Temple of Thought

The Temple of Thought aspires to be the first place dedicated exclusively to man's ability to think. It is a place to sit. It is a place to stop even without thinking. The project, born in Rossa, Grisons, Switzerland envisages the placement of the Temple of Thought in public spaces around the world in order to emphasise the belonging to the human race of all, indiscriminately, beyond the diversity of cultural, religious, geographic, climatic, political, and economic environments. The first reproduction of the Temple is located in Tesserete, Tessin, Switzerland, as part of the Artinbosco project.

In each place, the material used for the construction, will be chosen according to a sustainable and environmentally responsible approach.

It is a project to be realised with artists and architects who are fellow friends of the good way of thinking.
This embracing object intends to mark and physically signal the importance of devoting time to the preciousness of human thinking, to make us alert and aware that our quality of life, our survival and choice of priorities to follow in life, are linked to the quality of the thoughts we allow ourselves to elaborate.

We have educated and trained ourselves to produce and consume, and we perpetrate this by necessity at a rapid pace, at the limit of the sustainability of our forces, leaving only residual, meagre spaces for the most important activity of our existence: thinking.

We live in a historical moment of the ripening of a distinctive fruit, born from the seed of a long-established belief in accepting as natural our ability to make abstraction from reality, which we absorb primarily through the sense of sight.

Beyond the ideologies and prejudices associated with a world we have saddled with superfluous content, which we still impose on ourselves, and that restrain our human potential in its ability to decipher and synthesise the complexity of our habitat, resides a freshness of thought freed from impediments we ourselves create and from which, thanks to our sublime capacity for abstraction, is good, beautiful and healthy.

This increasingly prominent capacity is the child of a cultural change that began in the modern or mechanical age, sustained by the emergence of an abstract representation of the world, now assimilated and finally accepted as a fundamental part of our daily lives.

The next, more recent historical phase of conceptual elaboration of abstract reality has brought us to the gates of new realities, those of the virtual world, as a direct consequence of an evolution, which I am sure, will be of the most positive and definitive in the life of man on this planet, in harmony with nature.

The Temple of Thought is also the ultimate synthesis of the studio’s thinking: an architecture that constantly seeks nature in all its representations and uses humans as the primary measure. An architecture that wants to express itself through a coordination between arts, human sciences and music, in search for harmony with nature and the cosmos.

In this sense, the role of perception, feelings, emotions and sociality becomes fundamental. To make architecture a tool capable of creating spaces connected with human beings, an organic art in harmony with the cosmos, it’s necessary to intervene in terms of impact on psychology, physiology and human behavior.
Therefore, it is necessary to talk about a neuro‐adaptive architecture.

Project: Temple of Thought
Location: Rossa, Svizzera / Tesserete, Svizzera
Project completed on: 2023
Height: 170cm / 300cm
Diameter: 130cm / 300cm
Area: 2,21m 2 / 9m 2
Materials: Local larch
Studio: Davide Macullo Architects SA – Lugano TI
Design Team: Davide Macullo, Andrea Conti, Jung Kim, Oleksandra Pohorila, Lorenza Tallarini, Aileen Forbes-Munnelly
Consultants: Frei Holzbau AG, Kriessern, St. Gallen, Switzerland
Photography credits: Corrado Griggi
Other Credits: Fondazione RossArte, Municipality of Rossa, ProCalanca, Azienda Forestale Calanca, ProGrigioni Italiano, Share-Architects, e-designfestival, rhnh rhnh.xyz, fondazione Artphilein, Italo Svevo editore, Associazione Artinbosco, Municipality of Capriasca

Davide Macullo, Andrea Conti, Jung Kim, Oleksandra Pohorila, Lorenza Tallarini, Aileen Forbes-Munnelly