Architecture - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: How Religion Impacts Architecture

his article explores issues of gender and modern architecture in Mandatory Palestine in the context of 1920s and 1930s modernism. Women architects, newly immigrated from Germany, collaborated with WIZO, Women's International Zionist Organisation, in building Domestic Science and Agriculture training schools for Jewish immigrant women in the country. WIZO adopted the concept of the modern domestic sphere, particularly the rational kitchen, believing that a modern and efficient household will benefit women and society as a whole. Thus, their planned schools were to be modern both in appearance and in their built-up space: rational, airy and full of light. The women architects who studied and worked in Germany prior to their immigration, emphasised these modernist concepts in their design. These early ambitious architectural achievements by women for women were unique in the context of modernism and helped structure the national identity of the ‘New re-formed domestic woman’ in Mandatory Palestine.

Practicing Muslims pray five times a day during specified periods. Hence, public buildings in many Muslim-majority countries tend to have prayer facilities. These facilities are typically gender-segregated. Unfortunately, for a long time, the main focus for the design of these facilities has been on the male facilities. As a result, many female users suffer from using facilities that are not safe, hygienic or comfortable. Part of the reason is the lack of guidelines that help designers provide a facility that satisfies the needs of female users. This paper aims to address this problem with a focus on prayer facilities that are in public buildings and not in mosques.

Design/meth

Hindu temple construction has become common in suburban areas of the United States, following a steady wave of immigration from India. Immigrants hope to pass along traditional beliefs and cultural practices to a generation rapidly approaching adulthood. Small but committed groups have raised millions of dollars to build over 200 temples in the 1980s and 1990s. Temple builders face the usual land use concerns of any rezoning request, such as providing parking or shielding neighbors from externalities such as light and noise. Some proposals have met resistance from the established community based on misunderstandings and fears about Hindu practices and beliefs. Such resistance has slowed but not stopped the diffusion of Hindu temples across the United States.

As elements of culture and also as social-cultural phenomena, religion and denomination are the sources of creating change, difference and contrast in various places. Although indifference has been practically the approach adopted toward religion and its belongings in the contemporary world and today's human life, the religious and Islamic discussions have been among the important issues drawing a lot of attentions from the contemporaries in the theoretical arena. Islam has paid a particular attention to the house as the place of living and calmness for the human beings and believes in certain conditions for it. The theoretical foundations of Islamic mindset are neglected in today's houses so they are in need of revitalization in their designs and redesigning based on the original Islamic patterns. Nowadays, spatial meaningfulness is among the most important solutions of granting quality to the architectural spaces, especially residential spaces, and the designers and architects are making efforts in the area of paying attention to such concepts as calmness that can subsequently lead to the psychological health. The environmental designers and planners have paid attention to the quality of spaces and the role of perceptional indicators in forming the various spaces with the development of the human communities and appearance of meanings' gaps in the constructed spaces. These are the spaces that induce a sense of tranquility and pleasure followed by a sense of attachment and identity to the audience mind and revive the feelings of being present and existent in them. In this article, the effect of the Islamic teachings on the architectural spaces and places as theoretical bases has been investigated in various areas. The current article has been conducted with the objective of investigating the Islamic architectural pattern related to the housing in the Holy Quran's ĀYĀT and the possibility of using it as an Islamic pattern as a result of doing research and exploration in the Holy Quran, Nemooneh Interpretation and relevant articles and books. The achievement of the Islamic pattern and methods for semantic qualification and their application to a place and creating of an environmental calmness followed by psychological health based on the Islamic teachings in the residential spaces are among the findings underlined by the present research paper.

The "Sinicization of religion" that is being implemented in China since 2016 has not only adversely affected the practice of Islam by Hui Muslims but it has also impacted upon the architecture and decoration of mosques where Hui communities live. This article argues that the politics of Sinicizing religious spaces is inherently problematic; it involves issues of what exactly constitutes "Sinicization", and assumptions behind the choices that Muslims make regarding mosque architecture and decoration. To illustrate the intricacies of the matter, this article compares two large mosques in Beijing. The Niujie mosque is an example of an old and traditional "Chinese" Muslim place of worship, and as such, may be classified as "Sinicized", and approved of by the Chinese state. In contrast, the large, modern Doudian mosque, with its "Arab" style tall minarets and bulbous domes might be considered alien to Chinese tastes, however, such suppositions gloss over its hybrid architectural and decorative features and the multiple reasons for choices made in its design.

The construction of new, purpose‐built mosques in Europe often stirs a number of controversies. This paper looks at one such project: a new mosque building in Almere, a town near Amsterdam. It focuses on two kinds of controversies: discussions between various kinds of mosque committee members about aesthetic preferences and how they relate to members’ views about Islam in Europe, and neighborhood protests against the new mosque. Although the latter kind of conflicts have attracted some scholarly attention, most of this work treats these conflicts as discursive controversies and gives little attention to the material form. On the other hand, there is a new kind of literature on creativity and architectural design that emphasizes material processes but fails to analyze how these processes are related to larger political issues. By focusing on the temporal aspects of material processes, particularly the attention to form, I seek to merge these two approaches in order to analyze the mosque controversies as at once material and political.

Building a distinctive Buddhist architectural style temple in the United States is a transnational project. It involves not only transmigrants, but Buddhist monks within and outside the United States, as well as local people of different cultural, religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds.
Drawing from my fieldwork conducted among middle-class Thai transmigrants at a Thai temple I call Wat Thai of Silicon Valley,6 I will explore the following questions: how do U.S. building codes and Thai Theravada Buddhist regulations shape the process of building a chapel? How do the Thai transmigrants simultaneously negotiate two different kinds of regulations informed by different cultural logics with regard to space? These questions have led me to focus on two aspects of place-making. The first involves local and federal regulations: how building codes constrained construction of the chapel, and what strategies the temple employed to negotiate these constraints to ensure that permission to build would be granted by city authorities. The second involves Theravada Buddhist regulations: how Buddhist beliefs shaped the chapel space, and how the temple members disrupted some “traditional” Thai practices and created distinctive space by embracing cultural symbols of both Thailand and California.