Prayer Pocket

With a world that’s becoming more and more populated everyday, along with people moving into cities at a quicker pace than ever before, the future of religious spaces lies within that intense diversity. This more populated world, crammed into bigger cities and less space, means more people, with even more diverse opinions, all living within feet of each other, more so than at any other time in history. So what’s the religious solution? Is it more grandiose catholic cathedrals or massive mosques? No, the answer is the “Prayer Pocket”.

The “Prayer Pocket” dissects the demographics of any city, down to the individual neighborhood, through publicly accessible government data. It ties itself to the community by finding under utilized spaces and plugging in as a beacon of peace, unity, and escape from the crazy city that lies just outside its walls. It’s the combination of a calming idea, which is also a universal religious common denominator, the adoration of God’s creation (Earth, Nature, Life, etc.), which manifests itself in this project as a Pocket Park, and the creation of modular floors, each made up of a religious prayer room and circulation.

Any community with enough citizens to make a “congregation” in a specific religion can come together and purchase a module to add to the structure. Keeping costs much lower than those big churches and mosques and tieing the local citizens to the “Prayer Pocket” in a much richer and more personal way than they would otherwise find in today’s methods. They would be able to fit out the interior however that religious group saw fit, making each “Prayer Pocket” different in every community, to highlight that diversity that exists, even within the same religions.

The final touch is that each module comes with a front panel that is made up of fiber optic concrete, with the fiber optic wires making the religious symbol of the group that purchased it. The answer to the future of religion is here, the “Prayer Pocket” a space, no matter what it’s final size, whether it be one story or ten, that creates that personal connection with religion and escape from the troubles of the world, that everyone so desperately seeks.