A unique space for different religions?

Architecture makes room to life; it hosts the gestures of a single human being or of a group and translates them in material forms, made of space, margins, and equipment. Architecture’s hosting ability is clarified and tested in its limits, by its physical features. This ability is stressed in contemporary society, made of moving communities, gathered more around a shared need (study, work, research of wellness conditions) than around a rooted tradition. In them identity-making features, like the beliefs on divine and universal, can be forced to coexist. Men’s relationship with transcendent is structured on successive levels: the meditation, silent and private, the prayer, also in small groups, and the rite, collective and organized. If the first is independent from credo, and sharable in quiet rooms, the two following are much more identity related, and they are absolutely difficult to be placed side-by-side. Traditional communities have specific places and modes for all these levels, contrary to newly built communities, looking for new spaces, able not to divide different credo, but to relate them maintaining their differences. Detailed design, the closer to the gestures of dwellers, clarifies the call of this spaces, in the attention paid to materials and finishing, demonstration of their dignity, in the design of equipment, able to suggest with small variations mutual superimpositions or divisions, in the relationship with light, hidden, or direct, but always sign of divine, in the presence of the work of art, often abstract or defined by the light, natural, or artificial, and by the openings on the outer, surrounding world. A long-lasting work of research, on case studies and their theoretical basis, and a design experimentation, carried on during Architecture of Interiors Studios in Politecnico di Milano, explore the possible coexistences, through the material forms of architecture.