Archinect - News

Inside the creation and demise of the Temple of Together at Burning Man 2024

2024-09-11T07:00:00-04:00

With Burning Man 2024 concluded, organizers have shared imagery depicting the building, use, and ultimate demise of the event’s main temple. Designed by Caroline “Glitter Kitty” Ghosn, the Temple of Together was inspired by Lebanese Khaizaran chairs and the artist’s own decades-long battle with multi-generational trauma and illness.

Image credit: Rand Larson

The design of the temple seeks to portray “the light that emerges when we come together with all parts of ourselves and with the oneness we share with all living things.” The leading motif of the temple is the representation of two hands coming together in prayer, symbolizing a common gesture of unity, humility, and respect to almost all spiritual traditions.

Image credit: Rand Larson

The gesture of unity is depicted literally by the two hands creating the temple’s entrance archway, but also in a more abstract sense through neo-Gothic pointed arches repeated throughout the design, ...

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 ...

Mexico is planning a new museum at Chichén Itzá

2023-03-21T11:53:00-04:00

The museum, which is still in the planning stages, will replace a much smaller building that closed more than ten years ago. It is likely to follow in the museo de sitio (site museum) model found at other complexes managed by the federal Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e História (INAH). Carlos Esperón, the director of the Maya Museum in Cancún, in the neighbouring state of Quintana Roo, tells The Art Newspaper that work on the museum “could take two years.”

Meanwhile, the Art Newspaper is reporting that several finds taken from the disputed new Maya Train project’s construction will be displayed at the new museum, which is the third most visited cultural site in Mexico. Some experts had feared it would eventually become at risk over the number of visitors interacting with the 1,500-year-old space.

The new museum will apparently be built away from the UNESCO-protected site's monumental area on the other side of a highway so as not to risk any further damage. A section called Chichén Viejo which had previously been off-limits will also be made public as part of the construction project. Costs are expected to exceed US$14.4 million.

Malta's chamber of architects lays out guidelines for development near ancient Megalithic temples

2023-02-23T15:25:00-05:00

The chamber of architects has issued guidelines for its members working on projects close to Megalithic temples. “As professionals in the field of architecture and engineering, it is imperative that we approach the design and planning of development projects within the buffer zones of UNESCO World Heritage Sites with the utmost care and sensitivity,” the chamber said.

This is the first time Malta’s chamber of architects and civil engineers, Kamra tal-Periti (KTP) has introduced these types of rules for UNESCO buffer zones, areas around sites with legal and customary restrictions on their use and development to protect them. KTP’s directive lays out the limitations on developments that can be carried out within the buffer zones of Megalithic temples in Malta. It also provides guidance on how to develop in compliance with the guidelines.

KTP has required that only development consistent with the purpose and intent of the buffer zones and the UNESCO World Heritage Convention can be carried out within the buffer zones designated for the Megalithic temples. Development must also be of a scale and design that aligns with the international architectural and cultural heritage value of the temples and their buffer zones. Additionally, all development within Malta’s buffer zones must be in compliance with the relevant international conservation charters, ...

Burning Man reveals first physical temple design post-Covid

2023-02-02T12:52:00-05:00

The annual temple design to feature in this year’s Burning Man festival has been announced: The "Temple of the Heart" concept is designed by Polish-born, San Francisco-based entrepreneur Ela Madej with the help of her co-lead Reed Finlay and will be the festival’s first physical temple since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic three years ago.

In a blog post, Burning Man's creative team said: "Selecting the Temple for Black Rock City is a uniquely challenging decision. We look for a design with a strong visual impact that can serve as a meaningful space to hold the full range of our community’s experiences and offerings. There are both conceptual and practical considerations. Is the Temple creative and beautiful enough to be an artwork in and of itself but simple enough that it doesn’t get in the way or dictate an experience? Will it burn well, and safely? Have the applicants planned for LNT, and considered sustainability in their design and execution?"

A sketch of the temple courtes...

OMA’s Audrey Irmas Pavilion nears completion, their first religious building

2021-09-01T16:01:00-04:00

OMA New York have released an update on their Audrey Irmas Pavilion taking shape in Los Angeles, California. The scheme, designed for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, is OMA’s first cultural building in California, and the first religious institution building in the firm’s portfolio.

Image by Jason O'Rear, courtesy of OMA New York

Having been selected for the scheme’s design in 2015, OMA have progressed construction of the scheme through the COVID-19 pandemic. “The making of the Audrey Irmas Pavilion sustained forward momentum through the COVID-19 Pandemic, a period in which the act of human interaction was questioned and contemplated,” explains Shohei Shigematsu, the OMA Partner in charge of the project. “Its completion comes at a time where we hope to come together again, and this building can be a platform to reinstate the importance of gathering, exchange, and communal spirit.”

Image by Jason O'Rear, courtesy of OMA New York

The 55,000-square-foot pavilion sits adjacent to the cent...

Fernando Romero Enterprise reveals concept for Burning Man temple

2020-01-17T18:12:00-05:00

Mexico City and New York-based Fernando Romero Enterprise (FR-EE) has unveiled their proposal for this year's Burning Man Temple. Each year, the event invites a team of architects, artists, and designers to create a temple proposal where Burners (Burning Man participants) can gather.

Interior view.

Aerial view.

FR-EE's concept is inspired by the Ancient Greek word holon, which refers to an object that is both complete unto itself and an integral part of a larger whole. Taking the form of a wooden ellipsoid, the larger inhabitable temple houses an identically smaller version of itself within that serves as an altar. Within the altar still lies an even smaller replica of this ellipsoidal form, a nested array of artifacts, each complimenting the other.

The temple's construction consists of a wooden truss system, devised by FR-EE to achieve its organic form. Each truss bows outward and is braced by 34 circular horizontal members, representing the 34 years of Burning Man's existence. A com...

“In the fractured 21st century, we can respond to a human yearning to come together”: Baha’i Temple of South America by Hariri Pontarini Architects wins 2019 RAIC International Prize

2019-10-25T22:00:00-04:00

Built at the foot of the Andes near Santiago, Chile, the Baha’i Temple of South America by Hariri Pontarini Architects has attracted over 1.4 million visitors since opening in 2016. Tonight during an awards ceremony in Toronto, the RAIC announced the temple as the winner of their 2019 International Prize.

Established in 2013 by notable Canadian architect Richard Moriyama, the biennial CAD$100,000 prize — formerly called the Moriyama RAIC International Prize — honors socially transformative architecture and is open to architects worldwide. The temple was one of three competitive shortlisted projects.

Photo credit: Andrés Silva.

The domed temple plays a significant role for the local community by providing a welcoming space to gather and sit in quiet contemplation. Perhaps the building's most distinctive feature is the nine gracefully torqued wings that form an oculus at the top. The wings are made of an outer layer of cast-glass panels and an interior layer of translucent marble from ...

Angkor Archaeological Park: major conservation milestone reached in Cambodia

2019-06-14T13:51:00-04:00

The World Monuments Fund (WMF) is celebrating a milestone in its ongoing work at the Angkor archaeological park in Cambodia: the completion of a decade-long $4.8m conservation effort on the eastern side of Phnom Bakheng, one of the site’s oldest temples.

Restoration work on the eastern half of the ancient temple is now complete. Image courtesy of WMF.

"WMF’s work at Angkor began with a 1989 field mission to evaluate the damage it had suffered following 20 years of civil strife and international isolation," explains the World Monuments Fund website. "The team discovered that Angkor’s caretakers and many educated Cambodians had fled or died under the Khmer Rouge, leaving a capacity void for the site’s conservation. Encouraged by the Ministry of Culture, WMF developed recommendations to address fundamental preservation issues at four sites: Angkor Wat, Phnom Bakheng, Preah Khan, and Ta Som."

The western half of Phnom Bakheng is still in dire need of restoration work. Photo: Amine Birdouz, courtesy of WMF.

"Phnom Bakheng, the state temple of the first Khmer capital constructed between the ninth and tenth centuries, survives as one of the world’s greatest architectural treasures. In 2004, World Monuments Fund began its initial engagement a...

Plans for Burning Man's 2019 Japanese-inspired Temple design are revealed

2018-12-26T14:35:00-05:00

As the year comes to a close, the Burning Man Arts festival, one of the biggest events of the year, is already preparing for 2019. Designs for the temple, which is central to the black rock city experience, have been revealed.

Picked from a host of submissions for its "elegant simplicity", the 2019 Temple will feature a design inspired by the torii gates at the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Japan, where the artist, Geordie Van Der Bosch, previously lived.

Photo via Burning Man.

The temple will consist of a series of wooden archways that form a linear passageway leading to a large central hall. An altar and shelves to place offerings will help set the stage for festival-goes to have a collective and spiritual experience.

The design elicits "both a physical experience and a metaphorical journey," said the organizers in a statement on the design. "It’s a space that responds to the openness of the playa by creating a framework that encourages you to travel from end to end," they added.

Phot...

Ancient Syrian Ain Dara temple severely damaged in Turkish airstrike

2018-01-31T14:49:00-05:00

Much of the magnificent 3,000-year-old temple of Ain Dara, with its mysterious and massive footprints and a structure that provides clues for understanding the biblical temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, has been destroyed in a Turkish airstrike. [...] Photos and video from the Syrian Observatory and Hawar News confirm that more than half of the temple is gone, including many of the sculptures that ringed the site.

"The temple, one of the largest and most extensively ancient excavated structures in Syria," National Geographic reports, "is famous for its intricate stone sculptures of lions and sphinxes, and for its similarities to Solomon’s Temple—the first Jewish temple in Jerusalem, said to have held the Ark of the Covenant."

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...

Tadao Ando's "head-out Buddha" creates ample opportunities for reflection, both spiritual and literal

2017-08-03T13:39:00-04:00

While Tadao Ando has built religious structures before--famously, the Church of the Light--he has rarely worked with figurative icons of religion, preferring a more abstract approach. This has changed with his open-air prayer hall in the Makomanai Takinoreien Cemetery in Sapporo, Japan, where a previously unsheltered statue of the Buddha has now been reverently housed in Ando's masterful design.

Image: Shigeo Ogawa/Makomanai Takinoreien Cemetery

Prior to Ando, the 44-foot-tall statue had been sitting in a field for 15 years without any additional ornamentation. The scale and placement of the Buddha served less as a spiritual inspiration than a lonely beacon, prompting the commission of Ando to create a suitable home for the Buddha. The resulting open-air prayer hall both shelters the Buddha without disrupting its connection to the sky.

Image: Shigeo Ogawa/Makomanai Takinoreien Cemetery

From afar, visitors can't see the Buddha, only a landscaped exterior shell. Once they enter the tem...

Blair Kamin calls restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple "triumphant"

2017-05-22T14:29:00-04:00

Frrank Lloyd Wright was never one to fret about meeting deadlines, sticking to budgets or roofs that leaked. So there is something fitting about the delayed, but altogether triumphant, restoration of Wright's Unity Temple, [...] the finest public building of Wright's Chicago years and home to one of the most beautiful rooms in America. Instead of finishing on schedule last fall, the $25 million project is wrapping up just in time for the 150th anniversary of Wright's birthday, June 8.

"Success, it's often said, has many fathers, and so it is with here," Kamin writes. "A team of consultants led by Chicago's Harboe Architects has lavished exacting care on every aspect of this project, from the restoration of jewel-like art glass to the recreation of textured plaster walls."

Indian Hindu temple planned as world's tallest religious structure

2016-12-07T14:18:00-05:00

With its indoor theme park and helipad, this building might seem more like it would belong in Las Vegas, but this towering Hindu temple is set to become the world's tallest religious skyscraper. [...] At 700 feet (210 metres), the temple will be taller than India's Taj Mahal, which stands at 239 feet (73m) tall, as well as St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, which measures 422 feet (128.6m).

The illustration below shows the greater master plan for Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir. The project website has this description:

"The skyscraper temple-cum-heritage project, conceived of by the devotees of ISKCON-Bangalore, will consist of a grand temple of Lord Sri Krishna at its centre. The grand temple shall be of monumental proportions and its iconic architecture shall harmoniously combine elements of both Indian temple architecture and modern architecture. This temple is poised to become the tallest, grandest and largest religious structure in India. The temple has a footprint of about 5.5 acres and rises to a height of about 700 feet (213 metres or 70 floors). The temple is planned to be vibrant with festivals and religious activities throughout the year."

Vedic Cosmology is an integral part of the design concept. The project website explains:

"A capsule elevator takes visitors from the ground level to the 700 ft. tall viewing Gallery giving an immersive 3D sound and light experi...

European Space Agency's first resident artist is planning a temple on the moon

2016-08-16T14:34:00-04:00

[Jorge Mañes Rubio] plans to 3D print portions of the temple; other sections will incorporate an existing boulder, creating a cross between a building and a cave...The work will engage with a wide swath of architectural history, including the Pantheon, Mayan temples, and the Egyptian pyramids, [he] says. But when considering the possibilities on the moon, 18th-century French utopian architects like Étienne-Louis Boullée or Claude-Nicolas Ledoux have been the most influential.

For his current endeavor called Peak of Eternal Light, artist Jorge Mañes Rubio is working with the ESA to build a temple on the moon, as a way to “examine the potential social and anthropological aspects of colonizing celestial bodies”.

ISIS attacks second ancient Palmyra temple this month

2015-08-31T12:59:00-04:00

Islamic State has destroyed part of another ancient temple in the Syrian city of Palmyra, according to activists on social media and a group monitoring the conflict, this time targeting the Temple of Bel. [...] It is the second temple that Islamic State has attacked in Palmyra this month. On 25 August, the group detonated explosives in the ancient Baal Shamin temple, an act that the cultural agency Unesco has called a war crime aimed at wiping out a symbol of Syria’s diverse cultural heritage.

Previously in the Archinect news:

ISIS blows up 2,000-year-old Baalshamin temple in Palmyra

2015-08-24T13:24:00-04:00

Islamic State blew up the ancient temple of Baal Shamin in the Unesco-listed Syrian city of Palmyra, the country’s antiquities chief has said. [...] Baal Shamin was built in 17AD and it was expanded under the reign of Roman emperor Hadrian in 130AD. Known as the Pearl of the Desert, Palmyra, which means City of Palms, is a well-preserved oasis 130 miles north-east of Damascus.

Reports of the destruction of the Unesco-listed Baalshamin temple surfaced only days after the news broke that ISIS militants had beheaded Khaled Al-Asaad, a leading Syrian archaeologist and unrivaled Palmyra expert.

Meanwhile destruction in the name of so called "cultural cleansing" is also being reported from other parts of Syria, where ISIS is believed to have bulldozed the 1,500-year-old Catholic monastery of Mar Elian near the town of Qaryatain. The church had housed frescoes that may date back to the sixth century — likely the oldest Christian paintings in Syria.

Previously in the Archinect news: