Mahabodhi Monastery is a cool new building in Singapore which was shortlisted for the religious buildings category at World Architecture Festival 2015. The building has been made conveniently accessible by the recent opening of the Downtown Line Stage 2 (the building sits a few minutes from Beauty World Station) so I went to go take a look, and was pleasantly surprised by an array of intimately scaled visual delights.
The Mahabodhi Monastery eschews the archetype of the Chinese temple as a historically derived formal composition (as has been used in other Chinese temples in Singapore, even modern ones) in favour of an inward-out assemblage of finely crafted interior experiences.
The interior spaces on every level face out to a series of terracing natural courtyards piercing through the building. Even the basement opens up into a pair of open-air courtyards, drawing light down into a sunken landscape with a serene fish pond among draping vines.
The broken-down concrete forms of the modern monastery are shrouded in an steel and stone frame, shading the building from the harsh tropical sun and blurring the boundary between interior and exterior. The minimal steel structure supports a staggered array of thin onyx stone, which shines from the inside in the sun during the day and glows like a lantern at night.
Multiply Architects has a number of interesting upcoming buildings in Singapore, including the new building for the NUS School of Design and Environment, the new State Courts Complex in Chinatown, and a community hub in Punggol featuring terracing green rooftops and a sheltered public plaza.
This building has been added to Urban Architecture Now’s list of cool buildings in Singapore!
