Nine-Sided Nonesuch

Chicago motorists were heading north last week to see one of the most fantastic pieces of architecture in the U.S.--the continent's first Baha'i Temple of Worship (see cut), on Lake Michigan's shores in suburban Wilmette, Ill.

The exterior ornamentation of the domed, 180-ft. Temple, a melange of ancient styles sparkling with tons of white quartz crystals, was newly completed after eleven years' labor. Nine-sided, it stands in a nine-acre park, is supported by nine concrete piers sunk 90 feet below the water level of nearby Lake Michigan.

Nine is of great significance in the Baha'i religion (TIME, July 20, 1931), because it is the final digit. The Baha'i faith--boasting 29 adherents in Wilmette, 3,000 in the U.S., and more than 1,000,000 in the world--was founded in Persia in 1863 by one Mirza Husayn-'Ali, who took the name of Baha'u'llah (Glory of God). His followers emphasize the unity of mankind, universal peace, abolishment of extreme inequalities of wealth, and a world faith absorbing all religions now extant. Prominent Baha'is include Mrs. Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler, wife of New York's onetime lieutenant governor. The Wilmette Temple's nine sides symbolize the world's nine chief religions, but not all Baha'is agree as to what those religions are. Among the religious symbols in the Temple are the swastika, the circle, the triangle, the Jewish six-pointed star, the Greek and Roman Cross.

Permission from Palestine. Permission to erect a Baha'i House of Worship "in the center of the Western World" was received from Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'u'llah's son, in 1902. The fact that there were very few Baha'is in the U.S. at that time made the project seem overbold. But by 1912 the Temple's site had been bought, and blessed by Abdu'l-Baha himself. Cried he: "Now praise be to God that Chicago and its environs, from the beginning of the diffusion of the Fragrances of God, have been a strong heart."

In 1920 a competition for the Temple's design was won by the late New Jersey architect Louis Bourgeois, a Baha'i believer. Bourgeois took ship to the Holy Land, showed Abdu'l-Baha his drawings. Abdu'l-Baha approved and set the building's cost at $1,000,000 (cost to date: $1,000,342).

Bourgeois got Washington's architectural sculptor John J. Earley to do the external ornamentation. Bourgeois did not live to see the results: he died in 1930, on the Temple grounds. Wrote he of the shrine: "It is too sacred to me to try to utter words about it. . . . Most people who appreciate this 'new art' look to me as the creator of it, but the One Who did it, they do not know--that One was the Blessed Perfection, Baha'u'llah."

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