Rethinking Spirituality in Architecture: A Diagrammatic Reading Proposal

This study investigates how the relationship between architectural space and human spirituality can be rethought under contemporary conditions. Rather than approaching spirituality as a timeless and fixed essence, the study conceptualizes it as an experiential field that is repeatedly reconfigured through changing ways of understanding the world across historical periods. From this perspective, the relationship between spirituality and space is also understood as historically transformed rather than stable or universal. In contrast to pre-given centers or transcendent reference points, contemporary spirituality is assumed to emerge through fragmented yet continuous experiences. Accordingly, spirituality is not reduced to an inner or purely subjective domain, but is theorized as a multi-layered process constituted through the interaction of spatial, temporal, bodily-relational, and cognitive-imaginal dimensions. These dimensions often operate together through tensions and thresholds. Within this framework, architecture is approached not merely as a structure in which spirituality is represented, but as a dynamic milieu in which spiritual intensities are produced, suspended, and redirected. To render this relationship traceable and comparable, the study proposes a diagram-based analytical framework. By bringing together Rosalind Krauss’s concept of the relational field and Joseph Campbell’s model of the mythic cycle, the study examines how spatial meaning and spirituality gain continuity through both structural relations and cyclical movements. The aim of the study is to offer a reusable and comparative mode of architectural reading that avoids reducing spirituality to singular or subjective interpretations, and instead provides an explicit, diagrammatic framework for rethinking the relationship between architecture and spirituality.