Baha'i House of Worship

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.

A Baha'i House of Worship is deliberately built to accommodate anyone, of any religion or none, who wishes to enter for prayer or reflection, and what happens inside is correspondingly minimal by the standards of most of the building types described alongside it: there is no ordained clergy to lead a service, no fixed liturgy, no sermon and no ritual comparable to the Eucharist, the Torah reading or the salat, only the reading or chanting, sometimes to music, of scripture drawn not only from Baha'i texts but from the sacred writings of other world religions, reflecting the faith's teaching that previous revelations share a common divine source. This absence of clergy and prescribed ritual is not an accident of underdevelopment but a considered expression of Baha'i teaching on the essential unity of religion and the direct, unmediated relationship the tradition holds each individual should have with the divine.

Baha'i scripture envisions each House of Worship eventually surrounded by a set of dependent social service institutions, potentially including a hospital, university, orphanage and other charitable establishments, so that the building of prayer sits at the center of a larger complex oriented toward practical service rather than standing alone as a purely devotional structure, though in practice most existing Houses of Worship have not yet developed this full surrounding complex. The building's open invitation and minimal prescribed ritual together make it function architecturally almost as a counter example to nearly every other entry in this section, each of which encodes a specific tradition's particular liturgical requirements into its plan.