Sacred Spaces and Virtual Design. Toward a Digital Prayer Interreligious Architecture

The University of Naples Federico II Department of Architecture is developing research on new types of interreligious space for the three Abrahamic confessions. The research, called The Shape of Water (SOW), began in the early 2000s and it has been published in several articles and volumes. To increase the results of the research, the Department of Architecture has promoted another study (called ALEPH) in collaboration with the Federico II University Engineering Department. ALEPH’s aim is to design and program software to create a virtual museum related to the three Abrahamic confessions that could be adopted by European museums to encourage intercultural exchange between the communities. The software can create a database to collect the point of view of experts and ordinary people about the perception of new types of hybrid interreligious spaces. ALEPH uses digital technologies to build a virtual museum tour into two areas: the first one is a virtual tour through interior spaces of religious buildings particularly significant for each of the three confessions; the second one allows us to go into a virtual hybrid prayer space that was developed by SOW. The strategies produced using the ALEPH digital platform will support ongoing studies of SOW, implementing its databases. So, the visitors of the virtual tour must answer a questionnaire (made in augmented reality) about the perception of the places of the virtual tour and on the space for intercultural prayer. The output of the platform provides a series of useful indicators to map the types and compositing models of the hybrid prayer spaces for the three monotheistic confessions developed by SOW.