Lotus Temple

Before drawing a single line for this building, the architect Fariborz Sahba spent time travelling around India studying its temple traditions, and he kept running into the same motif across religions that otherwise shared almost nothing else visually: the lotus. It appears in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Islamic art across the subcontinent, which made it, for a Bahá'í house of worship meant to welcome people of every faith, the rare symbol that didn't belong to any single one of them. Sahba read it as a fitting image for the Bahá'í idea that purity and unity can emerge out of a murky, divided past — a flower rising clean out of muddy water.

Building that image at full scale took nearly ten years. The structure's 27 marble-clad petals aren't decorative panels bolted onto a frame — they're thin-shell concrete structures engineered to be self-supporting, arranged in three overlapping ranks of nine that also satisfy the strict nine-sided geometry required of every Bahá'í house of worship. Getting curved, load-bearing concrete shells clad in Greek Pentelic marble to hold that shape without visible joints or supports was, at the time, a genuinely difficult engineering problem rather than a simple sculptural exercise.

Since its 1986 opening, the building has drawn more than 70 million visitors, at various points reportedly outpacing the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal in annual footfall — an unusual outcome for a building with no clergy, no fixed liturgy, and no sermons. Anyone of any faith or none is free to sit inside in silence, and readings are drawn from the scriptures of multiple world religions rather than one, which is less a design footnote than the entire point of the building.

Getting there

5 km from Tighri. Indira Gandhi International Airport (DEL) is about 16 km away.