wfn.org | Translucent Temple to be Built in Chile

["Brad Pokorny" <bpokorny@adelphia.net>]

Baha'i World News Service
For more information, contact: editor@bahaiworldnews.org
or visit www.bahaiworldnews.org

Translucent Baha'i Temple to be Built in Chile

HAIFA, Israel, 13 June 2003 (BWNS) -- A temple of light is to grace the
continent of South America.

The Universal House of Justice, the international governing body of the
worldwide Baha'i community, has selected the luminous and organic design of
Toronto architect Siamak Hariri for the next Baha'i House of Worship, which
will be built near Santiago Chile.

There are now seven Baha'i Temples: in Australia, Germany, India, Panama,
Uganda, United States, and Western Samoa. The House of Worship in the United
States was the first one of these to be dedicated, in 1953. The most
recently completed was the Indian Temple, in 1986.

Mr. Hariri said he hopes to complete the project within the next three
years.

The approved design has "nine gracefully torqued wings, which enfold the
space of the Temple," Mr. Hariri said in his presentation to the Universal
House of Justice.

"These vast wings are made of two delicate skins of translucent, subtly
gridded alabaster, one on the outside and other on the inside," Mr. Hariri
said.

"Between these two layers of glowing, translucent stone, lies a curved steel
structure (the source of the faintly discernable gridding) enclosed in
glass, its primary structural members intertwining with secondary support
members, not unlike the structural veining discernable within a leaf.

"Light moving through and between each of the wings becomes light as
structure, lines of radiance moving and arcing gently about The Greatest
Name (calligraphy of Baha'u'llah's name at the center of the dome)."

Mr. Hariri said the wings, identical in form, are organically shaped and
twisted slightly to produce a nest-like structure, a soft, undulating dome
positioned around a raised base.

Mr. Hariri said the inner form of the Temple would be "defined by a finely
articulated tracery of wood, which offers a delicately ornamental inner
surface, rich in texture, warm by nature, acoustically practical and
responsive to the cultural givens of the area."

During the day, the soft undulating alabaster and glass skin forms the outer
expression, he said.

"At night, the image reverses itself, the entire volume then becoming a
warmed totalized glow, with the inner form of the building visible through
the glass."

The Temple, notable for its absence of straight lines, will rise amidst an
extensive radiating garden comprising nine reflecting lily pools and nine
prayer gardens.

The new Temple will seat approximately 500 people.

Mr. Hariri said it would take its place as a sister Temple to the other
Mother Temples - and yet "find its way into its own gentle and compelling
uniqueness."

Prominent Toronto-based architecture critic, Gary Michael Dault, said the
Temple was a "hovering cloud, an architectural mist."

He said it "acknowledges blossom, fruit, vegetable and the human heart --
but rests somewhere between such readings, gathering them up and
transforming them into an architectural scheme that is, simultaneously, both
engagingly familiar and brilliantly original."

A Baha'm, Mr. Hariri, of Hariri Pontarini Architects, was born in Bonn, West
Germany and educated in Toronto, Ontario. He attended Yale University School
of Architecture, New Haven, where he received his Master of Architecture in
1985.

Among his commissions have been the $70 million new Schulich School of
Business at York University, and the award-winning, $15 million office
building for McKinsey & Company in Toronto. He was the winner of the Toronto
Urban Design Awards (2000). Internationally, he completed the Landegg
Academy Master Plan in Switzerland.

In September last year, the national governing body of the Baha'i community
in Chile called for submission of designs for the House of Worship.

The call came after an announcement in 2001 by the Universal House of
Justice that efforts should begin to build what would be known as the
"Mother Temple of South America". Submissions were open not only to Baha'is,
but to all qualified designers.

After considering 185 submissions the Universal House of Justice selected
four teams based on the creativity of their designs and asked for further
developments or additional concepts. It then selected the design by Mr.
Hariri.

The Temple will be built outside Santiago on the Pan-American Highway.
Funding for the construction will be provided by voluntary donations from
the Baha'is of Chile and from local and national Baha'i communities around
the world.

Baha'i Temples are created as beautiful structures that provide places to
commune with God in silence and reverence. Their Arabic name,
Mashriqu'l-Adhkar, means "dawning place of the mention of God."

Baha'i Houses of Worship are open to all. In the future, each Temple will be
the central feature in a complex designed to provide social, humanitarian,
educational and scientific pursuits.

-- 14-MD-030613-1-CHILE-223-S

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