He Asked His Father-in-Law to Design It: The Shrine of the Báb

In The Priceless Pearl Rúḥíyyih Khánum devotes a careful chapter to the long, patient construction of the superstructure of the Shrine of the Báb on Mount Carmel — the building work that is, after the writing of his books, perhaps the most visible monument of Shoghi Effendi’s Guardianship.

The original Shrine, built by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in the early 1900s, was a low stone block set on the slope of the mountain. The Master had foreseen that, in time, a more fitting monument would rise above it — a colonnade, a dome, a structure adequate to the station of the Founder of the Bábí dispensation whose remains it housed. The work of imagining and supervising that structure fell to His grandson.

In 1942 — at the depth of the Second World War, when material was scarce and travel almost impossible — the Guardian made a decision Rúḥíyyih Khánum records with quiet pride. He asked his own father-in-law, William Sutherland Maxwell, to design the arcade and the superstructure.

Maxwell was one of the most celebrated architects of Canada; he had designed the Quebec Parliament Building, among other works, and was at this time living in Haifa near his daughter and the Guardian. He set to work in his small Haifa studio. The design that emerged would become one of the great twentieth-century examples of cross-cultural sacred architecture: a colonnade of Rose Baveno granite from northern Italy; arches in Chiampo stone, carved in Italy in an Oriental style; a golden dome above; and proportions Maxwell calculated to harmonise the Eastern and Western traditions of sacred building.

The execution was given to Dr. Ugo Giachery in Italy, working under wartime and post-war conditions of considerable difficulty. Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts how Giachery sourced the materials, how he engaged Italian artisans to cut, carve, and polish the stone according to Maxwell's drawings, and how twenty-eight columns, eight pilasters, and twenty-eight arches were produced — along with the many smaller architectural pieces — and shipped, piece by piece, to Haifa for assembly.

The completed structure was inaugurated in 1953. Rúḥíyyih Khánum's chapter on the construction is also, between its lines, a chronicle of the Guardian's working method: that he took huge architectural and institutional decisions in the quiet of his Haifa office, and that the great visible monuments of the Faith — the Shrine, the International Archives, the plans of the World Centre — emerged from a small office and a small family with very little fanfare and very great deliberation.

Paraphrased from The Priceless Pearl (Rúḥíyyih Khánum, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1969); see original for full text.

Khánum, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.