Baha’i Temple in Santiago, Chile.
Baha’i Temple in Santiago, Chile. © HARIRI PONTARINI ARCHITECTS

Hariri’s vision might have followed suit. The budget for the project, about $30-million raised from Baha’i community donations, is not especially lavish. And yet, a dozen years later, the curves of the South American temple have remained largely intact. “I think it’s remarkable just how closely we remained true to that initial vision,” says Hariri Pontarini architect Justin Ford, who has worked full-time on the project since 2004, with more than three years in Santiago.

It did take a long time to build. The location shifted several times until the final site, formerly a private school’s golf course in the district of Penalolen, was acquired to house the temple and a grand garden by the landscape architect Juan Grimm. “Finding the site was an odyssey in itself,” Hariri says.

In the end, the temple sits in the foothills of the Andes, between mountains and city. The 26,000-square-foot building is essentially one open room, with a mezzanine wrapped in curves of walnut. The nine doors are of bronze, with custom handles. The interior is surrounded by a dome that is made up of nine elements – call them petals. These begin wide at the bottom of the building, and then narrow upward to meet in a spiral at the top, separated by crescent-shaped windows and a round window at the top. The outer surfaces of these petals are made of 32-millimetre-thick panels of cast glass, which have a ruddy, milky quality to them; the inner surfaces are made of smooth Portuguese marble. Both layers are translucent.

Stone, glass, wood and bronze – all of them detailed and built in a way that should last, as the Baha’i governing body requested, for 400 years. “These are ancient materials, but the technology is state-of-the-art,” Ford says.

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Indeed, the design of the structure and the creation of its components tested the limits of contemporary building science and fabrication – the temple sits in an active seismic zone.

Consider the outside of the dome, the surface that defines the temple’s silhouette and its texture. After several years of exploration by Hariri and his team, it was clear that alabaster wouldn’t work. Project architect Doron Meinhard explains that there was a concern about how that material would behave at high temperatures. “Alabaster starts to change, irreversibly, at about 37 degrees,” he says. On a hot day in Santiago, with a power failure, the building skin might well reach that temperature.

And what exactly happens to alabaster when it heats up? It begins to turn opaque. “Which,” Meinhard says matter-of-factly, “would not work.”

Letting the light in – maintaining the integrity of the design against the constraints of structure and budget – was their struggle for a dozen years. “At every step, I had to say: ‘This is interesting, let’s try this.’ It was a constant push to keep things clear, and to protect the idea,” Hariri says. “Curves,” he adds wryly, “aren’t easy.”

Each of the nine wings of the building have two surfaces – one of cast glass and one of stone, resting on a steel structure. Each of those two surfaces has more than 1,000 separate components, in more than 150 different shapes. Meinhard talks about the shapes in categories: droop, slump, bullnose, shoulder, elbow, spine.

Each piece was shaped using digital models, which was complex work – especially the hundreds of panels that are curved, which must be cut and formed in three dimensions. (This is exponentially more difficult than working with flat pieces.)