In the history of architecture, religious places have always had a high status, which is the collection of spirituality and symbolism. "Light and Truth at the End of the Tunnel" is the inspiration for Sanctuary Tunnel Garden, which explores how modernism reinterprets religious architecture so that it retains its sanctity while replacing traditional complex decoration and natural materials with pure spatial expression, and reveals the pure beauty of the site itself with a new architectural language. Let faith return to its essence.

Sanctuary Tunnel Garden, designed by RAD+AR, is a chapel on a private estate near Bogor, Indonesia. It is both a secluded retreat and a meditation space. The presence of the building does not affect the surrounding natural environment, but intervenes in the site in a minimalist way.

The core of the chapel is an inverted, blurred tunnel space, combined with the adjacent retreat villa, which makes visitors feel as if they are immersed in silence, awe and eternal piety, and perceive the true spirituality while staying away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

The project occupies a large area, but the building occupies less than 10%, and through the embedded form, it is integrated with the natural terrain, so that the chapel seems to be here waiting to be discovered, rather than deliberately revealing itself. Its zigzag shape, separated from the transparent all-glass wall, gives it a 360-degree open view from any Angle. This idea makes the space both secular and sacred, creating a delicate balance between man and nature, architecture and faith.

The design concept is based on a modernist analytical approach to shaping sacred places through repetition and simplification. The overall form echoes the ramp-like original exoskeleton structure, connecting the newly built terraced complex with a flowing, ramp-like loop and guiding the visitor progressively deeper into the dense and irregular primary forest. This interlocking relationship between the building and the environment not only strengthens the mystery of the space, but also shapes a spiritual experience that transcends the physical reality, forming a non-physical "tunnel" that facilitates the crossing of nature, allowing visitors and faith to intersect here.

The building consists of three main Spaces: a semi-public chapel, the Virgin Mary Meditation Garden, and the retreat master's private villa and visitors' villa. The core tunnel space is carved out of a single volume, interleaved with multiple inverted Spaces, with the existing giant trees as part of the structure, creating an atmosphere where the building is wrapped in trees and permeated by mist. Inside the chapel, different levels of intimacy are expressed through flowing geometry and dramatic light and shadow, making the space an effective medium for spiritual experience.

At the basement level, a smaller temple naturally extends into the water at either end. The free-form terrace allows the water feature to naturally merge with the artificial waterfall, so that the water, light and space interact, and reproduce the scene of early human participation in outdoor religious ceremonies. The scale, light and fluidity of the entire space make it both landscape and architecture, creating a symbolic connection between abstraction and reality.

As the core expression of the sanctity of the building, the chapel, its spatial body is like the "suspended body of Christ", allowing visitors to feel the strong integration of the physical and spiritual. It not only presents a sense of detachment under the rendering of light, but also naturally enters a state of contemplation and belief in the process of passing through the tunnel. The light at the end of the tunnel is not only a visual end, but also a spiritual guide, implying the sublimation of the journey of faith.

In the framework of modernity, this chapel building is not only a real building, but also a spiritual container shaped by time and nature. It does not deliberately proclaim the sacred, but through light, scale, contrast and order, creates a universal emotional resonance between the contemporary and the faith, returning the building to the purest spiritual experience.

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