Sacred Spaces and Poly Perspectives

An Experiential Journey through a Sacred Site

Mbuso Mancotywa

BArch Hons 2021

Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Claudia Morgado
Unit Tutor: Ruby Mungoshi
Unit Assistant: Azraa Gabru

UNIT 13^︎︎︎
Second Nature | Shared Futures

What would happen if the monastery, workshop community and animals had to share spaces on the site of the Mariannhill Catholic Church site? My research this year has explored this question from varying approaches. The journey started in the Analogue studio gaining influence from the common room and landscape project which looked at different users and shared common space. From this work I looked at the ecology of different users on my site and began a series of speculations on shared spaces. Doing a site plan highlighted different behavioural thresholds that existed on my site which introduced different moments of etiquette shifts. These lead to a series of design tests aimed at blurring the potency of the thresholds. The tests involved an exploration of designs that gave equal weighting on the visible as the non-visible qualities of the experiential journey of arriving on the site. The series of tests looked at whether non-visible characteristics are an essential element of sacred sites or if they are merely visual.

Keywords:
Sacred, Poly-Perspective, Plural-sacred, Behavioural Threshold, Multi-sensory

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