Chile Temple coverage
Written by ry on March 29th, 2005
So they haven’t even broken ground on the Baha’i temple that’s going to be built in Santiago, Chile and already it seems the world can’t get enough of this remarkable building.
The Canadian Baha’i News Service has run a story about the temple and how it has “drawn accolades from over 40 international architectural and design journals from as far as Italy, Germany, Australia, and Russia.”
From the story:
The temple’s highest praise so far has come from the prestigious Canadian Architect journal, which honoured the design with one of its 2004 Awards of Excellence. Quoted in the journal’s December issue, one of the competition’s judges noted that, “while the spiritual aims of the building are not clearly articulated, this project represents a rare convergence of forces that seem destined to produce a monument so unique as to become a global landmark, or one of the ‘wonders of the world.’ One can only marvel at the architects’ commitment to originate this form, the energy with which it has been developed, and the power of religious belief in motivating artistic achievement.”
Widespread coverage of the design was sparked by a box story that ran in the influential Wallpaper magazine in November 2003. Since then, Hariri Pontarini Architects has been fielding enquiries from journals around the world, some fascinated by what Toronto-based artist Gary Michael Dault has described as “a soap-bubble that has alighted, momentarily, on the ground — an evanescent architectural grace-note come to rest in a rugged, sublime setting,” others echoing the Canadian Architect judge’s wonder about the structure’s spiritual aims.
Some of the uncertainty, explains Siamak Hariri, co-founder of Hariri Pontarini Architects and project leader for the temple, can be attributed to the Bahá’í temple’s break from the traditional function of places of worship associated with the world’s other major religions.
“It’s hard for people to get the fact that it’s not a church,” says Hariri, “and it’s not a mosque and it doesn’t have a pulpit and it doesn’t have a clergy. And so they say, What do you do in there? It’s quite alien to them. A synagogue is a synagogue. Architecturally, the fact that it isn’t embedded in ritual somehow makes it challenging — and interesting. So really, it’s about the form and the fact that it’s something a little new in the architectural world.”
The whole story is here.
For those of us who came into the Baha'i Faith through the ever popular 
