So I'm going to build a temple

My current project is the most ambitious one I've taken on to date; I'm building a miniature temple in our back garden. If it goes to plan, it will be part garden folly, part functional space, and part sculpture. I'm documenting my progress here as a sort of accountability mechanism. When it's built I'll eventually write up a set of more straightforward instructions, maybe an instructable.

Reason & Wonder are the basic themes in my art. The space between rationality and the Great Mysteries is where I find magic and inspiration. It's the closest thing I've got to a religion, and I think it's important to incorporate some of the components of traditional religion into your life even if, like me, you're not superstitious and don't believe in a traditional god. So I'm building a temple, and I'm calling it the Temple of Reason and Wonder.

Here's roughly what it will look like:

It's a modified "zome," a zonohedral constuction largely inspired by Rob Bell's Zonotopia and the Quasicrystalline Conjunction, installed at Burning Man in 2013:

I've fallen in love with these structures, and there are small groups of people here and there on the internet devoted to them, but it's been shockingly difficult to get detailed information on how they are actually constructed. The ones above were made to be assembled and disassembled, without nails or glue, and were cut out on a cnc shop bot. You can read more about these awesome pieces and the process used to make them here.

I started out by building a platform for it all to stand on. It's basically a miniature deck, designed to leave about a foot all arund the footprint of the finished temple. I'd never built anyting like it before, and I did about 90% of it myself, so feeling pretty proud of it: