Sacred spaces have always embodied the spiritual and cultural consciousness of their time. From ancient temples to modern sanctuaries, they represent the highest convergence of art, architecture, ritual, and engineering — physical expressions of how a society understands itself, the cosmos, and the divine.
In modern Western cultures, this lineage has fractured. As religion has receded as the primary container for spiritual experience, and science has distanced itself from metaphysical inquiry, many live in a tension between secular life and spiritual longing — often without a shared language or space to explore it.
And yet, the human impulse for connection — to self, to others, to something greater — remains. People gather in forests, at festivals, in clubs, on pilgrimages of sound, silence, and shared perception. We are re-learning what many indigenous cultures have always known: that presence itself can be sacred. That ritual, if rooted in intention and shared meaning, can arise anywhere.
New Typologies explores how architecture can respond to this shift — not by replicating religious forms, but by developing new ones. It is a design-research project mapping and imagining the spatial languages of a culture in transformation.
Project Overview
Throughout history, sacred architecture has evolved with our collective worldview. Today, as traditional frameworks dissolve, we face a paradox: the need for spaces of reflection, reverence, and resonance is greater than ever — and yet we lack forms to hold them.
This project maps and develops new spatial typologies that serve contemporary needs: not as replacements for religion, but as responses to the emotional, social, and perceptual voids many experience in secular life. We're especially interested in spaces that facilitate depth and stillness without dogma — spaces that feel meaningful, even if they aren't named as such.
Some of these inquiries are deeply informed by our ongoing Sacredness Mapping Project, which documents how people today — across cultures and beyond formal religion — experience the sacred in their everyday environments.
Areas of Inquiry
This project doesn’t begin with typologies. It begins with perception.
We’re interested in the kinds of spaces that help people feel connected — to themselves, to others, to something beyond. Not through doctrine or design clichés, but through resonance, attention, and presence.
We ask:
- What makes a space feel meaningful — even if it isn’t named as such?
- How can architecture support presence — without performance or prescription?
- Where will people in 50 years from now go to feel quiet, connected, or changed?
- What cultural and emotional needs are asking for space, but remain architecturally unaddressed?
- What spatial languages resonate with a generation shaped by festivals, forests, screens, and sound?
- And how might indigenous knowledge, interdisciplinary practice, and embodied ritual inform what comes next?
Our work also revisits a thread interrupted: the early 20th-century discovery of perceptual design, simplicity, and interdisciplinary architecture — as seen in the Bauhaus and related movements — held a spiritual undercurrent that was never fully realized. Post-war modernism adopted the form but lost the soul.
We believe it’s time to pick up that unfinished thread. To come together — and once again build spaces that could not have been built before.
Current Status
New Typologies is currently in a combined research and conceptual design phase. Alongside global case studies and collaborations across disciplines, Studio Schönenstein is developing a series of speculative spatial proposals to test new ideas in real and imagined contexts.
We welcome conversations with architects, artists, curators, and institutions interested in exploring the intersection of space, meaning, and experience.