More than Simply Encloses, Architecture Nurtures
2020 Winner of the National Best of Design Award, Religious/Institutional Category, from The Architect’s Newspaper.
For whomever visits a structure, architecture serves as a vessel of experiences and events. Sacred architecture can treasure memories, house beliefs and sustain confidence.
During the completion of the Buddha Pavilion project, Shamar Rinpoche, the distinguished Red Hat Lama of Tibet, passed. Poon Design’s fourth building for the 400-acre Buddhist retreat property honors the late Shamar Rinpoche. The Reliquary Building preserves relics of the 14th Shamarpa within a gold-leafed stupa, one of only three such stupas commissioned worldwide.
The design explores the spiritual divine principles of awakening, of moderation and equanimity. This 14th Shamarpa Reliquary Building completes the 250-foot long site axis that spiritually and visually links Poon Design’s previously completed Buddhist Pavilion and support building at the top of the hill, to the lake at the bottom, where a wood bridge and campus entry are located.
If Poon Design’s architecture here doesn’t look like much or doesn’t scream for attention, that is precisely the point. Poon Design chooses to not make a noisy statement, and instead, search for meditative stillness in architecture. Universally sacred, the projects express a crafted architecture of both human and spiritual hands.
