Marian Burchardt is Professor of Sociology at Leipzig University. As a cultural sociologist, he is interested in how diversity shapes institutions and everyday life. His research engages with the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, urban sociology, and theories of modernity, and draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods. He is especially interested in how notions of diversity influence social life and public space through nation-state regulations, law, and urban policy. He is the author of Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West (Rutgers UP, 2020) and Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

Panel "Faith in Diversity": The Promise of Architecture: Religious Diversity, Media and Affect in Berlin's "House of One"

29th May 10.30 – 12.00 am | Marian Burchardt

In my contribution, I explore the ways in which processes of communicative construction and mediatization enable people’s affective relationships with architectural projects. I focus on the projected and yet-to-be-realized multi-religious building called “House of One” in Berlin, which claims to become the world’s first mosque-church-synagogue and an exemplary site for the realization of peaceful interreligious coexistence. I explore how practices of mediatization situate concrete material and architectural objects such as the House of One in a network of references, produced by different speakers. I am intrigued by what I call the “the promise of architecture”: it is architecture’s affective force that spawns the belief in the power of the building to unite people in diversity and help producing a peaceful interreligious future. As materiality and meaning continually co-reference one another, the building-to-be-built becomes diversity-to-be-built.