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Sacred Space Research Paper

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What is sacred space?
Upon hearing the words “sacred” and “space” together, you may be inclined to think of a place of sanctity; spiritual spaces that invite prayer, worshipping of the divinities or a place built for peace and harmonious gatherings. Why were these spaces created? In the past, human beings believed that sacred spaces were an imperative method to reaching out to their divine gods and religions, as a link between mortal and god. These spaces have some relation Heidegger's concept of the four-fold: the idea of creating and implementing spaces that link to the earth, sky, mortals and divinities. He believed that this “bridge is a thing of this sort. The location allows the simple onefold of earth and sky, of divinities and mortals, …show more content…

Of course, with different cultures and religions in different countries, many sacred spaces have varying visual forms and purposes; a circle of freestanding stones may not look similar to the Lotus Temple in India, but they may share some form of spiritual tranquility. The Pantheon, however, is a building that has no clear purpose as a sacred space, although it is rumored to have been a temple due to the style of the decorations. One thing for certain was the fact that it had been built in order to have some link to the divinities and the sky, hence Pantheon meaning “honor all gods” in Greek. The dome of the Pantheon had been built with near perfect hemispherical geometry, something that human beings consider divine-tier and something that they strive for when creating sacred space: the perfect geometry. Rudolf Wittkower argues that “natural creations, such as the proportions and symmetry of the human frame, the relationships between planets or the intervals of musical harmony, seemed to follow geometric ratios, and that if the products of architecture were to possess the same conceptual integrity they too should be designed using perfect figures, symmetry and harmonic mathematical proportions” (2009,

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