BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Hindu Temple, Chino Hills, CA
 

Yesterday my partner and I went to the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir (Hindu Temple) in Chino Hills, CA, for their Diwali Festival, the Hindu festival of lights, which marks the Hindu New Year. It has to be the most architecturally interesting building in all of Chino Hills, being that said city is basically a new-ish suburban bedroom community with generic SoCal strip malls and tract homes. Well, it does have a state park, but no interesting architecture, IMO, apart from this temple.

The temple complex is basically a campus. The temple building itself was built in 2012. I think I read somewhere that it's the first Hindu temple in the world built on earthquake base isolators. I last visited it in 2014; back then, the area around it was barren. Since then, they've added other structures. It's still a work in progress, as they continue to add structures and landscaping. I took a boatload of pictures, and am only posting some of them, and they might look redundant I guess, hehe. It's a shame that photography is not allowed inside the temple (nor is wearing shoes, of course), because the inside is all white Italian Carrara marble, hand-carved in India. The exterior of the temple is pink Indian sandstone, also hand-carved in India. It was all then shipped to Chino Hills and assembled.

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At this point in the evening they turned on the floodlighting with the differenc color schemes. I took pictures of a few of the colors (it cycled through several colors).
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