Concrete Faith: The creation of the Bahá’í house of worship (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Concrete Faith: The creation of the Bahá’í house of worship (2023)

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I implore you, if you are within an hour of Evanston Illinois, go to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%CA%BC%C3%AD_House_of...

I agree. Other than the many beautiful homes and beaches, there are not a lot of things to see in Wilmette. Unlike other large buildings, mainly in the Northwestern (Evanston) campus area to the south, the Baha'i Temple is truly majestic and elegant that blends in well with the surrounding neighborhood.

Grab some baked goods at Hewn (in Evanston), visit the Bahai temple, and then walk across the street to Gillson Park to wander the Lake Michigan shore and eat your goods from Hewn.

The easternmost portion of Northwestern's campus also has a nice walking/biking path along the lakeshore with a great view looking back towards the Chicago skyline.

Take off your sandals, and soak your toes in that crisp clear water, but only a little past your ankles or the moment will have spoiled by the crackle of the beach nazis on atvs, "No SWIMMING! GET OUT OF THE WATER".

The recent changes have gotten absurd

That's a shame. I recall last summer seeing some dedicated and well-wetsuited people swimming much closer to town, along the concrete shoreline to the north of Ohio Street Beach.

That's the difference between the city and the suburbs. Swimming in the city is fine if a lifeguard is on duty.

https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks-facilities/beaches

Swimming in the Great Lakes is very dangerous, especially if you are not familiar with the behavior of the lakes.

https://glsrp.org/statistics/

Swimming in the Great Lakes is not dangerous at all. They account for 14 drowning deaths per year out of 4500 across the country. That's a quarter of the annual U.S. drownings in the Atlantic despite having more U.S. coastline.

I hate Illinois Nazis.

So much for the land of the free.

If you're a tourist, know that you can take the Purple Line elevated train from downtown Chicago. At the end of the train line, it is about 0.5 KM east, along a lovely tree-lined street with sidewalks. The street turns into cobblestones after a short distance; it is a very wealthy area.

In Oak Park, there's also Wright's concrete Unity Church from 1906 for extended Chicago area architectural sight seeing. It's about twenty miles.

https://flwright.org/explore/unity-temple

For those not familiar with Baha’i temples or houses of worship, lmk. I’m a Baha’i in case anyone has questions. Fun fact… do you know who introduced Steve Jobs to Wozniak was a Baha’i? It’s the only tech related thing I could think of when I wrote this. But Baha’is are pretty progressive towards tech.

Every other value system on Earth must be evaluated by its relationship with tech, whether they see technology as a net positive or net negative force.

heh, i didn't know that. more well known is actually this quote by Shoghi Effendi written in 1936 predicting the internet:

A mechanism of world inter-communication will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvelous swiftness and perfect regularity.

People need beauty. When people are put in an ugly environment and situated in a culture of ugliness, this need will be expressed in destructive ways. In such an environment, the female body will become increasingly the sole focus of male interest as it becomes the only source of beauty in that environment. And that kind of intensity, which would otherwise would sublimated in the richness of a beautiful environment, is now directed entirely toward the female body. This doesn't bode well for either men or women.

Beauty is not a luxury. It is essential to humanity. Deprive us of beauty, fill our world with ugly architecture and ugly art, with ugly human culture, and you will breed misery.

some people perceive beauty as alien and if burdened with competitive mindset, they seek to destroy it

Nobody truly hates beauty, but some people view most other people as cattle, and they don't want to invest a ton of money in making the barn beautiful. Especially because they rarely / never have to lay eyes on the barn. But their own homes? Yeah, they'll make those beautiful.

as in golden faucets beautiful?

So according to this theory to accentuate romance between a man and woman, the woman needs to make sure she’s placed in the most hideous settings possible to magnify her allure to her prospective mate?

Fascinating. All those romantic restaurants and locales really have screwed up their marketing.

This is a great tiktok comparing the Bahá’í with other concrete structures of that era (Brutalism)

https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.tpanova/video/7252757064517225770...

Baháʼí buildings are gorgeous; rivaling (US) Hindu and LDS temples. I wish there were more of them.

The complex in Haifa is just superb.

Search for the Baha’i Lotus Temple of India. It’s also beautiful

In other news and by contrast, Scientology opened a massive, ugly storefront across from UT on Guadalupe St. in Austin, TX. (Look at this celebration of stupidity.[0]) I guess they couldn't get sucker enough tech people in Mountain View, CA on Castro St., so they had to try again in a different market preying on naive young people, influenced by TikTok and/or evangelical Christianity, who aren't as cosmopolitan.

If you're going to pitch people magical thinking, don't steal from them and don't fill them with awful ideas like ethnoreligious nationalism, suicide bombing, external locus-of-control, denial of science, "infallible" messiahs, excessive generosity harming individual survival, or shunning "infidels".

0. https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2346782/grand_opening_ideal...

well, until earlier this century the focus was on getting one house of worship for each continent or continental region. but in 2017 the first local or national house has been built and since then 4 more have been completed, two are under construction and 3 more in planning. that means soon in just a short time their number will have more than doubled. and i am pretty sure it won't stop there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%CA%BC%C3%AD_House_of...

When I used to live in Chicago and bike race, this was one of the local sprint finish points on weekend group rides. A long flat road into a short climb and some of my favorite memories.

There's also a beautiful cobbled street on the other side of it.

"The Beauty of Concrete" (20 days ago: 89 messages)

The exterior of the Baha'i temple in Wilmette is beautiful but the interior is very plain. I'm not sure if this is intentional and reflective of some tenet of the faith.

it doesn't, no

Without paywall:

https://archive.ph/3JiFf

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