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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.
— National Geographic
"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... View full entry
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. — Burning Man Journal
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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.
— chicagotribune.com
"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." View full entry
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).
— Daily Mail
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... View full entry
[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. — Artsy
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”. More on Archinect:ESA proposes a village on the... View full entry
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.
— theguardian.com
Previously in the Archinect news:ISIS blows up 2,000-year-old Baalshamin temple in PalmyraISIS beheads leading archaeologist in PalmyraISIL destroys ancient mausoleums in historic Palmyra View full entry
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.
— theguardian.com
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... View full entry
