down. It is not only a question of avoiding contact with polluting
agents (even of the same caste) but of general precautions. Among the Brahmins, the eater must be pure (he
has bathed and his torso is bare) and he must be sheltered from any impure contact. He eats alone or in a
small group in a pure ‘square’ (cauka) in the kitchen or a nearby part of the house carefully protected from
intrusion. Any unforeseen contact, not only with a low-caste man (sometimes going as far as his shadow) or an
animal, but even with someone from the house (woman, child, man who is not purified for eating) would make
the food unfit for consumption. It is thought that ordinary cooked food is particularly vulnerable, and so is the
eater, who, the texts tell us, is in any case less pure when he finishes his meal than when he began."[9]
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In my experience of the meal in my grandfather's house, I saw the food being brought from the inner kitchen and served,
after which it is returned to the kitchen. In its journey it was never placed anywhere, either on the ground or on a
counter, and it was ensured that it does not touch the people eating or their plates. These practices continue in the
homes of the very orthodox and can be seen in other homes during a special day such as that marking a religious or
commemorative event.
Three, purity is protected and mediated by controlling acccess to the significant places in the home: the inner
kitchen was, in principle, accessible only to those who had been through the rite of samasrayanam, or the hot metal
branding with the mark of Vishnu’s disc and conch. Some limited access was permitted to those who had been through
the thread ceremony and were thus twice born. Additionally all these people would have to be in a state of purity,
expressed by the notion of madi, to be permitted to enter. To be in a state of madi the brahmin had to bathe and then
wear clothes that had been recently washed and dried, and that had not been touched by a person who was not madi.
The above examples illustrate the pure-impure opposition and demonstrate how purity, as a subset of the
sacred, can be apprehended through these three or similar notions – that of security, vulnerability and access. While
purity is one example it serves to illustrate the idea of oppositions. Then also while purity focuses upon protection-from it
also suggests the way of negotiating ‘the other’.
2. The sacred is about siting
In the description of the Kabyle house Bourdieu has given us a precise and very detailed description of direct parallels
between the organisation of elements in the household and the form and orientation of the household as mirroring or
directly representing the cosmos.[10] The Kabyle house model can seldom be encountered with such clear
correspondences between that which is perceived by the eye and that which has to be imagined by the mind. So it is not
in a specific geometric description of terrestrial and metaphysical orientation and sites that we find the significance of
both the Berber house and Bourdieu’s description. It is in the very existence of the two dimensions, the here and now
and the cosmic, in the construction of buildings and potentially artefacts too.
In Hindu mythology the form of the purusha, a crouching man drawn into a square, defines meanings for the
different parts of the site/ square based upon correspondences with the body parts of the purusha. Therefore it is
imagined that the corner where the head is located is either the site for the shrine, or the room of the head of the family.
Commonly referred to as Vaastu, this metaphorical overlay impacts upon organization of the spaces in the house and
defines the sites of artefacts and activities. A well orientated house with well sited spaces is considered a prescription
for the prosperity and well-being of the family and is in fact a situation where the sacred and secular are in accord or
effectively not in conflict.
Extending and categorising from the above, the sacred as siting is also crucially about three further aspects:
axis, siting and memory.
Sites on earth have axes that connect the cosmic with the terrestrial and thus the here and now becomes
charged with force and meaning. Eliade uses the notion of axis mundi as an archetypal symbol locating a place for man
to orient himself to the sacred, a scheme he refers to as a heirophany.
In India in the typical Iyengar house, which was a version of the courtyard house, the doors were located on
the central axis of the house. Walking through the streest of Chennai you can still look right through houses into their
back yards. Being a coastal city on the northern hemisphere, a south facing house with clear path for the sea breeze to
blow straight through, was considered valuable. This climatic-economic consideration informed the built form which had
then to be in accordance with the principle of Vaastu too, so that spaces and locations became significant. Then every
evening at ‘the lighting of the lamps’ (vilaku etal) Lakshmi, the godess of wealth, was thought to visit these houses. At
these times the doors from the front up to the shrine, in the middle of the house, would be open and the door leading out
to the rear of these houses was closed, to stop Lakshmi from walking right through.
The spaces in a house are organized according to principles of inclusion-exclusion, outer-inner, or as a

progression or procession. In my Grandfathers house the front room, where visitors were allowed, was called the
'camera room' and it was marked as 'male'. [11] When relatives visited the men would sit here, and the women would
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proceed deep into the house going up to the 'outer kitchen'. Now a small room, marked as the “bedroom” in the
drawings of the house, was connected to this first room. Though it served, when necessary, as a room for newlyweds,
its meaning as a conjugal space was not very strong. This room had at various times held a table and chair or a bed.
The room was used by children as a study and periodically served as the room where the women during dooram
(literally, ”distant”, a term used to denote the woman during menstruation) secluded themselves, for physical contact
with them was prohibited during this period. The dooram woman would be the last to eat, after everyone had eaten. All
food in a meal would be served onto her plate at one time, as compared to individual courses served in a normal meal.
The elder will not eat if he had seen a dooram woman before the meal. Small children were allowed go to the dooram
woman after taking off their clothes. This room had a fortuitous location that allowed the occupant to witness the coming
and goings of people to the house. And in recent times the dooram woman could leave for work without entering the rest
of the house. She could also use the lane to access the rear of the house where the wash area and toilets were located,
outside the house proper. She would also make such a trip after every meal to wash her plate, which she retained and
kept in the room. As also the only space with sexual connotations when kept for the newlyweds, the space contained
the meaning of fertility in a birth-death opposition. Though not physically set apart it is, as a category, treated as being
outside the main house. This room thus demanded care in its siting, and its siting both produced and reproduced the
culture of the iyengars.
3. Anything can be sacred
Emile Durkheim remarked that anything could be a sacred object: 'A rock, a tree, a spring, a stone, a piece of wood, a
house, in other words anything at all, can be sacred'.[12] The sacred is not a single domain that can be analysed as
such - but is a notion that can be attached to objects, shared system of beliefs and to place. The sacred has become a
significant territory in the reclamation of what is their's by indigenous peoples of different countries. Viewed from the
perspective of the object, to be rendered as sacred serves as a marker to set apart or render significant an object. In
short the usage of the word sacred is 'mostly as an adjective to designate objects that inspire a collective sentiment of
respect, are often hedged about by prohibitions and generally have an absolute value for the members of their
community'.[13]
Extending and categorising from the above the sacred is also crucially about three further aspects process, time and
balance.
One, there are specific processes by which something can be made sacred. Anita takes the car to the temple
as soon as she buys it - at the temple the priest is quite willing to walk out and touch the car with 'kum kum'(red
powder), sprinkle water over it and utter the key phrases (mantra). The car is thus effectively transformed (consecrated)
and potentially protected and will go on to protect the occupants. This is car puja and as Polan explains in her web
article; “it's a ceremony to consecrate or bless a new car in the Lord's name and keep it safe from bad influences”.[14]
The Shiva Temple in Melbourne offers a car puja. There is a strong sense that the fleeting presence of the sacred does
many things such as acknowledgement to God saying that even though she has just bought a really expensive car she
is not proud and still has time and space for him. In turn the objects themselves go through several stages of being
marked as the sacred or non-sacred, with different owners, through their life cycle.
Two, days are signficant and are marked as sacred. The day in the panchanga, an almanac listing significant
times in each day, is a manifestation of a specific planetary and solar arrangement or alignment, and the panchanga
defines diferent parts of the day as propitious or dangerous (unlucky). These slots of meaning in a day keep varying so
its all printed in the panchanga and people refer to it before planning or starting a new activity, often even before
venturing out of the house. Then there are certain days which are marked in the Hindu calendar with certain gods.
Saraswati puja is a festival devoted to Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, music and art when the family brings out
the pens and arranges them with books. Traditionally during this festival children are taught to write their first words. The
color yellow has a special meaning during this festival, and people usually wear yellow and even sweets are yellow. I
have seen my Lamy pen sitting amongst writing instruments and objects being rendered sacred for the day. The
examples I give here are either religious or at least cultural though all instances have elements of ritual in their
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engagement with the sacred. This is significant as it points to the pervasive nature of the sacred and hence the casual
way in which a ritual is conducted.
Three, the practices show a keen awareness of the need to maintain a balance. Van Gennep's notion of the
liminalilty captures the tension inherent in artefacts and relationships that can quickly become something else. The
sacred here is a discourse to tilt the balance towards a favourable outcome and the talisman, the consecration, the
other enveloping or touching rituals are all focussed upon maintaining and thus protecting. The existence of ritual hints
at an the acknowledgement of and desire not to upset the order or scheme of things.
4. The sacred connects to an overarching scheme
The sacred is a connection with the divine and in the context of the specifically non religious it is a connection to the
myth that provides an account of the world, the cosmos:
‘One should pay attention to the cosmological information contained in ancient myth, information of chaos,
struggle and violence. They are not mere projections of a troubled consciousness. They are attempts to portray
the forces which seem to have taken part in the shaping of the cosmos. Monsters, Titans, giants locked in
battle with the gods and trying to scale Olympus are functions and components of the order that is finally
established. A distinction is immediately clear. The fixed stars are the essence of Being, their assembly stands
for the hidden counsels and the unspoken laws that rule the whole. The planets seen as gods, represents the
Forces and the Will.’ [15]
At this level the diagram, Vaastu or Mandala, captures the scheme of the universe. The diagram, the myths become
mediations that permit the cosmology to be apprehended. We see here the cosmos as an overarching scheme, that is
subtle though potentially malevolent.
The sacred as connecting to an overarching scheme is also crucially about three further aspects: everything is
connected; the right way; and narrative.
The notion of an overarching scheme which often is the divine, hinting at the interconnectedness of all that is
external to the individual, is a recurring motif in the way knowledge itself is constructed in traditional societies. There has
been a strain of the environmental in such knowledge. Quite a few contemporary writers and their critics agree that
Western environmental problems, projects and movements have a marked religious dimension. The notion of
renunciation was just one example but it does reveal that as an environmental educator, I may have been using patterns
of construction that I am familiar with where the environmental, like the sacred, contains proscriptions, a cosmology-like
theory of everything being connected, and injuctions for responsible action. The view of the world as an interwoven and
interconnected entity, is quite similar to the notion of the cosmology, where everything is connected and every action has
a malevolent impact.
The sacred in products, systems and campaigns
The account till now has been to establish the sacred as a category that is negotiated in specific and traditionally
recognized ways. In objects and the proscriptions accompanying them the sacred is significantly a dualism signifying
either protection-from and connection-to.
I am intrigued by the potential such markers have for contemporary design practice. In the case of precious
and valued artefacts such as the chair as a family hierloom, or a piece of jewellery from a long departed relative that
resist being discarded, what is apparent is the aspect of 'connection-to'. As a collective representation, these objects are
protected from annihilation or violent transformation back into their natural material form. Through their connection to
something beyond their perceived value or properties they resist change offering us instances of the commonplace
made singular by a connection to something beyond which then resists even circulation.
Similarly another series of objects such as those sold by Oxfam or even recycled clothes stores offer a
connection to a place, time or an ethical action though here sustainability is significantly a symbolic marker. In these
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practices, in our way with these object consumptions, the meaning can be analogous to the sacred. While in the
provocative work of the Dutch Designer Wieki Somers, the ashes of loved ones are made into useful products, a chair, a
toaster or a vacuum cleaner, to make us realize the importance of ‘holding onto things’.[16] While the discourse here is
primarily one of consuming sustainably, the sacred impacts upon the culture of artefact consumption with the added
injunction of of holding onto things and not discarding them.
In the discourse of the sacred the larger ecosystem that the artefacts would connect-to would often be
malevolent. Violence as a theme is however absent from the discourse of sustainability focussed as it is not upon the
frequent violent events but upon the more stable or quiet periods as the defining feature of the earth. The sustainability
discourse presents an impoverished account. It is as though the earth is a mud ball, where the atmosphere is a closed
room, and the sustainability discourse is the ‘no smoking’ sign on the wall. Design that deals with sustainability is in this
account primarily utilitarian. It enters the room with its analytical consideration of materials and making then worries
about not leaving a mess for others to clean up. Introducing the themes of the sacred could magically transform this
static portrayal and unleash the malevolent in the room, which itself mysteriously pulsates and becomes sentient, if not
dissappears altogether.
This earth which we have imposed a campaign of sustainability upon is not really compassionate enough to
listen and modulate its behaviour. But we can certainly try and propitiate it with our rituals and sacrifices. We can all take
up proscription of this or that behaviour, applauding Bundanoon (NSW, Australia) the first town in the world to ban
bottled water[17] and speculate upon not just the protection-from pollution but a connection to this new malevolent
earth. Our subscription to a science that pushes for a rationally behaving earth which only randomly subjects us to freak
events is faulty and distracts from the majesty of this beast whose dynamic play is way better captured by the sacred
and its privileging of vulnerability as an essential condition.
The sacred, as in the writing of Datchevsky, enters into discussion of the environmental as a moral
imperative.[18] In the contemporary commons can be found proscriptions such as petitions against genetically modified
food, against supermarkets and in favour of ethical consumption. Such proscriptions mirror the sacred in the view of the
body and the collective. Douglas in her discussion of the prospects of asceticism speaks of the 'new category of risk …
a risk of irreparable damage to the commons, in which each and every one is liable to loss if the anticipated danger to
the environment is actualized'. She is here asking the question of the absence of the finger of accusation pointing at the
key agency – 'public demand for commodities' – responsible for the current state of affairs, for if there were more
honesty 'a popular movement of renunciation would be expected'. Such a movement of ethical consumption and
renunciation exists both in traditional and modern societies and in turn this movement contains a resilient strain of the
sacred in it. Characterized by a discourse of denial, of sharing and of a collective re-engagement with the sacred, future
movements of ethical consumption might well bolster sustainability campaigns and bring accelerated behaviour change.
It is clear that the sacred offers narrative possibilities. What is even more dramatic is the impact such narrative
possibilities would have upon design, founded as it is in a large measure upon the discourse of mass consumption and
the creation of singular artifacts. Is it even remotely conceivable that design would embrace proscription and that future
design practices would work towards design for avoidance, or design for renunciation of consumption? Is design
re-conceivable as a political project that connects the traditional peoples, largely the rural poor, and the modern, the
urban rich, through a narrative of the sacred or making significant? But first would the discourse of the sacred be
welcome at all in the public sphere?
Soumitri Vardarajan is Associate Professor in Architecture & Design at RMIT University, Melbourne. His research interersts are in social Innovation,
product design and service design, especially in the areas of consumption, food, transportation in China and India.
NOTES
[1] Varadarajan, Soumitri (2006). My Grandfather's House: Prescription and Practice in the Food System of the Iyengars of Tamil
Nadu. Indo-Portuguese Encounters: Journeys in Science, Technology and Culture. L. Varadarajan. New Delhi, Lisbon, Arayan Books
International. II.
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[2] Dumont, L. (1998). Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. New Delhi, Oxford University Press.
[3] Soumitri, G.V, and Sriparna Chaudhuri. "Solving the Intractable: Two Problem Solving Case Studies." In Ecodesign for Profit.
Sheffield, UK, 2001.
[4] Cox, James (2004). 'Separating Religion from the "Sacred" Methodological Agnosticism and the Future of Religious Studies', in
Steven J. Sutcliffe (editor). Religion: Empirical Studies. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 259-264.
[5] Varadarajan, Soumitri (2009). The Scared Mandala image, Faint Voice Blog at http://campaignprojects.wordpress.com/2009/08
/24/the-sacred-mandala/
[6] Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane : the nature of religion. New York, Harcourt, Brace.
[7] Dumont, Louis. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
[8] Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1991.
[9] Dumont, op. cit.
[10] Bourdieu, Pierre. "The Kabyle House or the World Reversed." In Algeria 1960, edited by Maurice Aymard, Jacques Revel and
Immanuel Wallerstein, 133-53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
[11] Varadarajan, Soumitri (2006). My Grandfather's House: Prescription and Practice in the Food System of the Iyengars of Tamil
Nadu. Indo-Portuguese Encounters: Journeys in Science, Technology and Culture. L. Varadarajan. New Delhi, Lisbon, Arayan Books
International. II.
[12] Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Free Press Paperbacks. New York: Free Press, 1965.
[13] Derlon, Brigitte, and Marie Mauze. ""Sacred" Or "Sensitive" Objects." In Non European Components of European Patrimony:
EUROPEAN CULTURAL HERITAGE ONLINE (ECHO) Project.
[14] Polan, Jennifer. "Photo Essay: A Puja for My New Car." Beliefnet, http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Hinduism/2003/01/Photo-
Essay-A-Puja-For-My-New-Car.aspx.
[15] Gioggio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill (New Hampshire: David R. Godine Publishers, Inc., 1977), p. 151.
[16] Ligett, Brit. "Artist Uses 3d Printer to Turn Human Ashes into Objects." http://inhabitat.com/2010/06/23/artist-uses-3d-printer-
to-turn-human-ashes-into-objects/.
[17] Substituted with free public drinking fountains and refillable bottles.Cubby, Ben. "Bundy Votes on Bottled Water Ban."
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/water-issues/bundy-votes-on-bottled-water-ban-20090707-dbvn.html and Bundanoon in 'world-
first' ban on bottled water, The Australian, September 26, 2009 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/bundanoon-in-world-first-
ban-on-bottled-water/story-e6frg6nf-1225779878437
[18] Datschefski, Edwin. "The Four Noble Truths of Biothinking " www.biothinking.com/truths.pdf.
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DPP no. 1, 2010 editorial http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/editorial/body...
Sacred Design Now
This is what we invited people to consider in the call for papers:

How can the sacred be thought beyond existing ways in which it is engaged by design? How do we think the
sacred in relation to contemporary beliefs, symbols, needs, economic and social structures? Should we
understand those fundamental things that sustain us in body and mind as sacred? What can we discover from
past or existing traditions and beliefs that could inform the designation of the sacred for today and the future?
In what ways could the sacred be understood as designed?
We had many offers of papers on the design of churches, temples and other places of worship. We rejected these
because our aim has been to take the sacred beyond where it’s conventionally considered to be located. What follows
are brief descriptions of the papers we’ve chosen to publish. Below that are some reflections on the need for the sacred
now and the obstacles to re-thinking it in a secular context.
Karsten Harries in ‘On the Need for Sacred Architecture: 12 Observations’ argues why the sacred needs architecture
and why architecture needs the sacred, at the same time advocating a re-invigorated sacred that engages both
sensuousness and ‘being bound’.
Nilay Ozlu’s ‘Modernity and the Demise of the Sacred’ is a historical interrogation and post-structuralist reading of
Hagia Sophia, the oldest sacred monument of Istanbul, which, over the course of centuries has been the bearer of
vastly different symbolic meanings – a palpable site of struggle over the meaning of the sacred. The endurance of this
monument and its capacity to bear a diverse range of symbolic sacred meanings perhaps resonates with the reciprocal
relation between architecture and the sacred of which Karsten Harries speaks.
Soumitri Varadarajan in ‘On how the sacred could be a framework for sustainable design practice’ begins with personal
reflections on encounters with the sacred in India and Australia, then puts forward a four-part definition of the sacred
with an eye to design.
Tony Fry in ‘Re-turning: Sacred Design III’ reflects upon essays he published in the early 1990s on sacred design,
considering the changed context of now, while re-asserting “ … sustainment …is that value which we can all, no matter
our differences, share. … Given a particularity by design, it has the potential to be the embodiment of that higher order
of thing that is sacred, around which a commonality of belief can accumulate and be held.”
Samer Akkach, co-editor of this issue, in ‘The Presence of Absence: Sacred Design Now’ discusses the philosophical
and historical context of the emergence of the idea of the sacred, arguing for “a renewed understanding of its nature and
fresh intellectual investment in its significance” given the resurgence of the religious, especially in non-Western
societies, which is not a revival of pre-modern understandings but a new hybrid that blends the sacred with a strategic
instrumental rationality. He asks: “Can the sacred be divorced from, or thought of outside, the religious without losing its
efficacy and inviolability and being transformed into something else? Is it possible to re-invest the inviolable necessity of
the symbolic function, the essence of sacred, as it were, in a whole new spectrum of things and actions?”
___________
Sacred Belief
Is nothing sacred anymore?

Well .. no, nothing really. The relentless grind of rationalist thinking as it has shaped the modern world, strips everything
down to a factuality that has no need of spiritual explanations or sacred rites.
Is it an anachronism then, to talk of sacred design?
Especially given that design, as both a servant and agent of modernization and of the market economy, has been a
major force of secularization, displacing ‘visions of heaven and hell’ with imaginaries of material rewards that can be had
in this earthly life – just for the price of a car, a house, a new outfit, a holiday, or anything else you might desire. When
reason via science technology has harnessed and processed the bounty of nature – plant, animal, mineral – for the
benefit of human beings, what need is there to offer sacrifices to gods for a plentiful harvest, to ward off flood, famine, or
other threats to the people’s well-being and flourishing?
Such comments may seem reductive: as if, at the level of the subject, the shift from the pre-modern to the modern, was
based upon a kind of calculus, a cost-benefit analysis of the soul. But that’s not the intention – what is being gestured to,
is the larger, longer and slower shift from sacred to secular societies. For, as will be discussed below, the sacred always
operates communally.
But why do we want to talk of sacred design? The implication of our call-for-papers is that the sacred is a powerful idea,
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an idea with efficacy, a means, perhaps, of valuing, protecting, conserving, enhancing that which sustains or that which
has sustaining power. Historically, that which was sacred, was given special status – it was something that could not be
defiled or destroyed.
How, in a secular society could such a status be re-invented?
Perhaps we begin by trying to understand the meaning of ‘sacred’. What is its essence? What are some commonplace
understandings of the sacred? Here are some sketchy thoughts.
The sacred says: do not violate; always respect. The sacred is not fleeting, ephemeral. It endures over time, beyond the
span of a human life. It is not for simple practical purposes that the sacred is valued, respected and paid homage to. Yet
the sacred is often invested in everyday practices and ordinary things – as in care of the body or the preparation of food.
This is one aspect discussed in Soumitri Varadarajan’s paper.
The sacred, then, is this ‘something more’, something beyond mere appearance and functionality. It is invested with a
degree of mystery. It is simultaneously fragile (vulnerable to violation) and powerful (it is the locus of forces that can
punish those who violate it and reward those who venerate it).
The sacred is not self-evident. One has to be inducted into its prohibitions, initiated into its special practices and rituals.
In fact, says Caillois, the sacred in everyday life is nearly always manifested as prohibitions, but, he emphasizes, the
sacred has another side: the ferment and excess of festival, a time in which taboos are broken and the normal order of
things is overturned, reversed.[1] His claim is that, paradoxically, or perhaps dialectically, the continuity of the group is
ensured by periodic, communal transgressions against its norms.
While the sacred is associated with a range of emotions – fear, awe, love – it is not dependent upon the emotional
disposition of individual subjects in order to be maintained as sacred. Begrudging compliance serves the sacred as
effectively as love and devotion. That is so, if we regard the sacred sociologically.
However, the sacred is always an object of belief. And it is always communal. When a community of believers no longer
believe that something is sacred, it is no longer sacred. The community may move on to venerate something else, or
they may be ‘converted’ to another faith with different sacred objects and practices (between these two moments lies the
whole history of colonialism). To mention colonialism is to return to the point about reason conquering the world, here
not via Enlightenment, but by violence that is both genocidal (killing bodies, populations) and ethnocidal (shattering
systems of belief). The blast from a gun kills not only the warrior but also the sacred powers he invokes.
When the sacred works, when it resonates with the circumstances of a community, it will remain sacred. When
circumstances change suddenly, dramatically, it no longer resonates, it becomes a meaningless thing, a dead thing: its
sacredness is annihilated. The sacred is thus sustained by that which sustains the community of believers that hold
something to be sacred. At the same time, the sacred acts to protect the sustaining power of that which sustains the
community. A virtuous circle. Yet to speak of the sacred in this way indicates a paradox: the sacred can never be merely
functional, yet, at another level, it is. The sacred (as Jean Luc Nancy observed and as discussed in Tony Fry’s essay) is
that which draws people together as a community of belief. The function of the sacred, then, is the creation of
community.
This is a long way from community today, which no longer names a socio-economic-cultural totality, but shifting
functional and strategic associations without a centre or continuity.
The sacred is predicated upon belief, yet belief is the most fragile of things. Where it rests entirely on having been
instilled, or on faith alone, it is vulnerable to challenge. The converse is so: belief based solely on reason is vulnerable
too, for it is ever skeptical, it can never trust, never settle, nothing for it is permanent, nothing sacred. Perhaps for belief
to be strong (and thus able to engender a sacred that is resilient) there has to be an element of giving over, giving way:
a leaping over the grind and tyranny of calculative reason that demands empirical proof that something is of such
absolute value that it be called sacred.
The obstacles to sacred design are many. The sacred is associated with religion, with myth, with modes of explaining
the world that held sway before ‘the age of reason’. You cannot simply re-install an idea that reason has pulverized.
Belief in the sacred cannot simply be willed into being. To believe in the sacred now would seem to be to turn one’s
back on reason.
But is that really so? What is the relation between reason and belief? We might like to think, for example, that we as
citizens, believe that human-produced greenhouse gas emissions are a threat to the earth’s atmosphere and climate,
because we have been convinced by the scientific evidence. Yet how many people are in a position to verify the
evidence for themselves? The scientific evidence is mediated via mass media, it arrives from voices vested with
authority, and in a politicized context. This goes for a good deal of the complex factors in play in contemporary life.
Believing something to be true never arrives through the exercise of reason alone. Belief is complex – it comes about
through a combination of credibility, congruence with existing explanatory models, authority, connections to other
believers, context, persuasion, rhetoric, desire, disavowal and much else. And, of course, action doesn’t necessarily
follow belief. Aristotle, a long time ago, identified this contradiction and named it akrasia – knowing that one should act
in a certain way, but not doing so[2] . Perhaps the sacred inhabits this gap between knowing and doing, and could thus
be a powerful counterforce to akrasia.
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The language of the climate change debate has theological overtones – there are ‘climate change skeptics’ and there
are ‘believers’ in human-induced climate change.
So, if this defining issue of our age appears in the garb of science and reason but is not contained by it; if it is already
bound up with systems of values and pre-existing beliefs, is there an inchoate sacred lurking underneath that could be
brought to the surface? What could this be? Could it be named as the sacredness of all human and non-human life? Or
is the sacred that which sustains and allows for the continuity and flourishing of life? The sacred eludes precise or final
definition. It must be sensed, felt, as well as thought. Belief in the sacred now requires a leap of faith. This, in turn,
requires an enriched, post-rationalist understanding of belief.
What, of value, have human beings ever achieved without belief? Belief in the face of obstacles and seeming
impossibilities?
To believe in the possibility of the arising and gathering momentum of a new, powerful sacred – a post-secular sacred as
Sam Akkach alludes to in his essay – might seem like a replay of rationalist humanist hubris – a contradiction because
it is the antithesis of the mystery and power of the sacred which traditionally emanates from elsewhere – gods, spirits,
ancestors, dreamtime. The extent of its powers, especially its destructive powers were never fully known – the sacred
was feared and appeased through sacrifice (the two words come from the same root).
So how could a contemporary re-invented sacred not be a pale simulacrum, a pathetic thing paid lip-service to; a
mission statement for the soul? It would not be such as long as it recognized the limits of reason and the fiction that
human beings are in control of all they have designed and made (and the concomitant uncritical belief in the saving
power of the technofix). Today, so much of what was once unproblematically celebrated as progress is no more than the
unfolding and playing out of the inherent logics at macro and micro levels of economic and technological systems that
were initiated long ago. This is what Tony Fry has called defuturing, and why he insists that defuturing names both an
historical process and a method for interrogating that history.[3] There is much that is unknown, there is much to fear:
not the wrath of gods or malevolent spirits but that which issues from our own making. No one really knows the extent of
global climatic havoc that will ensue within the next sixty odd years if global warming creeps to the upper levels of the
projected temperature range. Neither does anyone know how to stem the accelerating ‘economic development’ that is
driving global warming. We have unleashed destructive and world transformative powers of unknown limits. The power
of the sacred is what could be thrown across this path.
Universal agreement on that which is sacred is unlikely. Thus the sacred is inseparable from the political. What then, as
the clock ticks down to midnight, is its appropriate means? An answer springs to mind: declare a holy war on the
unsustainable. Not a war fought with weapons, but with thinking, with powerful ideas. Its targets are many:
instrumentalist (un)thinking, commodity-centred individualism, technocentrism, ethnocentrism, liberal pluralism,
cynicism.
Above all, the sacred is serious business.
The obstacles of disenchantment and secularism (see Samer Akkach on Weber) are to be overcome not via the
window-dressing of sacred kitsch. A re-invented sacred would not even appear as such. A spark of revelation igniting a
slow burn of resoluteness. This would be the mood of sacred design now.
Anne-Marie Willis
August 2010
[1] Roger Caillois, ‘Festival’ in Denis Hollier (ed.) The College of Sociology 1937-39, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988, pp. 279-303.
[2] See Susan Stewart and Jacqueline Lorber-Kasunic, ‘Akrasia, ethics and design education’ Design Philosophy Papers 4/2006
www.desphilosophy.com
[3] Tony Fry, A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing, Sydney: University of new South Wales Press, 1999, pp. 2-13.
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Hagia Sophia:demise of the sacred http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/paper2/body...
Nilay Ozlu
“As soon as there is a society, every usage is converted into a sign of itself.”
(Barthes, 1968)
The Sacred: A Question of Representation
The sacred is the connection between the divine and the mortal, the eternal and the temporary, the transcendental and
the immanent. The sacred takes place in this world sometimes as a materialized object, a piece of art, a designed
temple, and sometimes as a person; in any case, however, its presence signifies a power originating from a source
beyond our world. Through a narrowed perspective, the “sacred,” as a concept, can be defined by a set of symbolic
relations, where each signifier represents the signified absolute. So the question of the sacred can be interpreted as
one of representation. The etymology of the word “representation” provides us with clues about the ontological structure
the concept of the sacred entails: “re-presenting” is presenting a substitute instead of the real.[1] When the real thing is
not available to us, some other thing is provided to replace the thing in absence. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a
semiotic system forms a regime of sign, where every sign refers to another sign, generating a signifying chain, an
infinitely circular spiral oriented toward the center of significance. The form comes from the signifier, while the signified
re-imparts the signifier, produces more of it, and recharges it (Figure 1). In this semiotic system, there exists a form of
expression and a form of content, which constitutes the “Temple.”[2]
Figure 1. Regimes of signs (from Deleuze & Guattari, 2007)
Through a historical interrogation of a temple, a post-structural reading of Hagia Sophia, this paper explores the reasons
behind the demise of the sacred within the modern epistemological regimes. Hagia Sophia, the oldest and most
prominently sacred monument of Istanbul, is an iconic symbol of the city. Over the course of the city’s complex history,
this monument went through several symbolic re-manifestations, which makes it a unique example for discussing the
changing meanings of the “sacred” within the city’s stratified socio-cultural structure. In the pre-modern era, Hagia
Sophia as an architectural masterpiece was believed to be truly miraculous and the structure itself was accepted as a
gift from God. It was the form of the content and the form of the expression, wherein every part of the “Temple” was
believed to represent the signified absolute, God himself. The signified, that is, the creator or divinity, was being
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comprehended through symbolic means and was perceived as the created or the signifier. The worldly object was
coded with the sanctity and eventually the designed and created was decoded as the sacred one.[3]
This study offers parallel readings of the changing significance of Hagia Sophia within the transforming socio-political
strata of the city by analyzing the changing perception of the sacred as represented in the architecture of this unique
building.
Christianization
Istanbul is an old city founded by the legendary Megarian King Byzas in the seventh century BC. It was captured by the
Romans in 196 AD, declared as the capital of Eastern Rome by Constantine in 330 AD, and finally became the capital
of Orthodox Byzantine until the Turkish conquest in the fifteenth century. The city remained as the Muslim capital until
the end of the Ottoman Empire, when it lost its privileged status with the declaration of Ankara as the capital of the new
Turkish Republic in 1923. Emperor Constantine moved the capital of Rome to Nova Roma, which would later be called
Constantinople, and declared Christianity as the official religion of Eastern Rome. The capital was adorned by several
churches to reinforce the religious power and authority of the state. Hagia Sophia was located in Istanbul on an
acropolis, the first hill of the Historic Peninsula, where two other churches with the same name were built at the same
spot. The first church, constructed during the reign of Constantinus II in 350 AD, was destroyed by the fire of 404 AD.
The second church was erected by Theodosius; it was consecrated in 415 AD and destroyed over a century later in 532
AD. The construction of the third church, the current Hagia Sophia, begun immediately with the order of Emperor
rd th
Justinian on the 23 of February, 532 AD, and was completed in five years, a relatively short period of time, on the 27
of December, 537 AD.[4] Two mathematical physicists, Anthemius of Tralles, who died in 534 AD, and Isidorus of
Miletus were said to have been responsible for the design and construction of this sacred monument. The design of this
new church was completely different from the former churches in its ambitious scale and remarkable grandeur (Figure
2).[5]
Figure 2. Exterior view of Hagia Sophia (Source: Author)
The church has a surface area of 4570 square meters with a middle nave of 75x70 meters. Some of the 107 columns
supporting the structure are believed to have been brought from several sacred buildings of the ancient world, such as
the temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the world, the Temple of Sun at Heliopolis, and other temples in
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Rome. The “fabled dome, which appeared to be suspended from heaven on a golden chain,” as described by
Procopius, has a height of 55.60 meters and a diameter of 31-32 meters. The dome, which sits on four pendentives,
does not make a perfect circle due to the several renovations that were carried out to repair the damages caused by
several earthquakes. With its colossal size and incredible dome, supported by two half-domes and six smaller domes,
the achievement of this architectural masterpiece was believed to be a miracle of God and was, therefore, widely
regarded as the most sacred temple of Orthodox Christianity.[6] Procopius praised the new church in Book I of his
Edifices as:[7]
So the church has become a spectacle of marvelous beauty, overwhelming to those who see it, but to those who
know it by hearsay [is] altogether incredible… For it proudly reveals its mass and harmony of its proportions,
having neither any excess nor deficiency, since it is more pretentious than the buildings to which we are
accustomed, and considerably more noble than buildings which are merely huge, and it abounds exceedingly in
sunlight and the reflection of the sun’s rays from the marble. Indeed one might say that its interior is not
illuminated [from] without by the sun, but that its radiance comes into being [from] within it, such an abundance of
light bathes this shrine.
Apart from its monumental mass, the interior of the basilica elongated in east-west axis was elaborately decorated. A
variety of fine marbles, brought from all over the world adorned the interior walls and piers. The finely carved column
capitals are among the finest examples of Byzantine art and they are famous for their delicacy. The most prominent of
all is the lavish use of gold tesserae, gold covered glass mosaics cubes.[8] Except for the non-figural narthex mosaics,
remaining from the Justinian era, no earlier mosaics were saved from the Byzantine “iconoclasm.” In this unsettled era,
all religious images in the city were destroyed in a movement that is explained as a reaction against the representation
of the sacred through religious icons. All the figurative mosaics were added to the church after the iconoclastic period,
which lasted from 726 to 843 AD. The golden mosaic panels of Hagia Sophia, depicting several religious scenes and
historic instances were among the finest examples of Byzantine religious art (Figure 3). Especially so are the mosaics
depicting Christ and the Emperor Leo VI the Wise (886-912 AD), the Virgin and Christ Child (ninth century), Archangel
Michael (tenth century), the Virgin between Justinian and Constantine, and several other panels at the galleries are of
great spiritual and artistic significance. Hagia Sophia, as the magnum opus of Byzantine art and architecture, was
accepted as the sacred icon of Orthodox Christianity and finally became the symbol of the shrinking Empire. By the
mid-fifteenth century, the Byzantine Empire was besieged by the Ottomans and the Empire had to survive within the
fortifications of Constantinople.
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Figure 3. Christ from the Deesis panel of the south gallery of Hagia Sophia, late twelfth, early thirteenth
centuries (Source: Author).
Islamification
Conquering Constantinople was of vital importance for the Ottomans, and the fall of the city represents the sovereignty
of Islam over the easternmost castle of Christianity. For the Ottomans, Hagia Sophia held special significance as it
represented the “red apple,” the sacred nationalistic ideal of the Turks.[9] It is believed that with the siege of the city,
the cardinal’s attempt of a Dictum of Union[10] was rejected by the Byzantine populace that cried: “Better the turban of
th
the Turk than the Pope’s tiara.”[11] According to the historical records, upon concurring Constantinople on the 29 of
May, 1453 AD, Sultan Mehmed II headed straight towards Hagia Sophia, admired the grandness and magnificence of
the church, and prayed there. Mehmed the Conqueror commanded the immediate conversion of the church to a
mosque and directed his soldiers not to damage the sacred mosaics and relics. The 1123 years of Christian history of
the city came to an end with the conversion of Hagia Sophia. The Muslim Ottomans became deeply inspired by Hagia
Sophia and celebrated its sacredness in several literary works. The poem of Koca Niancı Celalzade Mustafa Paa (d.
1569), comparing Hagia Sophia with heaven, provided a poetic frame for his contemporaries’ appreciation of the new
architectural image of the sacred:[12]
Melek görmei dilersen yürü var hatır-ı adi

Ayasofya'nın içinde ko dursun ol dil-i zarı
(If you would like to see an angel, go to Hagia Sophia and leave your broken heart there)
Mekanı Cennetü'l-Me'va veya Firdevs-i sanidir

Behit olma mı ol cami melek olıcak üstadı
(This place is the heaven, because the mosque was built by angels)
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(…)
Anın gibi dahi bir eyledi mahluk ol Halık
Yedi kat gökler üstünde Ayasofiyye'dir adı
(The divine creator God, seven floors above the ground, created a similar edifice named Hagia Sophia)
Figure 4. Interior view of Hagia Sophia (Source: Author).
With the Islamification of the city, Hagia Sophia Mosque becomes one of the most important symbols of Muslim glory,
symbolizing the victory of Islam over Christianity. After the immediate removal of the ambo, relics, thrones, altar, and
icons, a wooden minaret was constructed and the east-west axis of the altar was tilted with the addition of a mihrab
indicating the direction of Mecca. During Sultan Mehmed’s reign, the temporary wooden minaret was replaced with a
brick one. Later, a stone minaret was erected by Selim II in 1574 AD, and two other stone minarets were added by his
son, Murat III, a year later. All three stone minarets were constructed by the chief architect Sinan, who was also
responsible for the restoration of the building. The Ottomans, apart from covering the figurative mosaics with white-wash
plaster, appended several sacred elements of their own and adorned the mosque according to the Islamic tradition. The
addition of several Islamic “icons,” such as mihrab and minber, which were oriented toward Mecca, the levhas,
presenting the names of Allah, Mohammed, Abu Bekr, Omar, Othman, Ali, Hasan, and Hüseyin, and with the Islamic
inscription on the inner surface of the dome, the Christian basilica was turned into one of the most sacred places of
Islam (Figure 4). Apart from the conversion of the baptistery of the church into türbe, “funerary monuments” of Mustafa I
and brahim, the addition of imperial türbes for the Sultans—Selim II, Murad III, and Mehmed III, and for their immediate
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families—shows the great symbolic significance the building and its sacred site held for the Ottoman royal family.[13]
Figure 5. Fossati’s depiction of Hagia Sophia as a mosque in the nineteenth century (Source: Cimok, 1996).
The architecture of Hagia Sophia became the main inspiration for Ottoman architects, who tried to outdo its miraculously
grand dome, but only to come near a thousand years after its construction through the works of the renowned Ottoman
architect Sinan in the sixteenth century. The structural system of supporting the main dome with semi-domes was
improved by the Ottoman architects and becomes a typical feature of Ottoman mosques (Figure 5). The large dome
covering the whole space is believed to symbolize the unity of God as the Supreme Ruler of heaven and earth.
Secularization
During the renovations undertaken by Swiss architects Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati in 1847-49, the whitewash and
plaster covering the figural mosaics were cleared. The mosaics, which were recorded by Fossati brothers and covered
over again, must have generated a great interest in the Western academic circles. However, the Christian icons had to
wait until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire before they reappear again.
Right after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, adopting a
strict secular and nationalistic ideology. The new republic, inspired by Western ideals, repudiated the Ottoman heritage
and strove to sever the organic relation between religion and official and social institutions. The laicism of modern
Turkey was secured with a constitutional law that isolated religion from the state, while allowing the state to intervene in
religious matters. While this paradox was criticized by liberal groups, conservative parties blamed the secular state for
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promoting heathenism and enforcing irreligion.[14] In this new milieu, a socio-political separation took place among the
enlightened elites, who admired Ataturk and his principles, and the conservative groups, who considered the traditional
Ottoman heritage as religious and sacred. The polarization between the Kemalist/Westernist and the
Islamist/Traditionalist populations widened the social and intellectual gap within the society.[15]
This socio-political tension and its ensuing debates can be traced in the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a museum. In
1932, members of the Byzantine Institute, Thomas Whittemore and his colleagues, started uncovering and restoring the
mosaics of Hagia Sophia. In 1934, with a direct order from the cabinet and the approval of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the
mosque of Hagia Sophia was opened as a museum. The official memorandum states that “The conversion of Hagia
Sophia, as an architectural masterpiece, to a museum would please the Eastern world and will introduce a new scientific
institution to the civilized world.”[16] The decision was certainly a political one, which is still been discussed by various
groups. Today, while some circles applaud this decision as an important step in the modernization of Turkey, other
parties believe that the museumification was dictated by the Western imperialist forces, representing the first step
towards the conversion of Hagia Sophia back into a church (Figure 5).[17] Arif Nihat Asya’s poetry demonstrates the
reaction against the museumed Hagia Sophia:[18]
Be vakit, loluunda saf saftık; (We used to pray five times in your shadowy light;)
Davetin vardı dün ezanlarda... (Yesterday you were calling us for prayer…)
Seni, ey mabedim, utansınlar (They must be embarrassed, my sanctuary;)
Kapayanlar da; açmayanlar da! (For closing you down and not opening up)
Figure 5. Alerting headlines on Turkish newspapers: “Europe aims at converting Hagia Sophia into a
church!” (Source: Kandemir, 2004)
The Sacred in a Plurality of Representational Systems
The mosaic iconography of the church exemplifies the perception of the sacred and the problem of representation. For
Orthodox Christians the icons did not signify God, but they were seen as manifestations of God himself. For Deleuze
and Guatari, the sacred is the “faciality” of God.[19] It is known that some mosaics were eaten by the believers with the
ambition for unification with the God. Iconoclasm was a reaction against such an extreme understanding of the
representation of the sacred. The figural icons were destroyed to prevent the problem of representation. Obviously, the
destruction of the signifier was not the answer to this dilemma; a century later Byzantines continued creating much
refined and even more realistic icons. The holy sanctuary of Hagia Sophia represented literally and symbolically the very
th
being of Orthodox Christianity by the 15 century.
The conquest of Istanbul not only changed the socio-political structure of the city; but also transformed the semiotic
system of the ‘sayable’ and the ‘visible’[20]. The new power structure that was directing its authority towards the most
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“sacred” edifice, was more than willing to demonstrate his sovereignty through representation. Lines of flight break the
established regimes of signs; in other words, de-territorialize the system of representations and re-territorialize them by
loading a new set of meanings to the form.[21] The form was stripped off of its existing meanings and loaded with a
new set of symbolic values. In Deleuzian terms, the signifier was overcoded to represent the new signified, which
happened to be the glory of Islam.
Apart from being a functional necessity, architecture is a semiotic system, a representational structure. Umberto Eco
argues that architectural forms, as tools of mass communication, signify both primary functions, which directly denote
the function or the utilitas of the building, and have secondary functions that connote the ideology of the power structure.
However, according to Eco, the primary functions of buildings may vary and their secondary functions could be open to
unforeseen future codes.[22] A building can adopt different functions throughout its physical life, and, more importantly,
the symbolic message it conveys can be open to alternative and even contrasting readings. So the initial representative
intention is subject to change due to transforming political, social, or cultural contexts. In this respect, the foundation
of the Turkish Republic has radically transformed the socio-political context. The new power structure of the modern
state is the abstract machine that regulates the regimes of signs and overcodes them. The conversion of the mosque
into a museum in 1935 was the victory of the secular ideology against the sacred. The Byzantine mosaics were
uncovered and displayed side by side with the Islamic calligraphy. The sacred was fragmented into pieces, where each
piece becomes an object of display for the “modern” people of the secular world. The 1400-year-old monument was
converted into a tourist icon.
The shift of the historical formation in the twentieth century, however, was different from the one that took place in the
fifteenth century. An important power vector, “modernity,” continuously transforms the historical formation and cyclically
de-territorializes and re-territorializes the system. In other words, modernity broke the chain of signifying relations and
shifted the regime of signs to a different plane, to the plane of immanence. Lines of flight de-territorialized the long
established rules of representation. In the pre-modern era, the signifier was clearly an artificial place-maker for the
signified. With the epistemological-shift of modernity, the representation does not take the place of reality anymore, so
the sacred signifier does not represent the absolute signified any longer. The sacred connection between the divine and
the mortal was broken and the transcendental has landed in the plane of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari
distinguished the paranoid, signifying, despotic regime of signs from passionate or subjective, post-signifying,
authoritarian regime. In the post-signifying regime, “a sign or packet of signs detaches from the irradiating circular
network and sets to work on its own account.”[23] The dispersion of the circular regime refers to the absence of the
transcendental center and the fragmentation of the signified, which used to be located at the core of the system.
During the course of its history, the primary function of Hagia Sophia as a temple has changed, and so did its secondary
functions. Hagia Sophia still denotes sacred meanings, but the transcendental unity of the representation was lost. The
continuous and absolute relationship between the signifier and the signified was dispersed. The temple, as the content
of form, now conveys diverse messages to different receptors. Today, Hagia Sophia indicates several diverse and even
conflicting messages to different segments of the society. For various receptive groups, it may represent the legacy of
the Ottomans, the glory of Byzantine art and architecture, a touristic attraction, or the cultural mosaic of Istanbul. The
two mainstream opposing representations are the “sacred” heritage of secular Kemalist enlightenment and the “sacred”
nostalgia towards the glorious Ottoman past. The case in Turkey exemplifies Wuthnow’s theory of modernization,
according to which the religion’s capacity to influence the public realm weakens but there remain periods of reaction
during which religiously inspired backlash movements appear.[24] The conservative groups, who believe that
European powers aim at converting Hagia Sophia back into a church, hope that eventually the monument will be
converted into a mosque. For this group, the building itself does not represent the sacred anymore; however, it
represents the sacred memory of the Ottoman heritage. With romantic tendencies, the conservative group try to bridge
the inevitable separation between the past and the present. They hope to cure the malady of modernity, the sense of
discontinuity and the feeling of disunity. On the other hand, for the secularist groups, who acclaim the museumification
of the monument, the idea of reopening of Hagia Sophia as a mosque represents an obscurantist thread, a direct
opposition towards Kemalist ideals.
What needs to be addressed here, however, is not what the form actually represents, but the fact that the semiotic chain
was broken into pieces. According to Peter L. Berger, religious symbolic universes and secular symbolic universes may
perform much the same functions and compete with each other for adherents. In the modern society, the sacred and
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non-sacred realities are constructed collectively with symbols, but the very same symbol may be interpreted differently
in a separate context, challenging the transcendental assumptions and norms.[25] As emphasized by Marshall
Berman, in the maelstrom of continuous disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and
anguish, the search for unity is meaningless, because there is only one kind of unity, the unity of disunity.[26] In the
modern world, “everything is pregnant with its contrary,” the signified does not re-impart the signifier, re-produce more of
it, and recharge it anymore; but in a reverse manner, the signifier exposes and explodes the signified and produces
more of it. In other words, a single form might indicate endless number of meanings, diminishing the ultimate power of
representations. The centrality of the signified is thus dispersed in the infinite plane of coding, decoding, and recoding.
In conclusion, with the epistemological shift of modernity, the paradigm of the sacred lost its transcendental authority
due to the lack of unity and coherence of the semiotic regime. There is no more an absolute center within which power
is located and towards which all signifiers point, but power accumulates around several points of concentration. It is not
true that there are no longer as powerful semiotic tools as the ancient times, but on the contrary there is an abundance
of both the signifiers and the signifieds in modern times. It is not the duality but the plurality of the representational
system that comprises the real curse for the sacred.
[1] F. Ankersmit, Historical Representation, Stanford University Press, 2001, pp. 1-25.
[2] G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minesota
Press, 2007, pp. 111-148.
[3] R. Barthes, Göstergebilimsel Serüven, Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2005.
[4] F. Cimok, Hagia Sophia, A Yayınları, 1996.
[5] J. Freely & A. S. Çakmak, Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.
90-128.
[6] M. Belge, stanbul Gezi Rehberi, letiim yayınları, 2007, pp. 31-37.
[7] Freely & Çakmak, op.cit., pp. 90-128.
[8] Cimok, op. cit.
[9] . Kandemir, Ulu Mabed Aya Sofya, stanbul, 2004, p. 40.
[10] Especially after the Latin invasion, the rivalry between Catholic and Orthodox Christian worlds was at its
peak. Byzantians refused the idea of unification of the creeds under the governence of the Pope.
[11] Cimok, op. cit., p. 37.
[12] A. H. Çelebi, Divan
iirinde stanbul, Hece Yayınları, 2002, p. 51.
[13] Freely & Çakmak, op.cit., pp. 90-128.
[14] N. Berkes, Türkiye’de Çadalama, Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2008, pp. 536-540.
[15] S. Özlü Diniz, Turkish Community Based Organizations in Houston: Replicating Home Country Tension.
Unpublished Thesis, University of Houston, 2009, pp. 35-39.
[16] Kandemir, op. cit., p.58.
[17] Ibid. pp. 253-268.
[18] . Pala, “Ayasoya ve iir”, Yamur Dergisi vol:4, 1999 (http://www.yagmurdergisi.com.tr).
[19] Deleuze & Guattari, op.cit., pp. 111-148.
[20] G. Deleuze, Foucault, University of Minesota Press, 1998, pp.47-69.
[21] E.W. Holland, Deleuze ve Guattari’nin Anti-Oedipus’u izoanalize Giri, Otonom Felsefe, 2006.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, lines of flight break the established regimes of signs; in other words,
lines of flight de-territorialize the system of representations and re-territorialize them.
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[22] U. Eco, “Function and Sign: Semiotics of Architecture”, in M. Gottdiener and A. Lagopoulos, eds., The City
and the Sign; an Introduction to Urban Semiotics, Columbia University Press, 1986.
[23] Deleuze & Guattari, op.cit., p.121.
[24] R. Wuthnow, Rediscovering Sacred, Perspectives on Religion in Contemporary Society, Wm. B. Eedmans
Publishing, 1992, p.7.
[25] P. L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of Sociological Theory of Religion, Doubleday, 1967.
[26] M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air The Experience of Modernity, Verso, 1983, p. 15.
10 von 10 19.09.10 18:08

Presence of Absence: Sacred Design Now http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/paper5/body...
Samer Akkach
Greek philosophers proposed a simple idea: that the governing principle of any domain lies always beyond it. This
meant that the governing principle of the visible reality lies beyond its physical confines, which in turn meant that the
order of the senses is one thing, while the order of the mind is quite another. This simple, yet powerful, philosophical
idea proved to be very popular, so popular, indeed, that it has since dominated not only western thinking but also the
thinking of other civilizations that inherited Greek philosophy and system of knowledge. According to this idea, reality is
divided into the realm of the sensible and the realm of the intelligible, with the latter being accorded more significance on
the basis of permanence and immutability. The principle that governs the intelligible reality lies, in the same manner,
beyond its intelligibility: it is the incomprehensible First Principle, the Immovable Mover, that governs the entire universe.
The “sacred,” as we understand it, derives its meanings, workings, and efficacy from these philosophical assumptions
and reasoning, and since the First Principle was identified with a deity in the two major religious traditions which
inherited and operated within the Greek systems of thought, the Judaeo-Christian and the Islamic, the sacred came to
belong in the realm of religion and to be anchored in metaphysics. A range of derivatives and related words, such as
sacrament, sacrifice, sacrosanct, sacrilege, sacrum, describes its usages and conceptual spectrum, pointing to actions
and beliefs concerned primarily with the reverence, service, and sustainment of a transcendental reality – its dictates
and manifestations.[1] In this sense, the sacred is the “presence of absence,” the presence through other reality of what
in itself cannot be present.[2]
The efficacy of the sacred, thus understood, depended on the ontological relationship that binds sensible existents to
their higher intelligible realities. This ontological bond formed the essence of the symbolic power of the sacred, through
which symbolic significance was seen not as an added on or constructed conceptual garnish, but rather as an inherent
quality integral to the very fabric of the material object itself, and inextricably united with it in a manner analogous to the
way in which natural law inhere within physical phenomena or as mathematical principles reside in the very nature of
numerical or geometrical phenomena.[3]
Through this ontological connection material objects are seen to have the capacity of embodying symbolic significance
belonging to a higher order of reality, and through such embodiment to be able to deliver qualities of that higher order.
Accordingly, sacred objects and actions were thus cable of delivering aspects of the sacred itself and of generating the
sense of sacredness in those who are experiencing it. This aspect is still operative today and can be seen in religious
rituals.[4]
Despite the polarity of the mundane and transcendental, and the significance accorded to the latter, the sacred , in
premodern times, was not perceived, experienced, and sustained in contrast or exclusion to the worldly, the secular, or
the profane. At least, this was the case in the Islamic tradition, wherein there were, and still are, no words for the secular
and the profane as contrasting adjectives whereby the sacred can be profiled, defined, and comprehended. The world
was not sharply polarised into the sacred and the profane as has increasingly become in modern times.
With the collapse of traditional theology, anthropology, and cosmology at the end of the pre-modern times, a new
intellectual regime emerged in Europe, which is commonly known as the “Enlightenment.” During the Enlightenment, a
“disenchantment of world” took place, a process whereby the realm of the sacred was redefined and its efficacy was
severely undermined. This occurred through a number of key shifts in the ways reality was perceived, experienced, and
interpreted. Descartes introduced one of these shifts when he considered that the self-conscious mind can, through
internal mental process, alone establish truths and reach certainty. Traditionally, this was a divine prerogative. The other
key shift resulted from the rethinking and eventual abandonment of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic philosophy, cosmology, and
physics. With this, the concept of “power,” which was previously identified with the Immovable Mover, the
incomprehensible source of life and existence that lies outside the confines of the physical world, became immanent in
the physical world and was ultimately identified with nature and the sensible.[5] In other words, the source of power that
runs and organises the world was no longer transcendental; it has become natural.
With these major intellectual shifts, the power of symbolism, the inner force of the sacred, was diminished: the cosmic
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hierarchy was flattened and the ontological relationship upon which the symbol once depended to deliver qualities of the
transcendental without mediation, irrespective of the individual understanding, was transformed into a theoretical
agency whereby truths and efficacy depended on the human self-conscious understanding of it.
Up until the Enlightenment, “design” in general (though it did not yet go by that name), and architectural design in
particular, had access to the sacred through many means, such as religious narratives, myths, dreams, and collective
memories, but most importantly, through geometry and numbers. Geometry and numbers were the expression of the
sacred par excellence, as they were at once the traces and tools of sacred design.[6] Numbers and geometry were
available as mundane tools in everyday life, yet they were also potently loaded with symbolic significance that made
them particularly powerful as objects of philosophical and spiritual reflections. The immediacy of their symbolic
significance meant that the act of designing could never be just about firmitas, commoditas, and venustas, but first and
foremost about an interaction with the cosmological tools and criteria of designing. In this sense, design was, in one
form or another, an engagement with the transcendental dimensions of being.[7]
Within the scientific project of the Enlightenment numbers and geometry were reduced to units of measurement and
became the necessary tools of scientific experimentation. And as human rationality and the scientific truth became at
once the source and measure of dealing with reality, the act of designing became a measurable rational exercise.
During the Enlightenment, design was reduced into an activity determined primarily by questions of function, efficiency,
and aesthetics, and this trend laid the foundations of the modern ways of understanding of design, both as practice and
in education.[8]
Modernity has its roots in the Enlightenment’s intellectual project, and was established upon a fundamental premise:
that reason and faith are incompatible, and, consequently, that scientific reasoning and religious thinking are
irreconcilable. As the world went scientific, social scientists, like Max Weber for example, who equated modernity with
secularity, predicted that as scientific understanding becomes more highly valued than religious belief, the
disenchantment of the world would prevail in modern societies, and that the more a society embraces modern ways of
life the more secular this society becomes. Sacred modernity has thus become fundamentally an oxymoron that can
only make sense in the realm of fiction.
To reconcile the inherent contraction between the sacred and modernity, religious studies scholars , like Rudolf Otto,
established a sharp divide between the rational and the irrational or nonrational, whereby they further alienated the
sacred from the credible realm of modern science by relegating it to the nonrational, the ineffable, the mysterious. This
in turn stripped the sacred from any remaining conceptual rigour and reduced it to “the feeling which remains when the
concept fails.”[9] Thus the sacred became primarily an issue of psychology rather than ontology, as it was for thousands
of years. The sacred and its concomitant opposites, the profane and the secular, became contrasting forces to be
understood and negotiated within one’s own personal space, and not something of cosmological order and communal
magnitude as it used to be. While this fits neatly within modernity’s emphasis on individuality, it is questionable whether
“personal sacred” is anything more than a contradiction, especially given the growing recognition of the sacred as that
which creates community – a community of believers forms around/is formed by that which is held sacred.
Talking about sacred design today leads us to confront the confinement and limitations modernity has imposed upon the
sacred. If we are to maintain the restriction of the sacred to personal space, then sacred design will continue to revolve
within the sphere of personal interpretations and understandings as it has increasingly become over the last hundred
years. If we are to restore to the sacred an aspect of its inherent power, however, a major shift in understanding needs
to take place so that the significance of the sacred can re-emerge in a communal or societal space that extends way
beyond individuality and personal concerns. This is neither simple nor easy, of course. For even with a pressing global
crisis, such as climate change and global warming, and its palpable destructive impact on the planet, there has been no
global unity to re-invest the planet with an inviolable sense of “sacredness” profound enough to inspire nations,
societies, and individuals to believe and to design their futures with such belief and constructed “sacredness” in
mind.
Today, there are many reasons why the sacred needs to be re-empowered through a renewed understanding of its
nature and fresh intellectual investment in its significance. One of these reasons is the vigorous resurgence of the
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religious against all the robust predictions of the prophets of modernity. True, aspects of Western society and ways of
living might have become more secular, however, many other societies around the world have become more religious.
Religious expressions in the public sphere have risen, rather than decreased as predicted, even in the West, reaching
points of serious conflicts in many Western countries. This new sense of religiosity spreading widely, especially in
non-Western societies, is not a revival of pre-modern understandings, as many portray it to be, but rather a whole new
sentiment that is able to forge a new partnership with modern science and its prevailing rationality. Today’s
fundamentalists, for example, work very skilfully and proficiently with modern rationalism, sciences, and technologies,
yet they are able to maintain a strict sense of religiosity and a viable religious space in ways many would consider
contrary to the fundamental premise of modernity.
Sacred modernity, once an oxymoron, is now a reality. Perhaps the sacred and the religious, despite the arduous efforts
of secular modernists, have never really disappeared, nor could ever disappear, for these seem to be an “ineliminable
subjective stratum” tied to, and inherent in, the spiritual dimensions of humanity. So rethinking the sacred now presents
us with the challenge of confronting the religious, the home ground of the sacred, in new ways. Several questions may
define the search for these new ways. Can the sacred be divorced from, or thought of outside, the religious without
losing its efficacy and inviolability and being transformed into something else? Is it possible to re-invest the inviolable
necessity of the symbolic function, the essence of sacred, in a whole new spectrum of things and actions? How can the
unpredictable, mysterious side of the sacred be reconciled with modern scientific rationality? Does today’s re-emerging
religiosity necessarily require a schizophrenic subjectivity in order to accommodate the demands of both the sacred and
the secular? Is there a horizon of thinking today that can give meaning to a contradictory expression, such as “sacred
secularity”? And how can we think of the sacred in a post-modern and post-secular society?
Within the current regime of rationality, Marcel Gauchet asserts that a complete departure from religion is possible, and
that personal experience, as an “ineliminable subjective stratum underlying the religious phenomenon,” can indeed be
freed from fixed dogmatic content.[10] In this liberated context, the sacred can be invoked and engaged in two
intellectual spheres: psychology and morality. In the realm of psychology the sacred can still manifest as an aesthetic
feeling, or as Otto puts it, “the feeling which remains when the concept fails.” Now the concept has failed, all that
remained is the unreducible, ineliminable feeling. This refers to the intrinsic feeling that is anchored in the imaginative,
not the intellective, faculty, as Gaushet explains : “Our capacity for emotion at the sight of things arises from a basic
mode of inscription in being, which connects us with what used to be the meaning of the sacred for thousands of years.
Here we are no longer dealing with our manner of thinking the profound nature of things, but of the way we receive their
appearance, of the imaginary organisation of our grasp of the world—of our imaginative rather than our intellective
faculty.”[11] Here the sacred can be reinvoked in connection with our emotions within the realm of aesthetic appreciation
of art, as well as the realm of spirituality and free spiritual expressions outside the dictates of dogmatic religion. Yet the
question remains as to what moral parameters, if any, guide our aesthetic experiences and underlie the “imaginary
organisation of our grasp of the world”? Who sets such parameters, and for what end? Or should the aesthetic
experience be sought for pure pleasure?
In the realm of morality, the sacred can manifest in the form of inviolable moral code for human actions. But whereas in
the realm of psychology invoking the sacred draws on an intrinsic human nature, feelings and emotions, morality,
considered free of inviolable religious laws, cannot rely on the intrinsic and the imaginative but has to move into the
deliberate and the intellective, wherein the inviolability will have to be constructed collectively. Here the efficacy of the
sacred would hinge on the level of human conviction, belief in, and adherence to, the constructed sacredness. Yet a
sense of sacredness can never be constructed; it can only emerge in a community formed by a shared belief in the
inviolable values of certain things. But in a world wherein the absolute otherness of a transcendental being no longer
enforces and guards the inviolability of things, the question remains as to whether human-centred social orders and
moral codes can ever provide the immaterial power and inner bond required for the re-emergence of the sacred. “When
the gods abandon the world,” Gaushet explains, “when they stop coming to notify us of their otherness to it, the world
itself begins to appear other, to disclose an imaginary depth that becomes the object of a special quest, constraining its
purpose and referring only to itself.”[12] In this horizontal self-referential context, wherein proliferates “obsessive
investigations of the fracturing of everyday life, of internal transcendence of appearances, of the world being expressed
as other to itself,”[13] the inviolable otherness of the sacred will have to be evoked from deep within us rather than from
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without.
Samer Akkach is Director of Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture and Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of
Adelaide. He is working on the religious, socio-urban and intellectual histories of Damascus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
focusing on the life and works of ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi. His recent books include The Correspondence of ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi
(1641-1731) ( Brill 2009), ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi: Islam and the Enlightenment (Oneworld 2007), Cosmology and Architecture in
Premodern Islam: An Architectural Reading of Mystical Ideas (SUNY 2005),
[1] See Philip Sherrard, The Sacred in Life and Art (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1990).
[2] Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Trans. by Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton
University press, 1997), 203.
[3] See Samer Akkach, Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern Islam: an Architectural Reading of Mystical Ideas (Albany: SUNY,
2005), 10-13; and Adrian Snodgrass, The Symbolism of the Stupa (Ithaca: SEAP, 1985), 1-4.
[4] See Paul Tillich, “The Meaning and Justification of Religious Symbols,” in Sidney Hook (ed.), Religious Experience and Truth (New
York: New York University Press, 1961), 3-11; and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (ed.), Mircea Eliade: Symbolism, the Sacred, and the
Art (New York: Crossroad, 1986).
[5] See Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New haven: Yale University Press, 2004),
18-44.
[6] See Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry: Philosophy and Practice (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982).
[7] See Akkach, Cosmology and Architecture.
[8] See Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1983).
th
[9] See Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. By J. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1926, 4 ed.), vii.
[10] Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, 200.
[11] Ibid., 203.
[12] Ibid., 203.
[13] Ibid., 203.
a while, they are no longer aware of them. Nonetheless, if the classical theory is itself a unity, the problems it produces cannot be
understood or solved separately.’
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Sacred Architecture http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/paper1/body...
12 observations
Karsten Harries
1. Well aware of its untimeliness, I want to insist on the continued need for sacred architecture and this indeed in a
twofold sense:
1) The sacred continues to need architecture if it is not to wither;
2) Architecture needs the sacred if it is not to wither.
2. Both claims invite challenge. To turn to the first: in just what sense does the sacred need architecture? Has
modern spirituality with its emphasis on inwardness not left art, and more especially architecture behind? And, to turn to
my second claim: is it not sufficient to create a work that succeeds both in meeting whatever function it is expected to
serve and as an aesthetic object to let us judge it a successful work of architecture? That function may be religious. But
it certainly need not be. Most significant works of architecture have not been religious in nature for over two centuries.
What need does architecture have for the sacred?
3. Our built environment speaks of a culture that has banished the sacred to the periphery of our modern lives. Just
compare the way medieval cities were dominated by churches and cathedrals with the way religious buildings are
usually dwarfed in our cities by other structures. Ever since the Enlightenment church and temple have ceased to be a
leading building task, which does not deny the obvious fact that churches, some of them architecturally significant,
continued and continue to be built. Quite a number of contemporary churches are also significant works of architecture.
It is not difficult to come up with examples. Tadao Ando, Mario Botta, Meinhard von Gerkan, Steve Holl, Juha Leiviskä,
Richard Meier, Peter Zumthor — these are just a few of the names that come to mind.
4. But just what is it that allows us to speak here of “sacred architecture”?

There is a ready answer: if “sacred” is defined, as it often is, as “dedicated to or set apart for the worship of a deity”
there would seem to be no problem. But that definition invites us to look for what makes a certain building sacred – not
to the material object, but the use to which it is put. So understood there would be no very significant relationship
between the sensible qualities of a structure and the sacred. What renders some material object sacred, on this
understanding, is only the religious practice it serves, not the object itself. The simplest shed, serving a few people
assembled around the Lord’s table, is rendered sacred by the activity. When I here speak of “sacred architecture” I am
using “sacred” differently: we call an entity “sacred” when we experience it as an incarnation of spirit in matter that
places and orients us and directs our freedom. We experience a work of architecture as sacred when we experience it
as such an incarnation.
5. But does our modern reality still have room for such incarnations of spirit in matter? What need do we have for the
sacred? What need does this age of the decorated shed have for sacred architecture? But what lets me call our
modern epoch “the age of the decorated shed”? What I have in mind is more than the obvious fact that most of the
important buildings rising today all over the world, many of them designed by the same small number of star architects,
all of whom have developed a truly global practice, invite appreciation as functional buildings meant to succeed also as
aesthetic objects: work of architecture = building + aesthetic addendum. And why call into question that time-honored
understanding? One reason is because aesthetic objects are supposed to be experienced as self-sufficient wholes. As
such they can stand in no essential relationship to their outside. Aesthetic objects, so understood, are essentially
mobile. Thus mobile, they lack the power to place us.
6. But when I describe our age as the age of the decorated shed, I am thinking of something more essential than the
fact that “decorated shed” describes what works of architecture have to become in an age that understands works of
architecture first of all as functional buildings that are to be appreciated also as aesthetic objects. Our modern world, I
would like to suggest, including many of its religious practices, invite understanding in the image of a decorated shed.
Our sense of reality has been shaped by the demand for objectivity that is a presupposition of our science and
technology. It is of course easy to insist that the objectified world-picture of science should not be confused with our
life-world. But the correctness of this observation should not lead us to forget the extent to which our life-world is ever
more decisively being transformed by technology and thus by science. That transformation threatens to split the human
being into object and subject, into human material, available to technological organization just like any other material
and into a subject that has to consider all material, including its own body and psyche as mere material to be shaped or
played with as we see fit and our power permits. To the extent that our modern world has to transform us in the image
of the Cartesian subject, it will make us ever more free, ever less bound to particular places, but that means also ever
more mobile, rootless, and ghostly. Does such a subject still need architecture in the traditional sense? Was one
function of such architecture not to grant a sense of place that we moderns have come to recognize to be at odds with
freedom? And does such a subject still need work that will assign it its place and keep freedom responsible? But
altogether unbound, freedom faces a mute, meaningless world.
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Sacred Architecture http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/paper1/body...
7. Religion and experiences of the sacred have long bound freedom. Although the etymology that ties the word
“religion “ to the Latin “religare,” to bind again, is no longer generally accepted, must a religious person not experience
his or her freedom as bound by and to what is taken to matter unconditionally and most profoundly, bound, we can say,
by what is experienced as sacred? Science can know nothing of such a reality. Any genuine encounter with another
person, on the other hand, binds freedom. In such experiences the sacred possesses a last refuge. Think of falling in
love.
8. What makes life meaningful must be sought outside reality as it can be understood by science. And do not
aesthetic objects furnish us moderns with just such an outside, presenting themselves as being just as they should be?
Aesthetic production so understood presents itself as the decoration of a world rendered mute by our science and
technology, as a dressing up of an ultimately meaningless reality with inherited finery. But is that which is needed not
something very different? Not a covering up or escape from reality, but a window to what transcends our modern world
building — a window to the sacred?
9. But does the sacred today still need art or, more specifically architecture? Anyone familiar with the history of art
and architecture know that art's claim to autonomy and its separation from the sacred did not always characterize it. At
one time they were even indistinguishable. Should we say that the modern period has witnessed the emancipation of
the aesthetic object from what is extrinsic to it? Did art, by breaking the bond that tied it to religion, not purify itself?
What need does art have for the sacred? And art here includes architecture.
10. And religion, too, had reason to welcome that break. Religion may thus be said to have purified itself of art. From
its very beginning Biblical religion is shadowed by iconoclasm. That the marriage of art and Christian faith should have
been an uneasy one from the very beginning is to be expected, given Christianity's emphasis on the spirit, on the one
invisible God, who suffered no other gods. And yet, this God incarnated Himself and thus closed the gap between spirit
and body. Must we understand the Incarnation with Asterius of Amasia as a humiliation? Should we not understand it
rather as a mysterious necessity, demanded by both body and soul, sensuousness and spirit? And if so, should we not
join those who appealed to the Incarnation to defend art, this human incarnation? But modernity has difficulty accepting
the Incarnation, as it has difficulty making sense of talk of incarnations of spirit in matter. Even Christians today tend to
relegate the Incarnation to a past that lies behind us. Christianity has become the religion of the no longer present, the
dead God, the religion of a spiritual and increasingly empty transcendence.
11. Religious experience is open to transcendence. But how should “transcendence” be understood? Just what is
being transcended? Temporal reality? Reason? The dynamism of religious transcendence, especially when one adds
the attribute "infinite," carries with it the danger of a radicalization of transcendence that threatens to so empty it and
therefore also God of all meaning that mysticism and atheism come to coincide. But must transcendence be thought in
opposition to time, to sensuousness? I would question the link of transcendence to both eternity and disembodied spirit.
What I do want to insist on is this: to the extent that spirit is privileged at the expense of sensuousness, it will be
impossible to arrive at a full self-affirmation. The descent of the transcendent into the visible, into the community, is
necessary. Sacred architecture is one site of such a descent. Such descent wrests from space a sacred place. That is
why the sacred continues to need architecture if it is not to wither.
12. I want to underscore the word “place” here. Architecture may be understood as the art of wresting place from
space, thus providing not just the body, but the soul with shelter. Aesthetic objects are incapable of providing such
shelter. That would require a binding back of the aesthetic to the sacred. That is why architecture needs the sacred if it
is not to wither.
Karsten Harries is Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professsor of Philosophy, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy at Yale
University.
He has published widely on the philosophy of architecture over many years.
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Sacred Design III http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/paper3/body...
Tony Fry
Indivisibly, industrialised western people exist, at best, in inoperative communities –marked by the loss of myth and the
sacred (as community). Inoperative co-existence is what they/we share: it is the normative condition of our
instrumentalised/functional individual and collective existence. This encompasses a loss of the communal, commonality
and the common good, along with the coming to dominance of the pursuit of individual interests. Social fragmentation
has been technologically amplified (contrary to the claim of the rise of electronic/virtual communities and network
society).
No matter if it knows it on not, the global population exists in a deepening of ‘the crises’ of the unsustainable.[1] On
the one hand, there are the coming environmental, agricultural, demographic and economic impacts of climate change
plus the globalisation of unsustainable production and consumption of a growing global population. On the other hand,
there is the inability to constitute collective practical responses to these problems and the failure of national and
international politics/political ideologies to transcend interests imbedded in the status quo (including the dominant
anthropocentric and ethnocentric modes of subjectivity and paradigm of territorially based sovereignty). In short, a
massive disjuncture exists between the exponential growth of the problems and the ability to respond to them.
A decade and a half ago, motivated by my understanding of the issues just outlined, I argued for the need to create a
‘new aesthetics of sacred design by which the desiring power of fetishised commodities offers and delivers a ‘cared-for
becoming’.[2] What was being acknowledged was a widespread feeling shared by many people that they were living at
a time when the survival of a great deal of what they valued and depended upon was at risk by what I was later to
name, ‘defuturing’ – human action that negates a viable future.
The realisation of products made ‘sacred by design’ was presented as a means to bond making with ‘a common
sociality of mutual interests.’ What these secular but sacred designed products aimed to do was help constitute and
animate a symbolic domain in which ‘things’ were situated as expressive figures of worldly care which acted, as such,
to serve the formation of a ‘community of care’ that invested ‘care’ as a practice of sustainment (at an individual,
communal and biophysical level).
As is often concluded when reviewing one’s own work, what I wrote on ‘sacred design’ is not what I would write now.
The basic idea originally presented is not being disavowed, but how it was exposited now seems to lack sufficient
contextualisation and persuasive grit. Of course, this view has been coloured by changes in worldly events, encounters
with subsequent publications exploring the sacred and what would hopefully be regarded as the development of my own
thinking.
But rather than the concept of ‘sacred design’ loosing significance over time, current global circumstances suggest that
it is of even greater importance, hence the motivation to revisit, resituate and elaborate it.
Understanding the sacred

What follows now is a revision of some of the original influences upon Sacred Design I and II. This writing was
underscored by the pantheist notion of the sacred that Martin Heidegger embraced via the poetry of Hölderlin. The
mood created by his poetry was viewed as bringing the reader into an attunement with that which is fundamentally
present (physis) and ineffable. This understanding of the sacred rested on seeing the ‘holy being of nature’ as it
enfolded chaos and the abyss, conflict and peace, light and darkness, calm and unease, creation and destruction. Such
a characterisation flowed back into a pre-Socratic notion of physis – the ‘everything that is’, especially as intimated by
Heraclitus.[3] In such a context ‘sacred design’ sustains all that is ‘holy’ (heilig – from the originally meaning ‘whole’),
this before the meaning of the term was captured and colonised by institutional religion.
A secular and more overtly political understanding of ‘the sacred’ was enunciated by Georges Bataille and his
collaborators, then reinforced many years later by Jean-Luc Nancy. Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and others formed
the short lived non-institution, the College of Sociology in 1937. The central conceptual plank of the College was the
idea of a ‘Sacred Sociology’. Drawing on religious studies and other areas of enquiry, the College sought to study
everything that communifies social being. This ‘everything’ is the gathering of all that constituted the dependent unity
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that is humanity realised. This is to say that ‘community’ is the very basis of the sacred. Such an understanding rested
on Goethe’s self-addressed question/answer: ‘what is sacred’ – answered: ‘that which unites souls.’ After a good deal of
investigative work, Bataille, Caillois and the College took this statement and substituted ‘communification’ for the
reference to ‘that which’ unites.[4] At the same time, the relation between the sacred and society was explored by
looking at the relationship between ‘organism’ and ‘being’. What these two terms have in common with the idea of
‘nature as sacred’ is their convergence on the economy of essential exchange in which the biological and social
‘organism’ meets.
As Bataille was at pains to argue: for there to be creation there has to be destruction, discharge, waste, expenditure,
attraction, repulsion, energy – nature simply gives a name to this economy within which ‘life’ is merely one element.
Thus it is not life itself which is sacred but what brings ‘life’ out of and into ‘being’ – which (i) is the biological ‘organism’
(life itself: zo) and (ii) socially, is the communal/community (living as being in common: bios). The ritualisation of life
(organic and social) coming out of death was seen to link ancient and modern ways of enacting ‘the sacred’ and
transcendental being. In this respect, there is a continuity between say, cannibals in the past eating their dead as an act
of homage to ‘cheat’ the fate of decomposition and an act of symbolic transference making the consumed sacred;[5]
and Christians participating in the sacrament of holy communion in order to symbolically ‘consume’ the body of Christ in
order to enable spiritual transfer and sacred unification.
As was recognised in Sacred Design I and II, Jean-Luc Nancy’s theoretical exploration of community connects back to
Heidegger, Bataille and Caillois, constructively taking up and extending their thinking. In so doing Nancy recognised that
‘community’ is a thing in itself – an ‘organic communion with its own essence’.[6]
As Nancy’s critical reading of Bataille makes clear, community is not simply a compound of members functioning within
the strictures of a particular culture but a paradoxical condition of being in which the communitarian exists in an
unreconcilable relation with what constitutes the sovereign subject.[7] ‘Oneself’ is thus not an autonomous individuated
subject, but rather an intersection of communication between plural subjects and objects, being and beings, organism
and world. Essentially, the construction of the idea of both individualism and community (as that other than ‘me’ that I
can become a constituent member of) is an illusion. Complicit with this illusion is anthropocentrism’s masking of the
interconnection between ‘the human animal’ and animal/biological life in general. What the common experience of
community reveals to ‘me’ as it presents to me ‘my birth and death, is my existence outside myself’ and my being within
a ‘community of finite beings.’[8] Thus every community is finite, which is why Nancy can assert ‘death is indissociable
from community.’[9]
In the ‘modern world’ the ‘dissolution, dislocation and conflagration’ of community needs to be seen as much a site and
mark of unsustainability as is damage to the planet’s climate system and to its vital ecological systems (all resulting in
significant part from the pursuit of short term economic ‘gains’).[10] ‘Yet just as we must not think that community is
“lost” ... just as it would be foolish ... to advocate its return as a remedy for the evils of our society.’[11]
In the demise of the sacred community, that sharing which is community has taken its place and has to become ‘the
sacred.’ As such it has to prefigure all human activities if the value of ‘being human’ is to advance beyond ‘its’ inhuman
propensity. However, the restoration of community is not possible by turning it into an instrumental task, rather it has to
be embraced as ‘a gift to be renewed and communicated’.[12] Central to this renewal is the revitalisation of myth[13]
(that which is believed to be truth – thus myth infuses most of what is taken to be truth, it is truth’s provisionality upon
which we act – as opposed to being the other of truth). Thus, ‘myth tends to become truth itself’.[14] Myth is essential
for community; there can be ‘no community outside of myth’.[15]
The myth in question in the advocation of ‘sacred design’ is expressed as ‘the community of care’. That is: community
as the agency that communally brings the common good into being and cares for it as it cares for ‘us’ – the
inclusiveness of ‘us’ is the human and the non-human (‘us’ is life). For community to be sacred it cannot simply be
designated and perceived anthropocentrically. True care for ‘us’ cannot just be care for things human.
Current understandings
What is understood now as the scope of ‘sacred design’ is not dramatically different from those that shaped the initial
approach to the idea, although there are two major changes in global circumstances that powerfully reframe the
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significance of what I originally argued in the mid 1990s.
The first event is a protracted one: the widespread recognition of global warming. This phenomenon has arrived on the
world’s stage as probably the most catastrophic environmental problem since the start of human settlement – ten
thousand years ago. The changes it is triggering are recognised to be ever accelerating. Increased temperatures, once
touted not many years ago as the harbingers of possible distant dangers, are now regarded as increasingly likely and
are expected to be at the higher end of the 1.4ºC to 7ºC range.
More heat, extended droughts, rising sea levels, extreme weather events and other climate impacts will have dire
consequences especially for many of the world’s poorest nations. Potentially there will be hundreds of millions of
‘environmental refugees’ by the end of the century, which will trigger large population redistributions. In turn, this will
increase the risks of conflict.
Event two is also protracted but was made globally visible by what occurred in New York on September 11, 2001. The
destruction of the World Trade Centre was the iconic event that brought the ‘war on terror’ into popular consciousness
and directly influenced the commencement of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The significance of this overall event cannot
be measured simply by statistics like total fatalities, which have been dominantly of huge numbers of civilian
non-combatants. The greater significance is the resultant reconfiguration of the world order – seen as ‘the west’
(especially the USA) lining up against ‘the rest’ (in particular a large percentage of the global Muslim population). So
while the media focus has been on the conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia, the implications will be felt
world-wide and extend out into the future politically and economically (this not least because a major sub-text of the
scenario is the US acting to secure its access to oil).
Overarching both these events is the imperative to adapt climatically, socially, geo-politically and culturally. And here,
cultural change is as crucial as scientific and technological action. Adaptation has been the key to the survival of Homo
sapiens over its 160,000 years of species existence. In a world continually being made more unsustainable, adaptation
will be the absolute key to humanity’s future.
No matter the dreams and claims of the proponents of ‘sustainable technologies’, ‘green architecture,’ ‘sustainable
consumption’ – such developments in no way match the expansion of the unsustainable. Sadly, much taking place
under the rubric of ‘sustainability’ sustains the unsustainable. For instance, a corporation can now claim a degree of
market advantage by having invested in the design and construction of a ‘green’ headquarters building, but the true
measure of the corporation ‘green performance’ is the sum of the impacts of all its products.
None of this is not to say ‘sustainability’ actions are not worth doing, but they have to actually deliver sustain-ability, and
this means going beyond the notion of economic growth perpetually resting on depleting natural resources. Likewise,
and on so many levels, humanity, especially industrialised humanity, seem completely incapable of effectively
confronting global inequity, and even more fundamentally questioning (its) finitude.
As far as I am concerned, the partial mainstreaming of the idea of ‘sustainability’ (and its accompanying evacuation and
overloading with plural meanings) prompts the need for disassociation and the creation of linguistic differentiation. So
rather than discussing sustainability, I prefer, as indicated above, the more apt and self-defining term ‘sustain-ability’,
which in turn is placed in a subordinate relation to the general temporal category of ‘sustainment’ – which names both a
process and its moment.
On the issue of ‘the sacred’: my current thinking has been sharpened by the disruption of the simple and prevalent
sacred/profane binary. Additionally there is also the renewed interest in the sacred sparked by the appearance of
Georgio Agamben’s book Homo Sacer[16] first published in Italy in 1995 and then in translation in the USA in 1998.
However, the way he defined the sacred has been viewed as controversial.
Agamben’s concern with the sacred centred on the specificity of ‘the sacred man’, which draws heavily on the laws of
the early period of the Roman Empire, wherein a man judged to have committed a crime against the legal or social
order was cast outside the society/culture/community.[17] As such ‘he’ was no longer deemed to be of the same order
of humanity (or even human) but made into a non-human who could be sacrificed without the person who kills him being
punished.[18]
Although Agamben discusses the various interpretations that modern scholars make of this contradictory designation of
the sacred, and status of the sacred man, he does not position this in a relation to how the sacred has been understood
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philosophically, theologically and anthropologically within and outside western thought. This leaves him open to the
criticism that he simply selected material to fit his argument.
Agamben’s view of the sacred was informed by a theo-anthropological position that presented two fundamentally
different positions: the first resting on religious laws (prior to their division from penal laws) and the second on of ‘an
archetypical figure of the sacred that rests with an ethnological notion of taboo. [19] However, what is of interest to us
here is the process of objectification – the turning of ‘man’ into a sacred object.
Hereafter, the transmogrification of the profane into the sacred object acts to reify belief and ritual (in contrast to the way
Christian theology anthropomorphises objects – the wafer as the body of Christ). Such a notion of the sacred is not
unfamiliar anthropologically, but does it help us understand how and why other forms of the sacred that can animate
community are needed? Certainly, the question of the ambiguity of sacrifice as moral capital gained from giving up begs
to be considered in this context. It does not take a great deal of imagination to conclude ‘we’ are not going to get to the
future without sacrifice. The implication is that for the sacred to be created, sacrifice has to be a communal ritual.
The West has a long history of exclusion of the Muslim as other. This has been re-infused by a new ‘spirit’ post 9/11.
Ironically, especially when one recalls Nancy’s argument, Islamic theology holds the ‘umma’ – the ‘single community’
governed by the sacred law of shará – as a still significant basis of community in a fractured culture.
More generally the power of mythology can be seen in Muslim and other non-western religions as a means to hold
sacred places and objects out of the path of the onward march of commodification. While this is an obvious observation,
it still begs to be taken more seriously in support of the design of sacred things.
Recasting the relation between the sacred and design

Sacred things arrive by ritual, including sacrifice. They are those things that sustain the sacred. They act to be the focal
objects of belief around which community gathers and constitutes its commonality.
The challenge of the present is that this characterisation of the function of the sacred is insufficient to grasp and sustain
the interconnectedness of ‘our’ ‘being-in-being’ – our lodgement in that greater nature of physis (all that is and thus all
that life depends upon). Moreover, to deal with the problems of futuring ‘life on earth’ as we know it there can be no
appeal (as Darwin and post Darwinism has shown) to a transcendental agent (God(s)). We are the only the animal able
to define (if not solve) a problem, and whatever the problems of sustainment we face there is nobody and no thing to
solve them but us. Abstractly, the process is not hard to name: we have to be able to rigorously define the problems;
analyse them relationally (rather by linear rationality); and then design solutions (be they directed at forms of erasure,
organisation, education, artefacts, or structures). These solutions can never be purely instrumental (which is what we
dominantly are disposed to strive to do). They have to be socio-symbolic. They have to be reified in things that act with
care no matter the values of users. They have to be implicated in, and assisted by, the sacred.
The sacred (to be ‘the sacred’) thus cannot be reduced to a binary moral order of: sacred and profane; good and evil,
sustainment and the unsustainable. Dialectically, the one cannot be without the other. Ethics is therefore a holding in
abeyance. It is an action that strives to reach for a future while resisting all that negates futures (the unsustainable in
dominance in the present).
The task before us is extensive. It will require the efforts of many and, notwithstanding the urgency of the plight of
humanity, it will take time.
Futuring is a mythology that demands a new order of imagination – in so far as it cannot be grounded in that which is to
hand, it ever remains mytho-logical. The issue of sacrifice is even more demanding to confront.
The investment of effort in design action is what situates action. In order to begin to contemplate the creation of things of
care (be they material or immaterial) a futuring mythology has to be present, as does a highly developed conceptual and
practical understanding of sacrifice remade. It is as if a higher order of things have to be created that, unlike the sacred
objects of religious ritual that require to be gathered in a sacred place, exist and act in spaces of ‘the profane’.
In some ways sustainment exists in a nascent condition of recognition. It is that value which we can all, no matter our
differences, share. It is a foundation of a common good. Given a particularity by design, it has the potential to be the
embodiment of that higher order of thing that is sacred, around which a commonality of belief can accumulate and be
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held. For this to happen, the capability to care has to be made explicit in terms of what care, at this fundamental level, is
and does. This means coming to see care as the structural feature that guides what sustains us in every dimension of
our being. It is an implicit rather than explicit quality of the animated nature of things. We already have things that, as
such, care – but they are overwhelmed by things that don’t (here is the difference between healthy and unhealthy food;
technologies that do not damage the environment versus those that do; shoes that protect our feet in contrast to shoes
that damage them, and so on). Plus the ethic of care is restricted – it is not directive of, the creation, design function,
ongoing designing and post-initial life of the ‘thing-itself’.
They may be objects/material assemblages that act or a social-political entity as Bruno Latour would have it, or services.
What counts is not what they are but what they do – their (as Heidegger called it) ‘thinging’ as it embodies and
materialises that ethics which is sustainment, which is the ‘commonality in difference’ acting toward ‘care’ that we all can
share.
We cannot get to designed things of care without sacrifice – deemed here as no mere instrumental task. The act of
sacrifice so framed means a practice of encoding, of the objectification, which can be offered up to ‘community’ to
endow a sacred object with the power to attract belief. It also means a public giving way, a giving over. This is to say it
has to be broken free from individual acts of ‘giving up’, especially to gain moral merit points (a de facto masking of
spiritual self interest often done in the name of another). To grasp sacrifice we have to go back in time, across cultures
and into a cultural space where it can be remade. Loss and pain will be not only be unavoidable but essential in the
creative act of endowment.
As said, ethics is therefore a holding in abeyance. Its measure is care as futuring enacted. The giving of care to things
cannot come from the head alone. It is also a matter of touch and a manner of holding.
Holding implies the hand, and the hand figured strongly in Sacred Design I and II. It was argued that the hand was a
‘locus of knowing’ and that it ‘acts before (and after) the anthropocentric impetus. Along with the ability to design
(prefigure) ‘it is cast, with language, as that which distinguishes ‘man’ from (other) animals.’[20] We human beings
have no future unless we in all our difference can touch, make and hold that which sustains. The future is literally in our
hands. To understand this is to realise that sustain-ability is a craft we have to learn in order to design and make sacred
things. I tried to say this before, I have tried again, but no matter how hard I try, comprehension rests not with my words
but the reader’s disposition to embrace the sentiment and turn it toward action.
Re-reading one’s own writing, in my experience, is not a pleasant experience. One is only too aware of the weaknesses
that others will have discerned. Yet certainly for me what makes the effort worthwhile is to discover that a certain
understanding has been evidently learnt. Fatalistically, this means that all one ever does is to go on saying the same
thing over and over again, be it in different ways and hopefully to different people.
So said, what I am saying is: sustainment has myriad faces, and sustain-ability has an incalculable number of ways to
bring these faces before ‘us’ (us here being the proto-community of care). This cannot happen without design (nor
without those who deem themselves ‘designers’ and member of the ‘change community’ that itself is but one element of
the ‘community of care’). Such design is sacred – but sacred understood futurally and ethically (rather than historically
and religiously).
Sustainment is an unending task, and will ever more be so. All that can be claimed is that the first steps along an
unending road have begun.[21]
Tony Fry is Professor of Design for the Design Futures Program at Griffith University, Queensland College of Art. His latest book s are Design
Futuring (Berg 2009) and Design as Politics (Berg forthcoming, 2010).
[1]Which is fundamentally a crisis of inaction in the face of the agents and objects of defuturing – see Tony Fry A New Design
Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999.
[2] Tony Fry ‘Sacred Design II’ in Remakings: Ecology Design Philosophy Sydney: Envirobook, 1994, 113-40. ‘Sacred Design I’
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appeared in Discovering Design Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan (eds) Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995.
[3] For a full account see Michel Harr The Song of the Earth (trans. Reginald Lilly) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, 52-56.
[4] Georges Bataille and Roger Cailois ‘Sacred Sociology and the Relationships between “Society,” ‘Organism,” and Being’ (November
20, 1937) in Denis Hollier (ed.) The College of Sociology 1937-39 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 74.
[5] Jean Baudrillard Symbolic Exchange and Death (trans. Iain Hamilton Grant) London: Sage Publications, 1993, 137-39.
[6] Jean-Luc Nancy The Inoperative Community (trans. Peter Connor et al) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, 9.
[7] Ibid 23.

[8] Ibid 26.
[9] Ibid 14.
[10] Ibid 1.
[11] Ibid 34-35.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid 42.
[14] Ibid 53.
[15] Ibid 13.
[16] Georgio Agamben Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen) Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998.
[17] Ibid 71-74.

[18] Ibid 79. A particular instance of the practice of exclusion from bios that has grown in poignancy is that of the ‘muselmann’.
Characterised as the most diminished level of humanity in Auschwitz, the ‘muselmann’ was the human being stripped of everything but
the last vestiges of their biological life. They were the dehumanised walking dead robbed of death in that all that they recognisably were
was already dead. The ‘muselmann’ figures, but abstracted, in Agamben’s writing as an instance of ‘biopower’. What does not get
elaborated in his argument is that for camp inmates ‘muselmann’ meant Muslim – as the name of the lowest of ‘human’ life. This
designation of the ‘muselmann’ by Jews still echoes. See Gil Anidjar interviewed by Nermeen Shaikh, ‘The Muselmann in Auschwitz’
Asia Source Interview, 15 May 2006.
[19] Ibid 72-73.

[20] Fry Remakings 131-32.
[21] Tony Fry Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice Oxford: Berg, 2009.
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Design Phi Lo Sophie Papers - Sacred

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Challenge of System Change: Sydney's sewers http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/paper4/body...

Could the sacred be, whatever its variants, a two-sided formation?

Reflection 1 - negotiating religion

Reflection 2 – secular renunciation

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Reflection 3 – constructing the sacred

The Sacred in four parts

1. The sacred is defined through oppositions

2. The sacred is about siting

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3. Anything can be sacred

4. The sacred connects to an overarching scheme

1. The sacred is defined through oppositions

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2. The sacred is about siting

The spaces in a house are organized according to principles of inclusion-exclusion, outer-inner, or as a

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3. Anything can be sacred

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4. The sacred connects to an overarching scheme

The sacred in products, systems and campaigns

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Ah\al\ane^(Ngbo^klbmr Design  Academy  Eindhoven

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Sacred Design Now

This is what we invited people to consider in the call for papers:

Is nothing sacred anymore?

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The Sacred: A Question of Representation

Figure 1. Regimes of signs (from Deleuze & Guattari, 2007)

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Figure 2. Exterior view of Hagia Sophia (Source: Author)

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Melek görmei dilersen yürü var hatır-ı adi

Mekanı Cennetü'l-Me'va veya Firdevs-i sanidir

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Figure 4. Interior view of Hagia Sophia (Source: Author).

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The Sacred in a Plurality of Representational Systems

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4. But just what is it that allows us to speak here of “sacred architecture”?

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Understanding the sacred

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significance of what I originally argued in the mid 1990s.

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Recasting the relation between the sacred and design

Ah\al\ane^(Ngbo^klbmr Design Academy Eindhoven

L^f^lm^kikhc^dm ;Z\a^ehkZk[^bm =biehfZk[^bm FZlm^kZk[^bm

Melek görmei dilersen yürü var hatır-ı adi