Engineering Sacred Spaces takes its starting point from sacred places — sites and structures that mediate between visible and invisible realities, mark particular locations for awareness and transformation, and are configured through correspondences — above and below, seen and unseen — between different orders of experience. Eliade located this heterogeneous, sacred-charged space in archaic and traditional societies and described modernity as a process of desacralization, in which space flattens into a homogeneous, profane continuum and the sacred survives mainly as religious content, symbol, and myth. Much scholarship on sacred sites since Eliade has worked within that desacralized frame, approaching them primarily as objects of religious history and symbolic interpretation.

This raises a fundamental question for architecture, landscape design, and spatial practice: what design methods, historical and contemporary, actually produce a site's capacity to hold attention, mark transition, shift experience and create meaning — and how can that capacity be read, engineered, and designed for today, without reducing it to religious content or period style?