The influence of religious and cosmological beliefs on the solar architecture of the ancient world

In the earliest civilizations of the Ancient World, sun worship developed in parallel with an understanding of the movement of the stars. That was the origin of an architecture that expressed a number of religious and cosmological beliefs. Studies of ancient archaeological remains have revealed that astronomical orientations strongly influenced the construction of some of the most important ancient architectural monuments. Besides its religious role, the sun regulated the culture of the Ancient World in many of its more practical aspects. For instance, the observation of solar and lunar cycles allowed people to anticipate seasonal change. This provided man with a means of organizing and improving agricultural and livestock activities and, in turn, influenced the construction of the large civil and religious buildings. The complex relationships that developed between cosmology, sun worship, early mathematics, and the orientation of buildings with respect to the position of the sun, also decisively influenced the birth and development of what has come to be known as passive solar design. This article describes some of these influences dating from the megalithic period to the development of Mesopotamian and Egyptian architecture.Postprint (published version

Thirty Years of Religious Freedom in Russia: The Case of Ekaterinburg

The religious revival, which began nationwide during the USSR’s last decade, affected all religious denominations, including the so-called “traditional” religions, which had deep roots in Imperial Russia’s history, and new religions that appeared after the collapse of Soviet ideology. The religious renaissance manifested itself through the rapidly increasing number of religious communities, religion’s fast penetration into social and political life, and the church buildings that mushroomed all over the country. This article focuses on the history of the religious landscape in Russia since 1989, using the city of Ekaterinburg as a case study. We use the religious landscape concept to analyze the representation of different religions in the city, which manifested themselves through the buildings designed and used for public worship—the main elements and markers of religious life in the city. This research is based on contemporary statistics and narratives about Ekaterinburg’s religious institutions, as well as field observations. Elena Glavatskaya is a senior research fellow at the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a history professor at Ural Federal University in Ekaterinburg, Russia. She received a PhD in history for her dissertation, which focused on the Siberian people’s religious traditions. She has published over one hundred articles on ethnic and religious minorities in Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church history. Glavatskaya currently leads a research project focused on ethno-religious and demographic dynamics in the Urals

Some Early Adams County Communities, Their Churches, and Church Lands

The earliest European settlers in today\u27s Adams county were basically a religious people. While probably most of them should not be described as particularly pious, they did have the fear of the Lord in their hearts and wanted to have access to the services of some religious organization, either the one to which they were accustomed in Europe or one with which they had affiliated in America. If they belonged to groups such as the Quakers, Mennonites, or Brethren, it was easy for them to develop internally the leadership necessary to function successfully as a religious community. If they were Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Lutherans, or Reformed, at least they hoped to be able to rely upon a learned and properly ordained clergy to preach, administer the sacraments, and perform other duties which they had come to expect of their religious leaders. Once in Pennsylvania, laymen of all but the most recently formed religious bodies encountered something new to their experience. There simply were no long-existing church buildings, schools, or religious authorities. In a province which imposed very few restrictions on one\u27s religious freedom, there were also no laws either permitting or requiring the provincial government to expend money for church and school buildings or to secure and support ministers. This meant that if the early settlers in Adams county wanted to have churches and schools, they would need to rely on private efforts to secure them. Since there continued to be a severe shortage of learned and properly ordained clergymen in Pennsylvania long after the close of the colonial period, much of the responsibility for establishing religious institutions rested upon laymen, for whom this was a new and often difficult task. [excerpt

In Defiance of a Stylistic Stereotype: British Crematoria, Architecture, Design and Landscape

This paper presented a new critical reading of the crematorium, rendered ‘invisible’ by the taboo surrounding death and provided the first opportunity to disseminate this research to an international audience. It focussed on the ways in which architects responded to the challenges of modern secularism and relativism. The paper developed issues identified by the research for Death Redesigned (Grainger 2007), in particular it explored the social, political, economic determinants that hindered the development of an identifiable architectural canon and investigated the reasons why the architectural pluralism that followed attracted so much early criticism from architects, architectural commentators, clergy and members of the public alike. It discussed the challenges that this building type presented arising from a lack of a common understanding of what is required by a building at once functional and symbolic, secular and religious. The crematorium has to provide a stage for the ritual of all denominations and none. For many people cremation is a religious act. For those individuals, the principle determining the arrangement of a building used in any religious service needs to be the physical expression of a religious rite, whether this be for example Christian or Hindu. The building must therefore embody its ritualistic purpose in a coherent and recognisable architectural form. For those who do not belong to the dominant religious groups, their spiritual and emotional needs must also be provided for in a meaningful way. But, a crematorium as a religious space, deriving directly from liturgical imperatives – the accepted norm in ecclesiastical architecture – is problematic because there is no liturgy for cremation in Europe – no agreed order of service. The result has been the lack of a conceptual basis for these buildings, and this paper examined the variety of stylistic options that architects adopted in order to address the dilemma

The Impact Of Disaster On Sustainability Of Civil Cultural Heritage And Authenticity: Case Of Religious Building Sample Of Selami Efendi Tekke In Istanbul

This study seeks the impact of highly destructive earthquakes on the buildings along the historical period beginning from 17th century up to now in the city of Istanbul that had a very rich cultural heritage. The religious buildings like mosques, tekkes and madrasas which are the civil religious foundation complexes of some regions of capital Ottoman city “Istanbul” were researched in the context of originality through reconstruction and restoration along the Ottoman period. The research methodology is primarily focused on determining the original situation of the buildings by researching archives, documentations and literature, afterward evaluation of historical buildings “tekkes” were evaluated in the context of authenticity as one of the main architectural conservation phenomena

Introduction to Heritage Assets: 19th- and 20th-Century Convents and Monasteries

A short description of the history and architecture of English nineteenth and twentieth-century convents and monasteries, with an emphasis on their most significant attribute

Do We Care about Built Cultural Heritage? The Empirical Evidence Based on the Veneto House Market

Italian historical buildings require urgent and costly maintenance and restoration works, but neither the local, nor the national public administrators can afford these expenditures. Nevertheless the built cultural heritage represent a unique resource of the territory, as it embodies the local social, historical, and cultural values, generates positive externalities (Musgrave, 1959), and stimulates economic activities mainly related to tourism. Is it possible to quantify how much we care about historical buildings and to measure this value in monetary terms? The aim of this paper is to answer to this question via the hedonimetric approach. Specifically, we try to verify if the proximity to historical villas, districts, palaces, squares, fortresses, religious buildings and archeological site systematically influence the house market equilibrium price in the Veneto region (Italy). The paper is organized as follows: in section two a brief review of the literature is reported, in section three the database used for the hedonimetric estimates is described, in section four the econometric models and the results we had obtained are illustrated, and in section five some final comments are drawn.Cultural Heritage Externalities, Hedonic Housing Price Method

Separation of Church and School: Guidance for Public Charter Schools Using Religious Facilities

Public charter school leaders and advocates are dedicated to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools available to all families, especially those in communities where there are very few opportunities to attend a high-quality public school. To realize the promise that public charter school expansion can bring, public charter schools need reasonable access to facilities in every community.This is a guidebook to help public charter school leaders -- and the advocates, attorneys, and others who support them -- navigate the increasingly complicated legal landscape surrounding public charter school use of a facility owned or operated by a religious organization. By presenting an analysis of the legal standards that govern application of the Establishment Clause and offering practical advice on how to ensure compliance with the it when a public charter school decides to locate in a religious-owned facility, this guidebook will help charter school leaders protect their access to an important facilities option and foster continued public charter school growth

Historic Preservation Law: The Metes & Bounds of a New Field

Historic Preservation Law has come to mean that combination of regulations, common-law property principles, tax incentives, and adjective law in administrative proceedings, governing historic sites and property within the United States. Although Congress first recognized a need to conserve the nation\u27s wealth of historic amenities in 1906 when it adopted The Antiquities Act, it was only with the nation\u27s bicentennial that the volume and diversity of laws designed to maintain, protect and preserve historic America grew to the point where it could be said that a new field of law had emerged. The symposium which follows this essay represents the first attempt to comprehensively delineate the elements of this new field. The conference entitled Historic Preservation and the Law: The Metes & Bounds of a New Field gathered 500 persons for two days at the House of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in September of 1978.s Organized by the Association and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, this conference traversed the entire range of preservation legal issues, from asking what is historic? to identifying the need for law reform already apparent in this new field. The proceedings of this conference comprise this symposium. By way of introduction, this essay provides background and a conceptual framework for the presentations which follow. This essay can best introduce the symposium by delineating first the scope of regulation by exercise of the police power and the definitions for what resources are historic, then the elements of real property law which transect these regulations, and thereafter the operation of municipal ordinances and federal procedural statutes which are the body of historic preservation law. The essay will then raise several of the thorny issues currently in dispute within this evolving field