Ritual House

Salat Ritual House

Beginning

Example Ritual Steps 1-2

When we first started working on the Ritual House, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. This was one of our first projects after 2 years of conceptional foundation courses. It’s supposed to be a sacred place of worship. I had no clue how to make architecture out of ritual steps. Thankfully, we had Bernard Tschumi help us guide our process. We were given a ritual from a religion. I was assigned the ritual of the Islamic Prayer called Salat. Our goal was to examine each crucial step that guided the prayer. Thus the ritual starts with a person entering the mosque. Afterwards they would take their shoes off, place their shoes in a shoe rack, and step-by-step until the prayer process was finished. I had 14 full steps in this process.

Experiments

This, however, didn’t make the confusion of making an actual ritual house any easier. I was perplexed by how we would create space from a bunch of small drawings that laid out each of the steps from the prayer. The drawings mainly represented a conceptual space of each prayer action and the action taking place itself. It was a difficult process because a bunch of prayer steps could happen in the same place. So the configuration of the hypothetical space didn’t really have much variety. As a result, we had to play around with each space to accommodate more hypotheticals like change in wall heights.

In the end of this process, I managed to sketch out a detailed drawing of all the 14 steps with accommodating spaces. The next step for the process was even more difficult. We had to translate the space we created and input it into the computer. This was then exported into rhino, each of the 14 spaces having their own individual layer. I managed to lay out the 14 spaces accordingly to how they would actually happen inside the prayer house. This was trial and error because everything that we did in this process was based on our own perception of how the ritual works in space. This allowed for a very interesting combination of spaces to mesh together to create the architecture. In the end the process was successful because each of us were able to get an interesting ritual house based on our own idea of what the ritual entails.

Afterwards, we had to create volume from each of the sectional space layers. This allowed for the actual translation of the 2-d drawings into 3d volumes. It was a demonstration of what is possible process by process. Afterwards, we did actually start making real plans, sections, and elevations. There was a lot of discussion regarding circulation, ease of access, room placement, and the overall impact the space has on it’s surroundings. When I created the model of the ritual house, everything that I did up until now definitely seemed worth it at the time. 

Review

Salat Ritual House

The review was when I realized the potential and the flaw of my design. Architecture reviews are the most helpful parts of the design course. The critiques may be shocking in the beginning but once you analyze it, the possibility that comes with the critiques open up a whole new world. But that’s only if you don’t take the critiques personally. My critique ended up, traditionally, with me being proud of what I accomplished but wishing I did more to improve the overall complexity of the project. The downside to Tschumi’s process is the argument that the project only focused on a specific process. The space itself was confined to the rules of the volumes. Obviously, you can play around with the volumes as much as you like, however, the output is a reflection of the process and not a total brand new creation. At least that’s how I felt with the limited time that I had during that semester.