“How do spaces shape the human experience? In what ways do rooms, homes, and buildings give us meaning and purpose?”[1] This review has been broken down into several parts, this post being Part 5 of 6.
The podcast, by TED Radio Hour, is an insightful listen, particularly for an architect or lover of spaces. From the spaces of a home, to hospitals, theatres and stages, sculptural structures, places of worship, and the space a country occupies. To “explore the power of the spaces we make and inhabit.”[2] And what reveals to us, the meaning of a space.
Part 5 of 6, from the review series of The Power of Spaces, hosted by Manoush Zomorodi, follows the words of architect, Siamak Hariri. Who designed a magnificent Bahá'í temple; the Bahá'í Temple of South America in Santiago, Chile.
Templo Bahá'í de Sudamérica (The Santiago Baháʼí House of Worship) | (Baldwin 2019)
The Santiago Baháʼí Temple | (Zomorodi, Delahoussaye, and Meshkinpour 2020)
Review
The building of spaces of worship. Spaces which are uplifted by faith.
Have you ever run your hands along a wall or table, or inhaled the smell of your grandparents home? It’s always different, and personal, the way we feel and experience spaces. We see past the fact that we are connected to these special places. The specific texture of the gallery’s wall you like, the cold, hard, cool surface of the bench outside. Spaces touch us, through the ways it makes us feel while we’re there. Feeling its texture, remembering that moment.
“Architecture has the capacity to move you. How does architecture do that?”[3] You stand there, in the middle, looking up to the ceiling. Taking everything in and feeling small. There’s this indescribable feeling of entering, sitting, or standing in a space that is meaningful to you. It consumes you, it takes you in. A mosque or a church offers you a place of prayer. Also, a place of understanding; between yourself, God, and a building that is an embodiment of your faith. We go there for that same feeling, again and again. Chasing a feeling, the immeasurable capacity of human emotion. To feel.
When Hariri was assigned the designing of a continental temple for the Bahá'í in Chile, South America, “The brief was simple. A circular room, nine sides, nine entrances, nine paths. Allowing you to come to the temple from all directions. Nine symbolising completeness, perfection. [It was] a whole new typology. It has no pulpit. No clergy. No sermons. In a world that is putting up walls, the design had to express in form the very opposite. To create a place which would accept everyone. People from all backgrounds. People of all faiths. [It was] a new form of sacred space.”[4]
“We live in a secular world today. How do we design sacred space?”[5]
The pillars of the mind and body are like the grand pillars of the Colosseum or a synagogue. Spaces that are remembered for what they stand for. And for who stands for them.
Imagine you see a person in front of you. “You say that person is radiant.”[6] How can architecture be like that person? How can architecture be radiant? How can it give off radiance? “Maybe, a pure form. A single form of emanation.”[7]
The Baháʼí structure had to be a temple. “Prayer is movement. It’s action. So, imbued in the design [was] rotation and torking. [The movement, that was it.] A totalised form, with nine wings that tork slightly in a spiral. Like a translucent rosebud, pointing to the sky.”[8] Pointing upwards, to the ancients, the unknown, and the heavens we believe in. The sky does represent belief. What better than buildings, architecture, and spaces that move us to look up. There’s a certain strength and humility in the vast immensity of a clear or troubled, heavy sky. It reflects our own human dilemma. In which we seek refuge, we are swayed aside, and brought to our knees until the dark, heavy clouds recede.
“A temple with two layers, nine luminous veils. Like luminescent drapery. [We needed the right material. And we made it, says Hariri.] Borosilicate glass is very strong. If you break and melt borosilicate rods, you end up with a new material. A new cast glass. It had this quality we loved. [It has and carries the] idea of the embodied light. But on the inside, we wanted something with a soft light.”[9] The whole figure of the temple moves with daylight. “It’s a structure that has a glow to it”[10], a luminescence and radiance of its own. You remember these places. It stays inside you, it lives within you. You remember it, the feeling you felt.
And “That’s what you want; a space that is for everybody.”[11] With tremendous care and purpose, Hariri and his team created a space of worship, yes, but also a space of faith.
Using the pillars of the mind and body, like a shrine.
“Work done well is like worship.”[12]
Part 6 of The Power of Spaces looks and ends with the TED talk, The infinite alchemy of storytelling, by Zahra Al-Mahdi. We look at how storytelling is shaped by spaces. And how these spaces, which are largely taken up by screens and the media, shape our understanding of the society we grow up in, and the world we live in.
Reference
TED Radio Hour. 2020. “The Power Of Spaces.” National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/23/894580784/the-power-of-spaces.
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