Le monastère de bSam-yas : essai de restitution

bSam-yas Monastery : an attempt at reconstruction. When he built a model of the bSam-yas monastery, S. Mémet, being an architect but not a specialist of Tibetan architecture, insisted on the proportions and volumes of the buildings. From the existing documents, photographs and very succinct plans, he drew a scale and placed accordingly the buildings, using resections of perspectives. The main figure of the plan was found to be the square, and the main element of composition the number three. The elevation of the central building is based on rectangles composed of three half-squares; its pyramidal organization expresses a hierarchy between the parts of the temple, the inner one being considered as a space regulator. But though the centre of the more or less circular enclosure is the vertical axis of the main temple, it is still difficult, owing to the lack of metrical survey, to state positively that the whole area is geometrically organized.Mémet Sébastien. Le monastère de bSam-yas : essai de restitution. In: Arts asiatiques, tome 43, 1988. pp. 30-32