FOREST TEMPLE I

Markham, Ontario, Canada

Cultural New Construction

5,285 sf

Unbuilt

A deep reverence for nature and environmental stewardship resonates strongly within the Canadian context, inspiring communities to view forests as sacred trusts — spaces to protect, preserve, restore, and honour. This ethos guides the proposed design toward sustainable principles: timber, a renewable resource abundant across Canada, serves as the primary construction material, while prefabrication minimizes site disturbance and promotes efficiency.

In deference to the surrounding forest and the diversity of those who will gather here, the exterior takes on a modest, circular form — open and inviting, free from cultural specificity.

The interior carries the forest inward. A radial arrangement of timber columns evokes the presence of trees, extending the forested landscape into the heart of the building. Like a forest — with its biodiversity, stillness, and layered beauty — the space is conceived as a natural sanctuary: a place of withdrawal from the material world, where one may reflect, pray, and find quiet receptivity.

The building's undulating form is composed entirely of otherwise conventional linear timber members, carefully arranged along varying axes. Each "branch," with its own unique orientation, joins the next to create a unified whole — a demonstration that diverse elements, brought together with intention, produce something cohesive, beautiful, and strong. This, too, is an expression of what it means to be Canadian.

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FOREST TEMPLE II