Authors: Praniya Anil Lingayat, Under the Guidance of Prof. Dilip Jade, Prof. Radhika Raut
Abstract: Contemporary meditation and monastic buildings increasingly rely on standard glazing and artifi-cial illumination borrowed from ordinary institutional design, and in doing so they often lose the very quality that historically made monastic space feel sacred: a slow, changing, self-revealing daylight. This paper looks at what can be called the “Luminous Envelope” in Buddhist monastery design, and asks how the deliberate shaping of roofs, screens, and courtyards to filter and funnel natural light can support meditation, mark the passage of time, and give built form to core Bud-dhist ideas such as impermanence and inner clarity. The study connects historic precedent — the single, sun-tracking apertures of rock-cut chaitya halls and the deep, thick-walled windows of Himalayan monasteries — with present-day design practice, using the Upper Cloister in Aranya, Golden Mountain (designed by Atelier Deshaus, China, completed 2022) as its primary case study. The paper builds a qualitative, non-mathematical design framework that final-year architec-ture students and practitioners can apply when shaping daylight-responsive monastic and medita-tion spaces.
