Archinect - News

Vassar's religious community finds a new home in adaptive reuse design from L.E.FT Architects

2024-07-23T17:48:00-04:00

School is out of session for the summer, but Vassar College’s new Center for the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and Contemplative Practices is on our minds after a recently completed project from L.E.FT Architects restored the existing Pratt House into a campus hub for student’s wellness and intellectual growth.

Photo by Michael Vahrenwald/ESTO

Their adaptive reuse of the 109-year-old building turned its three-story Gothic Revival structure into a home for the office and their mission to serve twelve religious and spiritual student groups at Vassar. In what was originally the college warden’s residence, a new kind of space has evolved. In it, the architects say, the restrictive “dichotomies” dividing religious and secular life in America are dissolved into a communal space imbued with tolerance and the desire to enact change.

Photo courtesy L.E.FT Architects

“The conversations that resulted between the diverse and sometimes theologically-opposed participants were dynamic yet r...

Burning Man unveils first-ever Black Rock City Temple design from female BIPOC lead artist

2024-02-13T12:34:00-05:00

Burning Man’s official 2024 Temple for Black Rock City has been unveiled as an optimistic design rising to a height of 70 feet and shrowded in a woven latticed screen cladding with repeated neo-Gothic archways that carry a metaphor of togetherness amidst a backdrop of global conflict.

The design took its charge from notable past iterations from David Best and will be called 'Temple of Together' as denoted by its repeated motif of hands touching in unison. Burner Caroline “Glitter Kitty” Ghosn was the Lead Artist chosen for her design, which is inspired by Lebanese Khaizaran chairs and her battle with multi-generational trauma and illness.

Temple of Together by Caroline Ghosn. Design rendering by Maissa Sader

Organizers say: “We look for a design that is novel, yet still fits within the Burning Man Temple tradition of being a treasured sanctuary ...

Dabbagh Architects’ first mosque project gives an enlightening new spiritual resource to Dubai's Al Quoz district

2021-12-21T17:04:00-05:00

A bright new spiritual center is finally open in Al Quoz, the industrial heart of Dubai.

Dabbagh Architects is behind one of the first mosques in the Emirates ever designed by a female architect.

Photo: Gerry O’Leary

A masterwork of materiality and form, the newly-completed mosque evokes a sense of inner calm to its worshippers, offering a spiritual break from the materialism of the outside world as promoted in the Quran.

Sumaya Dabbagh is one of only a handful of Saudi women architects and is considered a leader in the Gulf region for her designs, which “place an emphasis on the intangible in architecture; seeking to create meaning and a sense of the poetic in order to form a connection with each building’s user.”

Photo: Gerry O’Leary

“At the end of each project, my hope is that the building will evoke the feelings and emotions that were envisioned at the outset,” the architect said in a statement. “There is a defining, magical moment when the building is born and claims a life of...

This New Jersey architect is bringing divine inspiration to homes in the COVID-era

2021-08-11T18:43:00-04:00

Before the pandemic, Rachel Grochowski was busy designing yoga studios, movie theaters, upscale bistros and other kinds of crowded gathering spaces tailored to the lifestyle and wellness needs of communities that we all took blissfully for granted in a world without COVID.

Flash forward to the present, and our toned down but still chaotic, pandemic-induced stasis, where the architect is adapting to the growing demand for revitalized interior sanctums with her Montclair, New Jersey-based firm.

As the founder and principal of RHG Architecture+Design, the UW-Milwaukee graduate has been hard at work applying her knowledge of chapels and other religious spaces into remodels of area homes in need of some serious spiritually sprucing up.

Sustainable Home in Montclair, NJ by RHG Architecture+Design

“Design is spiritual. It just depends on how you see it,” Grochowski told Forbes’ Valentina Di Donata.

The spaces are a change of pace for the 18-year-old firm, which had focused on commercial an...

Burning Man reveals 2018 Temple design: Galaxia

2018-01-04T17:25:00-05:00

Galaxia celebrates hope in the unknown, stars, planets, black holes, the movement uniting us in swirling galaxies of dreams. A superior form of Gaia in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Galaxia is the ultimate network, the fabric of the universe connecting living beings into one entity.

Rejoice burners — the design for the 2018 Temple has been unveiled: 'Galaxia' by London-based French architect Arthur Mamou-Mani.

"Galaxia is shaped of 20 timber trusses converging as a spiral towards one point in the sky," describes the Burning Man Journal. "The triangular trusses form different paths towards a central space holding a giant 3D printed mandala, the heart of Galaxia. The timber modules start large enough to hold small alcoves in which people can write in peace. As participants walk through the path, the timber modules lift up and become thinner and thinner towards the sky as people reach the central mandala."

Mamou-Mani is no stranger to Burning Man: he and his MArch students at the University of Westminster's WeWantToLearn studio (taught jointly with with Toby Burgess) have been contributing art installations to the annual event site, Black Rock City in the Nevada desert, for the past six years: Shipwreck, Fractal Cult, Hayam Sun Temple, The Infinity Tree, Reflectio...

One brick per Bible verse in Napp Studio's enormous, lightbulb-infused "Archive of Light"

2017-01-05T14:44:00-05:00

The imaginary realm of architecture frequently ventures off into scales that are improbable, if not outright impossible, on the politically and gravitationally constrained Earth (think Étienne-Louis Boullée, or Lebbeus Woods). In a similar if less secular vein, Napp Studio has conceived of an enormous, walkable brick wall that would feature every verse of the bible and/or other spiritual texts inscribed on titled, lightbulb-illuminated bricks. The idea here is to create the sensation of leafing through a book page by page, with each page being loosely represented by a brick.

As the architects note, "The bricks are books written with text of living stories of the everyday reality, yet, a reality with hope. Hope is the most significant spiritual grain we rely on when facing the sometime harsh life, it provides us with strength and will – the light to live on." The massive scale of the project does not place it beyond the realm of the possible, although there's no word yet of an officia...

What makes a building sacred?

2014-10-22T13:47:00-04:00

The new science of neuroaesthetics [...] tells us much about the way pure form is dealt with by the brain. [...] V S Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, and William Hirstein, a philosopher at Elmhurst College in Illinois, argue that we are innately attuned to recognise things as unified objects – such that we find brushstrokes or architectural features that can be mentally assembled into a coherent whole more beautiful.