The thesis explores the ritual of sacred travel to the city of Jerusalem. It places pilgrimage as a project in which the pilgrim, as an independent subject led by spiritual orientation, contributes to the appropriation of the cities and landscapes that he or she is continually crossing. While pilgrimage is indeed acknowledged as a journey in pursuit of a religious objective, it is studied here as a powerful social and cultural vector that often destabilised the economic, civic and political conditions of places of worship.The thesis unfolds both chronologically and thematically in order to explore how the mentality of pilgrims and the scenography of pilgrimage have produced particular structures, landscapes and representations that I refer to as the Architecture of Pilgrimage. Each of the five chapters addresses both a specific era in the history of pilgrimage to Jerusalem and a particular theme, such as the fabrication of sacred landscapes, the intelligence of analogical thinking, the importance of movement in ritual, the politics of heritage and preservation, and the formation of collective memory.Although these paradigmatic ideas did not necessarily originate in Jerusalem, the condition of the city allows them to be examined in a state of acceleration and saturation. Acknowledging that Jerusalem is an idea larger than the city itself, the thesis expands the definition of pilgrimage to Jerusalem by including a variety of analogous ‘Jerusalems’ that proliferated elsewhere as pilgrimage sites in their own right. In this sense, pilgrimage to Jerusalem is approached as a flexible practice not geographically confined, but enacted through different combinations of text, place, memory and visual imagination. The thesis concludes with a photographic project proposing an alternative journey to Jerusalem through a topography of displaced yet enduring orientations towards the holy city.

Gili Merin is an architect and photographer. She teaches at the Architectural Association as a Diploma Unit Master, lectures in History and Theory at the Royal College of Art and has been a visiting professor at Syracuse University. She trained as an architect, editor and researcher at OMA, Kuehn Malvezzi and Efrat-Kowalsky. Gili writes and photographs regularly for the Architects’ Journal, Frame and Haaretz, and has published essays in journals including AA Files, Thresholds, The Guardian and The Architectural Review.