Spiritual Affect and Spatial Experience: Vernacular and Generic Architecture Through Sufi Hāl Concepts
RELIGIONS, cilt.17, sa.8, 2026 (AHCI, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 17 Sayı: 8
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.3390/rel17080916
- Dergi Adı: RELIGIONS
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Scopus, ATLA Religion Database, Index Islamicus, Linguistic Bibliography, Directory of Open Access Journals, Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO), Religion Database (ProQuest)
- Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
This study examines the emotional and spiritual orientations that emerge through the in-situ experience of vernacular and generic architectural spaces and investigates whether these orientations can be interpreted theologically through the h & amacr;l concepts of the Sufi tradition. A concurrent embedded mixed-methods design was employed with 24 architecture students who experienced both settings in & Ccedil;aml & imath;hem & scedil;in, Rize province, northeastern T & uuml;rkiye. Following each spatial experience, semi-structured interviews were conducted, and a nine-dimensional semantic differential instrument, developed through the systematic mapping of h & amacr;l concepts onto psychological emotion categories, was administered. The quantitative data were analyzed using a three-way repeated-measures ANOVA, and the qualitative data through content analysis. The findings indicate that the vernacular experience is associated with markedly stronger and more positive spiritual-emotional orientations than the generic experience across all dimensions and spatial conditions. In the qualitative analysis, spiritual feeling emerged as a prominent theme in the vernacular experience without any religious practice, whereas spiritual indifference was the dominant theme in the generic experience. Overall, the study reveals that architectural space is a context capable of carrying spiritually differentiated orientations, and that Sufi h & amacr;l concepts offer a productive hermeneutic framework for the theological interpretation of the spatial effect of nature-integrated vernacular architecture.