Bahá'í House of Worship Gardens

The story

If you drive north along Sheridan Road past Evanston, a bone-white, lacework dome suddenly looms over the suburban tree line like an ornate space vessel docked beside Lake Michigan. This is the oldest surviving Bahá'í House of Worship on Earth and the only one in North America. Designed by French-Canadian architect Louis Bourgeois and dedicated in 1953 after four decades of delays brought on by two world wars and the Great Depression, the sanctuary stands 190 feet tall. To get its pale, luminescent surface, concrete specialist John Earley ground up white quartz stone and blended it with white Portland cement, molding precast panels that glisten under direct sunlight and catch the glow of interior lights after dark.

Walk around the exterior columns and you'll find an understated piece of architectural subversion. Carved into the concrete pillars, sitting side by side, are the Christian cross, the Jewish Star of David, the Islamic star and crescent, and other ancient religious symbols—a physical manifestation of the Bahá'í principle that all major faiths stem from a single divine source. The entire complex is organized around the number nine, considered the digit of completion and unity. Nine main pillars support the structure, leading to nine outer doors, nine fountain basins, and nine symmetrical garden quadrants sprawling across seven acres.

A lesser-known piece of local lore: during World War II, military pilots training out of the nearby Glenview Naval Air Station relied on the shimmering, unfinished dome rising off the lakefront as a primary visual landmark for practice runs over Lake Michigan, referring to it in flight logs as 'Point Oboe.' Today, the temple remains one of the Midwest's most singular structures—a hand-carved, quartz-infused concrete sculpture hidden in plain sight between quiet Wilmette streets and the lake shore.