Building a house of worship

Weekender

By ALPHONSE BARIASI

A PARTICULARLY pious seminarian, so the story goes, routinely prayed at the chapel long after his colleagues would stop in time for dinner.
On one such occasion, when the rest of the future priests realise that their friend is not present at the mess, one of them walks back to the chapel and, sure enough, sees him kneeling down, lost in meditation.
Trying not to startle him, his friend approaches silently and whispers his name. “Yes Lord,” comes the automatic response!
A crude joke perhaps but the point there is that a house of prayer is where a penitent, needy or thankful soul expects to be closest to God – and hear him speak audibly if that were at all possible, like our fictional seminarian believed he did.
That is the object of religious architecture. In designing a place of worship, the architect, even if he or she were not a believer, has to appreciate and encompass such spiritual considerations in their work.
Baha’i houses of worship which stand out as landmarks in their localities around the world have all been built with prayer and quiet meditation in mind.
The website transindiatravels.com lists seven such buildings as the most famous Baha’i temples, among them the Lotus Temple in Delhi, India.
I was privileged to have visited the Lotus Temple in 2000, apart from another of the country’s major tourist attractions, the Taj Mahal in Agra.
On a humid day, my group of visiting journalists attending a course at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication in New Delhi entered the famous temple. The most striking feature was the tranquil and cool interior.
As dictated by Baha’i teaching, there are no items such as statues or an altar as found in temples or churches of other faiths. Yet in the hallowed quiet the non-believer might be excused for acknowledging the divine right there!
The building is composed of 27 free-standing marble-clad “petals” arranged in clusters of three to form nine sides, with nine doors opening onto a central hall capable of seating 2,500 people.
An essential architectural character of a Baha’i house of worship is a nine sided circular shape.

The PNG House of Worship
Recently, the Universal House of Justice of the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa, Israel granted approval for the construction of two national houses of worship, one in PNG and the other in the African Republic of Congo.
While planning for the Congolese house of worship is still ongoing, the design for the one here was unveiled on March 22 in Port Moresby.
Architects Henry Lape and Saed Granfar who are Baha’is themselves came up with the concept of the building which will be located on a knoll overlooking the Waigani Drive, next to the Bethel Worship Centre.
Lape says the final approved design evolved from concepts they had developed separately and jointly.
“It evolved from something else in the early stages,” Lape explains.
“Apart from local input from professionals, the Baha’i World Centre has also guided the design work. Many others not in the picture have also made an input in the project,” he adds.
The temple’s central edifice to rise 17 metres will have a seating capacity of 350, while the nine gable-roofed entrances will reflect a traditional structure that, according to the design team, is associated with the sacred throughout several major regions of the country.
Lape says because it is going to be the national worship centre, they needed to come up with a concept that that would unite all of the country.
“We settled for the patterns in the art of weaving which is used all over PNG in baskets, mats, bilums, head dresses, etc,” he says.
A common feature of such worship centres around the world is the lush gardens around them so Baha’i communities throughout PNG have been asked to contribute some native plants which will be incorporated in the landscaping.
The architects said about the design: “In traditional village life, which remains alive and vibrant in Papua New Guinea today, and in urban households alike, woven surfaces and objects are found in abundance. It is an image which resonates closely with ‘home’ for many of us, a functional and inherently beautiful art form which we interact with daily.”
When the concept was proposed to professionals, many pushed it aside while some gave positive critiques.
It was two of Granfar’s friends, a Pole and a German he had met in Shanghai, China who said it was “buildable.”
These two friends have been engaged as project engineers and will work in partnership with a local to finalise the engineering work before a builder is contracted.
Lape estimates that the project, likely to cost no more than US$8 million or roughly K25million, will l take up to two years to complete depending also on how soon the NCDC building board grants approval for work to start.
“The temple in Port Moresby will stand as a universal place of worship open to all the inhabitants of a locality, irrespective of their religion, background, ethnicity, or gender,” secretary of the national spiritual assembly of Baha’i of PNG, Confucius Ikoirere says.
“The craft of weaving is analogous to the process of building unity in diversity,” the architects said in a recent post.
“Individual strands come together to form something infinitely stronger than the object’s constituent parts, and the whole draws on the contributions of each individual strand.”
The house of worship will be another iconic building in the Waigani area, about a kilometre west of the landmark National Parliament building.
It promises to be a building not only Baha’is but Papua New Guineans generally would be proud of, Lape says.
The Baha’i faith in PNG has come a long way since 1955 when New Ireland school teacher Apelis Masakmat became the first Baha’i here.
Baha’is today are found all around the country and have centres in most urban centres.
They currently number about 60,000 but many more in rural parts of the country may not have been properly registered and accounted for.