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Wednesday, 11 April 2007 | Levent OZLER
The Temple of Design
New Places of Worship for a Multiethnic Society
 Marking the Milan design week, IED is presenting an event entitled "The Temple of Design", a modern place of worship to cater for the needs of a multiethnic society.
Five projects are going on show in the Spazio Teatro IED Moda Lab, presenting a temple as a place of worship, but as a meeting place as well, that also features a library, a conference hall, a canteen and two museums, one temporary and the other permanent.
Here the students hope that eleven major religions will be able to cohabit peacefully: three of them descended from the religion of Abraham (Jewry, Christianity and Islam), three derived from Hindu origins (Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism), three from the Far East (Confucianism, Taoism and Shinto) and two that are located between the areas of Islam and Hinduism (Sikhism and Zoroastrianism).
Custom designed around the five models, the installation expresses the elements shared by all these religions, elements whose meaning remains unchanged in the various different traditions: water as the purifying element, the numbers from 1 to 10, the four elements and their symbols - earth, water, air and fire - and four colours: brown, dark blue, light blue and orange.
Sounds, smells and images will accompany visitors along a real, virtual and spiritual path that offers an experience of time out from chaos, in a circle of equilibrium and cultural openness in a temple for all.
The students' work is based on an ambitious project: the master plan for the park in Torriano di Martignacco, near Udine, which stipulates an area to be devoted to a place of worship, a temple of peace, of the religions and of design.
The students at IED were involved and invited to design their place of worship after Luca Cendali, a lecturer in IED's Three-year course in Interior Design, met the entrepreneur Antonio Bardelli, owner of Cittą Fiera and of the adjacent park, where the temple is to be built: work is to be started in 2015.
It was the need to find ways for people from different ethnic origins, practising different religions, to live together in society today and in future - a need that the Institute perceives very strongly - that guided the students in their quest for a perfect meeting point between creativity and reality.
The Projects on Show
In transit by Yuji Kobayashi and Claudia Reder
The temple is a meeting place for worshipping both together and alone. The outdoor areas can be used for recreation.
This project intervenes at the point that is shared by all religions: although the various rituals are different, the moment when the worshipper passes out of the profane world and into the sacred precinct is the same for all the faithful.
The three main areas are:
- The semi-sphere (meeting zone)
- The central volume (individual zones)
- The outdoor passageway with a fence and staircase, which underscores the concept of passage and revives the traditional idea of the temple as a precinct.
The spiritual eye by Clara Cantł, Anja Kuebler and Elena Marini
The spiritual eye represents every individual's desire to seek his own divinity beyond the earthly world.
The square, the spiral and the circle are the elements used to build a path of culture, purification and ascent to godliness. The project is divided into three levels, which maintain these characteristics. The last, the room of worship, comprises a room for praying together to all the religions, on which eleven niches open. In each of these, we wanted to maintain the identity of each culture by using typical materials, symbols and objects.
The fourth element by Arnt-Jensen Vibeke and Chiara Polenghi
In all religions, water is a symbol of renewal, growth and regeneration. It is the source of life, of purification, of birth and of energy. It is a cradle for meditating and discovering a deeper spirituality, in harmony with godliness.
That is how our project came about, inducing the religions' diversities to converge on the unique focal point of water. On the ground floor, every religion has a space of its own reserved for worship; four rivers flow together into a common source of water in the centre. The first floor houses the museum of sacred art, the conference room, the library and the canteen.
Archetypal Harmony by Matteo Cupella and Simone Franco Sessi
Every religion, no matter how complex, is rooted in a few, clear messages: Harmony with yourself, Harmony with others, Harmony with the surrounding world.
These three aspects have been factored into this project, using geometry (circle, square and triangle), numerology and the musical scale in Do (the most harmonious), all in the proportions of the golden section. We created sixteen spaces dedicated to the religions and four auxiliary spaces on the ground floor, while the museum is housed on the first floor. All the spaces can be used independently at the same time and they can also be used more extensively, so that the structure, which is oriented to the four points of the compass, lives harmoniously.
Religions system by Cristina Barbieri, Gianmatteo Malchiodi and Federica Carla Rosa
This project aims at persuading eleven situations to cohabit in a single space: eleven unique and distinct religions that merge into a perfect system. The building has two levels: the ground floor houses support activities, such as the conference hall, the library-Internet point, the bar and the fixed and mobile museum, on this occasion adapted to house a photography exhibition; the first floor is a single space dedicated to the rituals of the eleven living religions.
Numerical Symbolism
1- One is Absolute, the circle, the non-manifest beginning, the motor.
2- Two is the primordial split, chaos, the fall, potential; One becomes Two: that is the mystery of life.
3- Three is the reconciliation of opposites, balance, the Trinity.
4- Four is the world of material, the elements, the directions, the seasons, the winds. Everything that was created originally is Four. Four, but with the potential of Five.
5- Five is the nuptial number, the quintessence, the microcosm that needs Six to become manifest.
6- Six is the plot, space-time: in all traditions, space and time are measured in multiples of Six.
7- Seven is the number of mystical evolution, of the growth of stations.
8- Eight is the renewal of balance, the octave, the octahedron.
9- Nine is the achievement of perfection, godliness for its own sake, human pregnancy, the enneagram, the limit of the first series, of the return to Unity.
10- This is the return to Unity: ten is the number of the laws, of the Sefiroth, of the Tetraktis.
IED: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/8851/
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