Temple in the Wood: Beyond Sensing Architecture

Abstract

The idea that we understand the world through our senses has been expressed time and again, yet modern architectural solutions have largely ignored or dismissed their potential to create beautiful or sublime sensory experience. Too often, buildings turn inward, absorbing their occupants in a lifeless environment devoid of meaningful connection to nature. Through the design of a Center for Jewish Life for Congregation Beth Israel - The West Temple in Cleveland, Ohio, this thesis endeavors to explore an architecture which is rooted in the sensory experience, but which does not ignore the interpretive and meaning-seeking nature of people. It is an architecture which does not intend to impose meaning, but which allows itself to be a repository of meaning and provides an opportunity for realizable ontological experience.