“Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again” — Joseph Campbell
Physical Description:
Drawing its inspiration from canyons carved by wind and water over time, the Temple of Flux rises from the playa floor as a series of graceful double-curved walls. Their wide, heavy bases taper as they ascend, leading the eye from a solid urban foundation to an increasingly fragmented upper edge as these long angles reach to the sky.
The walls stand in an overlapping, linear layout, allowing access from all sides via passages of varying widths between them. The largest walls describe a large chamber inside the array, creating space for gathering and celebration. Oriented to the passages of the sun and moon, the many fissures in the smooth wall faces serve as angled ports for changing luminosity. With this intentional perforation of the massive walls, areas of light and shadow change over time, visually signifying the diversity of an urban, secular, and spiritual place. Small raised fire rings around the outside of the Temple, and a central cauldron in the interior allow warming light to illuminate the walls at night. The Temple of Flux creates as a place of physical and spiritual shelter, its scale and space simultaneously affording and inspiring a setting for reflection.
Structure and the Metropolis:
The relationship between humankind and the physical environment has continually shifted over the ages. First we sought shelter in geological formations, hiding in crevices and dwelling in caves that nature provided. Next we sought to alter these formations, then to construct our own shelters. We have constructed our built environment to reflect our social structures; they in turn inform who we are. The intensity of our collective efforts has now become almost geological; it seems we are a force of nature ourselves.
Our cities as massive structures have evolved over time, rising like mountains and spreading like the deserts. We look to them as places of permanence and wonder, where we inhabit the urban canyons carved by roads of commerce. The city differs little from the geological features in which we once dwelled: a metropolis too changes with time, shifting, growing, crumbling and eroding. The city will someday disappear altogether.
