Type: Option Studio

Location: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Insructor: Meriem Chabani

Year: 2025

‘‘The threshold that separates the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible. A similar ritual function falls to the threshold of the human habitation, and it is for this reason that the threshold is an object of great importance.’’

-Mircea Eliade

The Sacred and the Profane

I began this journey searching for a cultural and spiritual anchor that could speak to New Orleans, a city where life and death, joy and mourning exist side by side. I was looking for something within my own cultural context that carried this same duality, and I found it in Varanasi. In that city, death is not an ending but part of a continuous cycle. It is acknowledged, honored, and transformed through ritual.

Varanasi, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, is often called the spiritual heart of India. It is closely tied to Shiva, the god of creation and destruction. For Hindus, to die and be cremated on the banks of the Ganges is to gain liberation from the cycle of rebirth. The city is therefore both a place of living and a destination for dying, where the earthly meets the eternal.

At its center is the river Ganges, revered as a goddess and a source of purification. The city’s architecture grows around it, with the ghats, broad stairways, linking the dense streets above to the sacred water below. Each of the many ghats holds its own story, but all serve as thresholds where ordinary life touches the divine.

The act of descending the ghats is a ritual in itself. Pilgrims bathe at dawn, priests perform fire ceremonies, families bring their dead to the cremation grounds, and daily life unfolds alongside. This movement from city to river becomes a shared, transformative experience. If such movement can shape sacred space in Varanasi, can similar patterns help us understand other places of ritual gathering?

This question turns toward New Orleans and Congo Square. For centuries, it has been a place where enslaved Africans and their descendants gathered to drum, dance, and keep cultural memory alive. Like the ghats, it becomes sacred not through buildings but through rhythm and movement.

My work uses Varanasi as a lens to understand New Orleans. By studying how movement and gathering create sacred space there, I hope to reveal similar forces at work in Congo Square. The aim is not comparison, but understanding, how architecture can draw from ritual, becoming a vessel for shared journeys, memory, and spiritual connection.