The hypothesis of this research is that societies in contemporary Western European cities have become increasingly pluralistic in cultural and religious terms, while the built environment has not evolved accordingly. The thesis chronologically examines correlations between shifting concepts of religious coexistence since the early Modern Era and their spatial manifestation through architectural case study analysis. Having accommodated successive immigrant communities since the seventeenth century, Spitalfields in East London is the first site of this investigation. Spitalfields is paradigmatic of how religious minority communities, though integral to urban life, have historically been excluded from the formal decision-making processes shaping the built environment, yet moments of minority spatial agency and interreligious encounter have emerged here. However, due to their provisional character and biases within architectural historiography, many of these spaces have since been erased or transfigured. Informed by oral histories and archival materials, the research analyses these spaces within the political and economic contexts of their construction and reconstructs them visually through drawing. While the first half of the thesis examines precedents of religious minorities constructing spaces of worship under conditions of political and economic pressure, the second half turns to the emergence of purpose-built multi-faith spaces as a twentieth-century institutional project. The first deliberate creation of a multi-faith building typology occurred in the US after the Second World War, where a new pluralistic national paradigm underpinned multi-faith campus chapel constructions. Berlin’s House of One then serves as a contemporary case study for monotheistic cohabitation that started as a community-led cooperative project but has since become increasingly intertwined with state institutions through government funding. By situating architectural responses to religious pluralism within a longer historical framework and examining the influence of evolving liberal thought, secular governance and economic structures, the research critically traces how changing formations of liberalism, governance and economic models have shaped the spatial conditions of religious coexistence, alongside typological continuities and transformations of architectural forms developed for monotheistic worship and multi-faith space.

Anna is a practising architect, researcher and educator. She has led large-scale cultural building projects from competition stage to completion in the UK and in Germany. Throughout her work in practice, she has remained actively involved in academic discourse through teaching, guest critiques, conferences and lectures. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the Architectural Association in London, where she has also taught history and theory studies.