FIU Interior Architecture student Fatma Hasanain has won an award from the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) for her interfaith center design, produced in Assistant Professor Sarah Boehm’s design studio course last semester.
Hasanain’s project incorporated the design of an interfaith center for eight different religions, creating “a space where people from various religions can all feel welcomed and co-exist, as well as learn about different cultures or religions.” Hasanain said that her design included areas for prayer, meditation, teaching, worship, cleansing, and gathering. For this project, Hasanain received ASID’s ST1B Conceptual Project Commercial award.
Hasanain provided the following design statement for her project:
Reconciling Divergent Beliefs:
Interfaith spaces are a response to a globalized world in which social life and religious practices are often detached from their locality. Within these spaces opportunities exist for divergent worldviews to be brought together with the potential of reconciliation between belief systems to occur. Water, the source of all life, reveals our human interconnectedness and provides the catalyst for reconciling these divergent beliefs.
In a consolidated statement, Hasanain said, “this project is designed as an interfaith space. The design combines multiple beliefs in one place and aims to encourage tolerance and acceptance.” (Source: ASID)
Hasanain is grateful for her role as a student at FIU, and how it played into her interfaith center project. “Being a student at FIU provided me with the opportunity and skills I needed to design this project.”
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