Architectural Brief: Vajrasana Retreat Centre Vision We envisage a journey through a sacred realm of beauty and simplicity culminating in a stupa courtyard and a visionary shrine room. Vajrasana is a place of collective and individual spiritual practice that includes meditation, ritual, friendship, communication, study, appreciation of the natural world, beauty, simplicity, silence and community living. Any development of the site needs to support and enhance all these dimensions of spiritual life. The retreat centre needs to encourage a transformative experience of kindness, friendship and awareness awareness of self and others, awareness of the environment and of the Dharma. It also needs to express and include these values throughout the design process. Specifications We want the retreat centre to be able to accommodate 60 people. In addition there should be a community space for up to 6 people. We are not anticipating holding 2 main retreats concurrently, however we may want to be able to host a meeting while there is a retreat going on. The retreat centre should be ecological and energy efficient. It should enable ease of universal access throughout. The built environment is to be made of materials sympathetic to the locality, and is to relate creatively to the surrounding landscapes. We are committed to keeping the house, its adjacent lounge, the two solitary huts and the ponds in the grounds. We do not anticipate being limited to the footprints of the other existing buildings. The shrineroom The shrine room should be a place of beauty and simplicity where the Buddha lives. We imagine a large rupa of Shakyamuni Buddha, seated on the Vajrasana, with possibly paintings to fill in the scene. The shrine should be an intrinsic part of the design, with the room envisaged as an extension of the shrine. There could also be other niches / alcove spaces where people can build shrines for individual retreats in relationship to the main image. Lighting, offerings, and so forth should all be designed as integral to the shrine rather than added on ad hoc later. We d want a sense of felt-connection to the shrine, rather than distance (e.g. not a church altar), but at the same time we want a sense of reverence and inspiration. 1
We imagine the shrine room itself as an architectural feature. If it is a rectangular room, it shouldn t be too long and thin, so as to allow horseshoe sitting, walking meditation, and not having some people too far away from the shrine. We may not use the Suffolk barn. Lighting, natural light and ventilation need to be intrinsic to the design (there will need to be extract fans for ventilation, although natural ventilation should be used where possible). As the shrineroom is a place of peace, there needs to be good sound insulation. To help create a sense of beauty and simplicity, under-floor heating would be preferable. We imagine the shrine lobby as a place that prepares you for entering a sacred space. Our vision is of a journey into the shrine room using graduations of dark and light perhaps, or different materials. This is as important to us as it s practical value. There needs to be big enough storage space for rupas and shrine stuff, cushions and mats. We will need a big enough cloakroom/lobby designed to allow for easy passage as you enter and leave the shrine room, taking into account the numbers we are envisaging being on retreat. The stupa courtyard The penultimate stage of the journey to the Buddha shrine is the Stupa Courtyard adjacent to the shrine room. We want to create a beautiful stupa courtyard/garden, where walking meditation and outside rituals could take place. There might also be some kind of water feature(s). We want to balance the privacy of being in the shrine room with an inspiring relationship to the natural world. The stupa courtyard/garden would be designed in such a way to make it easy to move from seated meditation in the shrine room to walking meditation around the stupa. In terms of the shrine room s relationship to the outside, there should be a quality of spaciousness in the building and adjoining environment. We would like intrinsic spaces for relics/ashes/ sacred objects of sangha members who have died. This could be in a stupa courtyard or it could be in the shrine room. The dining area Community life and friendship are central to our conception of spiritual life, so the dining room is an important space, which needs to support and help foster deeper relationships. The dining area should seat 60 comfortably (by our standards i.e. long tables) and could have a dividing partition, so that a section of the room could be partitioned off for smaller retreats. We want to encourage people to eat together and be together, so we d like the dining to have beautiful views out in to the surrounding countryside plenty of glass and sunlight. It could possibly be an L shape with the option of eating outside. 2
The dining room will need storage for crockery, cutlery, cereals, etc, as well as a fridge for milk and spreads. Attention will need to be given to acoustics so that the room is not too noisy when in use. Relationship of the dinning room to kitchen and storage The kitchen should be next to the dining room, with easy access to and from the kitchen. The storeroom(s) should be next to kitchen. There might be a hatch or servery directly from the kitchen. There should be separate in and out doors to allow good circulation between the kitchen and the dining room. Kitchen and utility Again, a vital part of our vision of spiritual life is generosity; one important expression of this is working harmoniously together on a common task. The kitchen therefore needs be a space in which the volunteers who help prepare food can work easily and smoothly as a team, with adequate space for food preparation, washing up, etc. The kitchen also needs to take into account the different sizes of retreats, and needs to be designed so that a number of retreatants can be chopping veg. while others might be washing up, etc There will need to be separate areas for washing/prep, and so forth. We may wish to have dishwashers. We will need various utility spaces such as potwash, washing up, pantry, cool room, fridge/freezers, housekeeping stores, and laundry room. Lounge Like the dining room, the lounge needs to encourage people to be together and develop friendship. We would therefore like a new lounge next to the dining room, about the same sort of size as the current lounge. This might also act as a study room or library. Toilets Toilets will be needed in easy access to the dining room/kitchen area, as well as associated with the accommodation (see below). Accommodation We want to balance the need for privacy (and therefore single rooms) with encouraging a sense of community living and shared life. So although we would like to see more single rooms, we still want to emphasise shared rooms. To accommodate 60 people, we envisage 10 spacious double rooms that could accommodate 3 people if needs be (perhaps with a fold-away bed); one 4 bed room; one 3 bed room; 6 singles; and 2 universally accessible single rooms sharing a suitable bathroom. In addition, 15 people would sleep in the existing house (see below). The bedrooms should have adequate space for belongings. 3
We are not intending to have many en-suite bathrooms, perhaps one or two, such as in the 4- bedded room. We would like small blocks with bathrooms and toilets, rather than one big toilet block. It may be helpful to be able to not use part of the retreat centre for smaller retreats. Changes to the existing house The kitchen and dining rooms would be moved from the house. Instead we would like extra bedrooms (to accommodate 15 people in total), improved bathroom facilities, and one or two study/discussion group rooms. Community space We would like community accommodation consisting of bedrooms for up to 6 people plus kitchen, bathroom, toilets, and living space. There should also be an office for running of the retreat centre. The space would need to balance privacy perhaps with its own garden and accessibility, especially for deliveries, etc. Deliveries and storage Consideration needs to be given to deliveries and storage for example we have deliveries to fill the gas tanks and transport arriving to empty the sewage tank. This needs to be taken into account in the design of the Centre. We will need space for a workshop, an office, and possibly a studio. We will need storage space for maintenance, spare furniture, linen, housekeeping, and washing/ drying laundry. Other storage areas include garaging for tractor and diesel; garden storage and greenhouse; and a place to deliver woodchip and manure. Utilities Water in East Anglia is predicted to become more and more of an issue. We are likely to need an additional, and deeper, borehole to provide sufficient water, plus a storage tank. Although we could connect up to the mains this would be expensive and water will become more expensive. Consequently we need to consider water efficiency e.g. capturing rainwater and economical water usage. We will also need to find solutions for providing sufficient supplies of gas and electricity as well as sewage processing for the expanded site. 4
Parking The parking for retreatants should be discreet and away from the heart of the retreat centre. Consideration needs to be given to the route from the car park to the retreat centre. We may need to have separate parking for the community and a service road for deliveries, etc. Flexible spaces We will want some flexible spaces that could cater for particular needs e.g. an art room, children s space, yoga space. It would be helpful to have a second Shrine room, although this might not need to be a dedicated space. Solitary huts The new buildings may make the solitary huts, especially Han Shan feel less private. We could turn Han Shan around the other way, but this would make it face north rather than south, making it dark. Another possibility would be to have a wall around it and creat a walled garden, although this would have to be a low maintenance garden e.g. a Zen garden. We also need to improve current huts, especially the kitchenettes. We need universal access to at least one of the solitary huts. This would entail ramps and a proper path to the hut, perhaps just to Han Shan. There needs to be easy access for solitary retreatants to food store, recycling etc. Gardens Part of our vision of the retreat centre is a place of beauty away from the city. We want to support retreatants in deepening their relationship to, and feeling for, the natural world. So we need to consider the relationship between built environment and the natural environment including views, the journeys that you go on through the retreat centre, and the relationship to existing gardens. There may be a need to redesign gardens. We want people on retreat to feel in close contact with the natural world. Local people We want to support the development of a local sangha and encourage local people to visit and/or use the retreat centre. This would most likely be centred on the residential community, especially if the community space was generous enough to have non-residential class/day for local people. 5