We schemed to throw you off, confident that our clue about the location being in an “L-accessible suburb” would make many of you think of Oak Park and, in particular, architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, the Unity Temple.
How wrong we were. Nearly everyone who guessed last week came up with the right answer: the soaring Bahai House of Worship in Wilmette.
Some of you even had personal connections to the temple.
Walter McCarty of Naperville wrote to say his grandfathers’ construction company was involved in building it, and Donna Scott of Glenview wrote, “As a child, I remember swimming in Lake Michigan across from the Temple, so in a way I watched the final stages of the construction.”
(A few readers were bamboozled, incorrectly positing The Unity Temple in Oak Park or the BAPS Shree Swaminarayan Mandir temple in Bartlett. Better luck this week!)
Head to the Bahai House of Worship and be prepared to see a building unlike anything else in North America.
White, domed and covered in fantastic filigree, the temple marries Eastern and Western architectural styles as designed by Bahai architect Louis Bourgeois, whose vision was completed in 1953 after more than three decades of work. Bits of the building feel like Islamic mosques, bits echo Romanesque cathedrals, other parts feel very Gothic.
Look carefully and you’ll discover the blending of East and West goes even further; the building contains religious symbols from all over the world, mirroring a central Bahai belief in the unity of all religions under God.
“It is loaded with symbology,” said Scott Conrad, a Bahai working on restoration of the temple steps, terraces and gardens. “If you ever come and really start staring at the building, there are different symbols of Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It’s all over the place.”
It’s even in the gardens, which are being restored to Bahai landscape architect Hilbert Dahl’s original design, which was simplified as the temple was being built due to a lack of funds, Conrad said.
If you were to fly over the Bahai House of Worship in a hang-glider, you would see nine circular gardens and nine approaches to the temple.
The circular gardens are more Western while the paths to the temple reflect the long approaches to temples of the East.
Think Taj Mahal meets English gardens.
The restoration of these gardens, which began in 2000, includes more fountains, a reflecting pool and almost entirely new landscaping, Conrad said.
Also, a tunnel under the terrace is being built to house the state-of-the-art equipment to control the fountains, irrigation and lighting, he said.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/flash/2005-07/18673246.swf
Thanks to all of this inter-cultural blending, the Bahai House of Worship feels at once very familiar and very exotic.
So go and stroll around the grounds. Breathe deeply and smell the flowers and the fresh breeze off the lake.
Walk inside the temple and admire the amazing detail work, envisioned decades ago by an architect with a vast knowledge of religious symbols and a wild imagination.
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