Architecture at Everest Semester 2: Week 1 Post 3

Intersession
Architecture and Design
Audie Santos
5/21/13

May 21th, 2013

Short Project: Jewish Octahedral Star Temple

This is the model of my Jewish Star Temple

Today's short project was to build a sacred place of worship for the inhabitants of Redwood City. I began to think which religion would I would be building this scared place for. Christian Churches are common in my area, so I decided to make a Jewish Temple. I started to think what could I associate with Judaism. This led me to a star. I decided to create a star-like building that would have great lighting. I was wondering, which type of polyhedron star should I make. Then it hit me, I had to use the octahedral star due to its 8 vertices and the fact that it resembles the Star of David. 4 vertices would face upwards while the other 4 downwards. The upward facing vertices will face the North, South, East, and West. Where 2 outward facing triangles meet, there will be a triangular window on the upper triangle and a rectangular window on the lower triangle. In total there are 4 entrances, each one adjacent to the window faces.

This is the interior of the Jewish Star Temple

On the interior, the speaker or priest would be placed in the center so that every person would view him at different angles. The seating is arranged like bleachers. To get to the top of the seating arrangement you enter from the bottom. Even the my model depicts the temple having 2 floors, it really only has one large chamber with both floors mixed into one large ceiling to create a vaulted ceiling. This vaulted ceiling would help the speaker's voice project and emanate across the chamber, so that every person can hear whoever is speaking. The window design allows for light to come in freely during daytime sermons so that the cost for electrical implementation would be low.