The Lotus temple
The Lotus Temple is a mashup of the massing of the Lotus Temple in Delhi and the texture of the Cultural Center in New Caledonia by Renzo Piano.
The temple in Delhi is like a riff on the Sydney Opera House masses arranged in a circle. This is unusual architecture because it features compound curves like those found in botany, anatomy, and sculpture, rather than the flat surfaces and occasional simple curves found in traditional architecture. The first version was drawn by Temara Kalo and submitted to Burning Man for the 2020 Temple. We were the runner-up because we had nearly no crew.
We came back for the 2023 Temple with a crew of 40, including some superstars, and we added bamboo as the sheathing for sustainability and had a United Nations of diversity in the crew. But we were still the runner-up, oh well. Here are some of the renderings done by Luke Wilson, Usha Seejarim, Ricardo Gil, and Barrak Darweesh.
