Abstract

Architectural studies, both analytical and historical, highlight their interest in dealing with the various aspects of religious buildings, according to their different cultural affiliations. Church buildings are considered one of the important religious buildings that have received this attention, due to their antiquity and their continuity to the present time and their wide spread in multiple civilizations.
Studies have focused on dealing with the role of religious intellectual characteristics in influencing the design characteristics of the church building, depending on the objective of each study, but they agree on the clarity of the relationship between the two sides in a way that is no less important than the functional relationship between them. They also agree on the change in design characteristics over time in light of the change in some intellectual concepts related to the change in other factors affecting design.
From the evaluation of the available knowledge about church buildings, the importance of studying the design characteristics of church buildings in Iraq, in general, and the characteristics of the internal space organization, in particular in the light of religious intellectual concepts, was revealed. This is due to the lack of specialized local studies, the dispersion of knowledge in global studies, and the inability to apply their theoretical frameworks to local production. Iraq in the light of religious intellectual concepts. For the purpose of solving this problem, the research methodology came to include building a theoretical framework capable of describing the relationship between form and meaning in the architecture of churches first, then putting forward hypotheses and determining the method of measurement secondly, and then applying it to the buildings of local churches to extract changes in their design characteristics that pertain to internal spaces and related to the change of intellectual characteristics religious.