The article deals with the issues of the formation and functioning of monumental postmodern churches as strong forms in the space of housing estates from the 1970s and 1980s. The aim of the research presented in the article is to diagnose the needs of local communities regarding the presence of the church in the context of its form, in the living environment. The research was carried out on the basis of formal and spatial experiments representative of the Polish religious architecture of those years. Among the research methods, the comparative analysis of examples dominates, next to the literature query and in situ research. Three sites were analyzed: in Warsaw, Wadowice and Wrocław.

The article discusses the coexistence of the sacred and the profane in the public space of a residential environment – in the light of research on public life and urban composition. The research problem concerns the existence of the need for a sacred space in the traditional form of an urban square in large housing estates. The study regarded the relationship between sacrum and profanum and its impact on the living conditions in the housing estate, exemplified by the square in front of the Church of the Ascension in North Ursynów district in Warsaw. The research subject included the genesis of the form of the square, the local legal background, participatory practices, and activity in the space of the square based on the on-site observations made in the years 2004-2022. The study results show the need for public urban space, not addressed in current urban and participatory practices.

The paper's objective is to shed light on the issue of sacralisation and desacralisation of space in cities with Kraków and Lviv as examples. The cities had been part of Poland for hundreds of years. They jointly suffered from the Partitions of Poland and were separated politically after the Second World War. Lviv joined the USSR and Kraków remained a Polish city. After 1990, Lviv became a major city of independent Ukraine. Several decades of Soviet (Lviv) socialism and Polish communist (Kraków) socialism have left a profound impression on their ‘sacred’ spaces, including the creation of new and the devastation of existing ones. The historical analysis of Kraków's and Lviv's urban spaces exhibited a continuous process of sacralisation, desacralisation, and sacralisation of some areas according to the current prevailing ideology or sociopolitical or religious doctrine. At the same time, a city, Kraków for example, can have certain ‘holy’ places that have remained unaffected by times of turmoil. To demonstrate what an urban sacred space is, the authors attempted to propose a scientific methodology for identifying such places.

Architectural and urban, functional and spatial solutions for living space are based on actions focused on human needs. In addition to many other aspects, sacred space or locus sacer (its function, form and conceptual contents) as a publicly dedicated place of worship in which one can contact the sacrum is particularly important in human living and functioning space. The article presents sacrum from the cultural perspective, on the materialized and symbolical plane with some references to the contemporary architectural practice, with an analysis of the innovative approach and metaphors while building new forms of the changing Catholic Church of the 21st century. Thanks to their characteristic structure, they play the role of a significant spatial and functional determinant supporting the identification, integration and the sense of belonging to the community of places and constitute special space perceived as an asylum promoting a good relation and appropriate organisation of the housing environment. In this context, the research was focused on developments located in completely different housing areas: a hybrid megalopolis (the city-state Singapore) and, as a sign of another topic and analyses supplementing the comprehensive presentation, a new housing district of a small European city (Freiburg, Germany).

Everyone functions within the area of the sacrum and the profanum, the material and non-material reality, having many meanings and interpretations and constituting an inherent field of human activity. While analysing a complicated network of relations and dependencies between the sacrum and the profanum, the intentionality of the location of locus sacer and its special demarcation in the architectural and urban area of the living environment of the 21st century was observed. It was demonstrated that designing a church in the contemporary commercialized world is not easy because its modern functionality requires the designer not only to consider the ideology, the vision of the church, tradition and biblical motives but also to highlight new methods of worship and state-of-the-art technological achievements. For that reason, contemporary sacrum significantly deviates from the traditional model of a shrine as presented in the analyses included in this article. The special and functional concept covered with the research shows this diversity and design methods highlight the architectural values and the dimension of locus sacer. This article supplements the research focused in this paper on analyses of the sacrum created in a new housing district in Freiburg, Germany.

Revolutionary changes after Second Vatican Council – in particular the renewal of the liturgy – resulted in a variety of forms and spatial solutions in sacred architecture. In contemporary urban layouts, they do not play a dominant role. Authors analyze selected sacred spaces regarding their composition in urban structures, focusing on their universalism, legibility in a symbolic dimension, as well as spatial expression combining elements of tradition and modernity. As a case study, authors present selected examples of European churches built after 2000.

The presence of sacred objects in the city structure is usually clearly visible. Temples and chapels complete public spaces, making them unique. Apart from the representation of the spiritual dimension and religiosity, all sacred buildings which are functioning as intended belong to the group of public buildings, therefore they should be characterized by good access and logical distribution in the city structure. Currently, research on the availability of service facilities in Krakow is fragmentary and does not create a comprehensive picture. The aim of this study is to fill the existing research gap by explaining the accessibility of religious objects in relation to the housing environment in Krakow. The research method is based on the concept of buffer zones which allow to identify areas with varying degrees of accessibility to the studied objects. The results of the analysis show the current distribution of religious and sacred objects in the city. In addition, the results of the research made it possible to identify residential areas with very good, good and acceptable accessibility, as well as those outside the designated buffers.