Religion as conceptual scaffolding for architecture

Abstract

Religion and Architecture have a long and intimately intertwined relationship in virtually all cultural histories. Through a wide-ranging discussion centring on India and its global diaspora, this chapter considers some of the many ways in which religion continues to be invested in architecture in the world today, and vice versa, broadening and deepening understanding of how religion is literally ‘placed’ in contemporary life. Architecture, we conclude, sustains at least a part of the project that religion pursued more dominantly and directly, with the aid of architecture, in other times; it constructs and articulates space, both physical and social, as a medium in which individuals and collectives may engage and cohere, and through which the self and its relationship to greater wholes or entities may be defined and realised.