Designing Interreligious Encounters: Space, Materiality, and Media in Berlin’s House of One

Abstract

Drawing on an analysis of the multi-religious architectural project called “House of One” in Berlin, this article explores the spatial dynamics surrounding multi-religious places by design. My central questions are: How are liberal notions of tolerance, religious sharing, and diversity addressed and translated in the medium of architecture? And what are the spatial dynamics that facilitate the formation of urban, national, and transnational publics in which understandings of shared sacred space are negotiated? I suggest that emblematic architectural projects such as the House of One acquire their material shape and political meanings not only through design practices but also through media-driven processes of communicative construction and the ways in which affect dispersed audiences by animating their fantasies of peaceful coexistence. Inspired by theories of iconicity, research on urban religion and studies of interreligious dialogue, I explore the narratives and material practices that turn the House of One into a new urban emblem. I argue that as a socio-material energy that is fundamentally relational, iconic force emerges from the ways people attach their vision of interreligious peace to buildings such as the House of One, begin to see them actualized through the building itself, and develop affective ties to it.