Reza Assasi
Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada
reza.assasi@gmail.com
Keywords: art, culture, contemplation, phenomenology, music, poetics, temple
Workshop Description
This workshop invites participants into a meditative and interactive experience that blends poetry and music within the architectural and philosophical context of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple. Set in a space conceived as a vessel for universal humanist values, the event engages participants in shared contemplation through improvisational Oud music and recitations of Rumi’s timeless poetry.
The Unity Temple—an icon of the Modern Movement—embodies principles of clarity, unity, and spiritual openness. The workshop aligns with this ethos by creating an experiential moment of “common ground” through sound, verse, and space. It also connects the Istanbul ACSF Symposium to the Chicago Salon, extending an arc of cultural dialogue across geography and time.
Phenomenologically, the workshop foregrounds architecture as an embodied, temporal, and multisensory experience. Being present—together, in real time—participants encounter the Unity Temple not only as form, but as atmosphere: a space of light, silence, echo, and resonance. The Oud’s acoustic timbre and the human voice animate the building’s natural acoustics, transforming architecture into a vessel of collective memory. Poetry, music, and silence serve as ritual acts of gathering—acts that heighten spatial awareness and invite deeper reflection on the spiritual and cultural possibilities of architecture.
The juxtaposition of Sufi poetic and musical traditions within a modern Western sacred space provokes a dynamic encounter: not merely contrast, but a call to unity through difference. In this way, the workshop explores the power of cross-cultural expression to reveal shared values—love, beauty, transcendence—that persist across time and place.
Workshop Objectives
- To create a contemplative and participatory experience that bridges music, poetry, and architectural space.
- To foreground the Unity Temple as both a physical and symbolic altar for collective spiritual inquiry.
- To explore how cultural juxtaposition—between Sufi traditions and Wright’s modernism—can generate insight into architectural and philosophical universality.
- To engage architecture as a lived, sensorial experience through sound, voice, light, and presence.
- To link the ACSF symposium sites in Istanbul and Chicago through an experiential thread of shared artistic practice.
Figure 1: Unity temple. (photo by author)
