Bamboo, Cob, Driftwood, Fabric, Light, PVC Pipe, Water
30' diameter x 15' tall. 2016
Costa Rica
Templo de la Tierra (Earth Temple) is a semi-permanent meditation space that was constructed for the 2016 edition of Envision Festival.
Created to offer sacred space for contemplation and ceremony, el Templo's design combines precise geometric architecture with hand-sculpted organic materials. This project was my first real foray into architecture and was full of experiments and lessons in natural building techniques.
The underlying architectural structure of the temple is a Star Dome, an innovative construction designed by Daisuke Takekawa, Ph.D and the Kyushu Fieldwork Society in Japan. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller and the mandalas of tibetan buddhism, the star dome achieves “maximum space out of minimum material” and results in an arrangement of 6 pentagrams (5-sided stars). It is literally a mandala projected into three-dimensional space that you can sit inside of, and it has the potential to effect one’s energy and attention much like meditating on a two-dimensional mandala can.
I was introduced to this beautiful structure by Christopher Gardner, and it was through his generous guidance that my team and I built a star dome as our temple’s “skeleton”.
To invite the “sensation of entering a deeper place”, we excavated the foundation of the temple by 12 inches, so that visitors literally stepped down into the earth. To further the experience of being held by the earth, we built a 3 foot cob wall around the base of the dome. Cob is an ancient building material made of clay, sand, plant fiber, water, and cow manure. All of these materials were sourced on site, utilizing the soil that was removed during excavation of the floor.
*Remarkably, as we sifted through the earth we had dug up, we found countless shards of terra-cotta fragments belonging to the long-gone indigenous inhabitants of this place. Some of these shards still bore painted lines and markings, and we even found a couple handles and legs of pots. The various shards that we collected found honored places on the altar and throughout the temple, but we made sure to bury them again at the close of the festival.
We sculpted the cob walls with geometric and spiraling relief designs, focused around 5 altars across the interior wall - aligned with the five-point symmetry of the Star Dome. The altars focused sculpted cob shelves around five illuminated ancestor masks.
Stretching over and beyond the dome of the temple was a hand-crafted shade-roof designed and made by master fabric artist Marcella Angrisano in greens, blues, and white to reflect the meeting place of the trees and the sky.
Occupying the center of the space is a focal altar oriented to the 4 “horizontal” directions . Vertically, the altar composes the four mystical elements: the base is formed from earthen cob, supporting a water fountain integrated into a sculpted “tree” Above the fountain hangs an iron dish that holds embers from the sacred fire outside and releases the smoke of offerings such as sage and incense into the air. This central “column” arrangement is a representation of the cosmographic model of the Axis Mundi/World Tree/World Mountain.
The exterior of the Templo de la Tierra is wrapped in driftwood branches that rise up to create the archway portal, and the threshold of the temple is an intricately crafted bamboo deck.
The Templo de la Tierra was built with the stellar assistance of Alexandra Beck, Marshall Julien, Jacob Troy, Lindsay Foreman, and Hallie Dalsimer, along with the incredible support of Living Space and the Envision Festival crew.
