Architecture and monasticism

Form(s) of Life

Architecture and Monasticism

Professor Pier Vittorio Aureli

EPFL 2025-2026

Fall Semester

This course aims to give a general overview of the history of monasticism in relationship with architecture. Monasticism can be interpreted as a 'form of life': an existence in which what is at stake is the inseparability of life and its form. For this reason, a crucial aspect of monastic life is the rule that monks decide to follow voluntarily. Unlike universal law, or a system of norms, the monastic rule is the approximation of 'a certain kind of life' chosen by the monk. As such, the rule can be revised or even changed, as long it supports the form of life for which the rule was formulated. Monastic architecture is thus the most tangible trace of the monastic form of life. Monasteries or other monastic facilities can be interpreted as spatial diagrams in which every moment of a specific forms of life is given its proper space. Of course, any architecture is, to a certain extent, the manifestation of a way of living. However, within monasticism, the relationship between form of life and built form is especially evident, explicit, and even emphatically expressed.

The common form of life of monastic traditions, both in the East and in the West, was a monk's renunciation of possessions and embracement of poverty. Another relevant aspect present in both Eastern and Western monasticism is the constant negotiation between the initial vocation of a life of solitude (the word "monk" derives from the Greek monos, which means "alone") and the necessity to live together as a community. It is precisely the tension between solitude and community that has made monasticism-especially in its earliest phase-a radical experimentum vitae in which the individual and the collective are not in antithesis, but, rather, are seen as two arms of the same body. Seen from this perspective, monasticism can be considered one of the most important contributions to modern domestic space, as its main concern was to negotiate the terms of individual and collective life.

The course traces the history of monasticism from its earliest known manifestations in the East to its development in the West. From the inception of Buddhist monasticism in India to the early Desert monks in Egypt and Syria, the course will examine the motivations and historical circumstances that gave origins to the monastic form of life. Each lecture focuses on specific case studies in which architecture has played a significant role, such as the Buddhist cave monasteries in India, the early monastic complexes in the Near East, and the Benedictine, and Cistercian monasteries in Europe. The course will expand the overview of monastic architecture to include the modern offsprings of the monastic influence, like the college and the missions that proliferated in Asia and the Americas under the shadow of Western colonial conquest. Rather than idealizing monasticism as a successful abandonment of society, the course will illustrate how the history of this form of life and its architecture was deeply intertwined with the social and political context that produced it.

February 19th

Form of life: introduction to the course and the rise of monasticism in the East

February 26

The cave and the forest: The architecture of Buddhist monasticism

March 5

Life in the 'Desert': from Laura to Monastery

March 12

The Rise of the Cloister: Monastic Architecture before the 11th century

March 19

Collective vs. Individual: The architecture of Cistercian and Carthusian monasteries

March 26

The Monastery and the City: The Architecture and the Politics of the Mendicant Orders

April 2

Resisting Patriarchy: The Rise of the Beguinage

April 16

Institutionalization of Asceticism: The Hindu Matha and Monastic Architecture in Central India

April 23

Monastic Offsprings (part 1): The College

April 30

Monastic Offsprings (part 2): The Mission

May 7

Monastic Offsprings (part 3): Le Corbusier's Monastery at La Tourette and Dom Hans van der Laan's Roosemberg Abbey