FA 22 | Degree Project Research | Magic

Research: The Sacred Civic: Ritual Architecture in Modern Cities

Thesis: Pneumatics + The Ecstatic

Abstract

Societies can be understood by the way they produce and regulate ecstatic experience. Ecstasy, then, is never merely individual. Urbanism has created atomized individuals offered infinite possibilities of consumption that monopolize the domain of collective, ecstatic, and civic experience. We argue that this inescapable cosmopolitan freedom is itself a constraint, and we propose a ritual space that frees individuals from their obligations to modern urban freedom. This space choreographs performative movements in a neutral condition stripped down to mere phenomenological relationships between mind, body, and environment. This architecture of modern ritual serves no other purpose than the transcendent and communal act of ritual itself.