Spiritual Affect and Spatial Experience: Vernacular and Generic Architecture Through Sufi Ḥāl Concepts

This study examines the emotional and spiritual orientations that emerge through the in-situ experience of vernacular and generic architectural spaces and investigates whether these orientations can be interpreted theologically through the ḥāl concepts of the Sufi tradition. A concurrent embedded mixed-methods design was employed with 24 architecture students who experienced both settings in Çamlıhemşin, Rize province, northeastern Türkiye. Following each spatial experience, semi-structured interviews were conducted, and a nine-dimensional semantic differential instrument, developed through the systematic mapping of ḥāl concepts onto psychological emotion categories, was administered. The quantitative data were analyzed using a three-way repeated-measures ANOVA, and the qualitative data through content analysis. The findings indicate that the vernacular experience is associated with markedly stronger and more positive spiritual-emotional orientations than the generic experience across all dimensions and spatial conditions. In the qualitative analysis, spiritual feeling emerged as a prominent theme in the vernacular experience without any religious practice, whereas spiritual indifference was the dominant theme in the generic experience. Overall, the study reveals that architectural space is a context capable of carrying spiritually differentiated orientations, and that Sufi ḥāl concepts offer a productive hermeneutic framework for the theological interpretation of the spatial effect of nature-integrated vernacular architecture.