Bhutan Elder Sangha Sanctuary
Bhutan Elder Sangha Sanctuary
Punaka, Bhutan
The Bhutan Elder Sangha Sanctuary is a residential compound, Buddhist sanctuary, and healthcare facility in rural Bhutan. Our goal was to create a retirement home for elder monks, including a healthcare facility, which would allow the monks to age in place within a vibrant, intergenerational community. We worked closely with local leaders and government agencies aiming to create a vital hub for Buddhist life.
The development clusters living, social, and spiritual zones in a village-like compound within a 73-acre wooded campus. The designs serve both to preserve and to contemporize traditional ways of life for this Buddhist community, including fully accessible, i.e., ADA compliant design.
At the heart of the center is a community building comprised of a library, infirmary, and facilities for gathering and dining. Eight houses (each for eight monks) are situated to create courtyard-like spaces between them. The houses provide communal living rooms and kitchens as well as individual bedrooms with a fully accessible bathroom between each pair of rooms. We believe this project was the first in Bhutan to incorporate ADA-design standards in a multi-unit residence.
Within each bedroom, low beds are designed to double as meditation platforms; and doors are specially configured to allow meals to be delivered during periods of solitary retreat without interrupting silent prayer.
We strove to respect the distinctive traditional architectural vocabularies cherished by the Bhutanese, even as we introduced new innovations such as skylights and porches, and, most crucially, living on the ground floor versus traditional-but-inaccessible second-floor living. The designs and construction techniques are intended to serve as prototypes that can easily be adapted and replicated across Bhutan.
Upon visiting the fully-completed project in the summer of 2023, Zack was delighted to see monks living there contentedly: “I felt an immense sense of relief, because we were, after all, working within a cultural context which, as foreigners, we could not possibly fully understand despite our best efforts over many years of investigations and engagements with the community”.
We love working in Bhutan, and on the heels of this project we were thrilled to be asked to work with the Bhutan Foundation and Bhutan's governing agencies on the restoration and repurposing of one of the country's most historically important buildings: the Wangduechhoeling Palace.
