Designing Australia’s sacred spaces and religious buildings: past, present and future

With fewer and fewer people identifying as belonging to a faith community or having any religious affiliation, and even fewer admitting to attending regular worship services, Australia appears to be growing increasingly secular. Church buildings across the country are being merged, closed, abandoned, sold or razed. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2016 data reported an accelerating incidence of Australia’s population reporting no religion. Christianity, the largest religious group in the country, has fallen as a religious affiliation from 88.2 percent in 1966 to 52.1 percent in 2016, while those reporting no religion has risen from 0.8 percent to 30.1 percent in the same time period. However, the data also reveals an increasing diversity of religious affiliation among the population, with Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism all on the rise.¹

Aboriginal sacred sites, European church buildings – from the earliest Georgian and Gothic Revival examples through to modern and contemporary churches – and the growing number of mosques, temples, shrines and stupas attest to a rich and diverse heritage within Australia. This heritage is manifest in the tangible: buildings, precincts, landscape, environment, gardens, trees and artefacts; and the intangible: customs, language, stories, beliefs and memories.