Designing sacred spaces and ceremonies

Sacred crypts, everyday delinquency

 The sacred and hidden, in everyday life, is manifested almost exclusively through prohibition. It is defined as the prohibited, the enclosed, the separate. It is set outside common usage.

The invisible architecture of crypts has always been connected to and dependent on visible architecture. Even more, architecture doesn't exist without crypts.

Crypts house remainders, delinquencies, ceremonies, cults, sanctity. They entail deception, system fault, the rupture of the obvious structure.

Crypts create their own homelands, symbols, laws, distances from the public view. They enlarge and change the current and generally accepted concept of time, place and morality. They hide, store, save, exclude, protect, deceive, prohibit, toughen up, safeguard. They show disregard for the social and accepted normality of today. They exist as something alien to general use, vision, access.

These small, mostly remote but not necessarily removed places are explained, understood and valid only for those who know their codes. They reveal themselves to those looking for them.

The modern, cosmic  man is still a ceremonial being. He still retains the signs of the behavior of  his godly ancestor through feasts, initiations, anniversaries, ceremonies, forgetting, tampering with, changing or deleting their initial meaning and importance. We could even say that modern man is full of cryptoreligious ceremonies and contemporary mythologies.

Throughout the course, parallel and simultaneous to the lectures, texts and conversations, a modern “sacred crypt” will be designed.