The first Baha'i House of Worship was built in Ashgabat, in what is now Turkmenistan, in the early twentieth century, a building later damaged by earthquake and subsequently demolished under Soviet rule, so that the oldest surviving example of the type is instead the House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois, near Chicago, designed by the French Canadian architect Louis Bourgeois and completed after a lengthy building process spanning several decades in the early to mid twentieth century. Each subsequent continental House of Worship has been designed by a different architect working within the same fixed religious requirements, nine sides and a central dome, but given considerable freedom in style and material, producing buildings as visually distinct as the concrete lotus petal form of the Bahai House of Worship in New Delhi, popularly called the Lotus Temple and completed in 1986, and the more traditionally domed structure in Wilmette.
Because the tradition calls eventually for a House of Worship in every significant population center, more recent Baha'i building programs have shifted toward constructing more modest local and national Houses of Worship in addition to the handful of grand continental structures built earlier, extending the same nine sided design principle to a far larger number of considerably smaller buildings intended to serve individual communities. The building type remains, in global terms, still a relatively young architectural tradition, its earliest surviving examples less than a century old, with the religion's building program continuing to develop new instances of the form.