Comparison of Two Paradigms of the Sacred Landscape in Islamic and Christian City (Case Study: Holy Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad and the Duomo Cathedral in Milan)

By studying the history of the diversity of urbanism attitudes in the world, it is becoming evident to us that religions have always had a drastic influence on the form, development, and geometry of the city. The influence of religions on the development of the cities is derived from the respect which all divine religions consider for holy places. The construction of a sacred place in an area has always given value to the surrounding fabric. Furthermore, it centralizes urban and other affiliate activities in the environs; therefore, the structure of the city has been gradually formed around the sacred place. The type of outlook to the sacred place in the two religions of Islam and Christianity is generally different, and this attitude towards the sacred place landscape is also crystallized. So, with an analytical and historical comparisons between Islamic and Christian cities and assess landscape constituent of the sacred place, the different attitudes towards the holy place can be seen. In this qualitative study, according to the theorists' point of view about city structure, the position of sacred places in the Islamic and the Christian cities has been investigated. Then a comparative study conducted between two case pilgrimage sites. the findings evidently prove that the landscape identity of the holy places in the Islamic city is organically connected to the peripheral neighborhood and the surrounding area. In fact, sacred place is located in the heart of environ spaces as a focal place which could bring together communication of pilgrims and citizens in term of various pilgrimage did and usual activities. However, in Christianity, the holy place has a dominated architecture which represents Christ cross in geometry and also has semantic and formic independent respect to its adjacent. The lack of objective-subjective relations with nearby neighborhoods leads to separation of the holy place and usual urban activity. The origin of this contention appears in the analogy of sacred places in both Islamic and Christian cities.