The first Mashriqu'l-Adhkar was built in Ashgabat, then part of the Russian Empire's Central Asian territory, beginning in 1902 under a flourishing Baha'i community that Soviet religious policy later dismantled; the building was confiscated in the 1920s, damaged by an earthquake in 1948 and demolished by Soviet authorities in 1963, leaving no continental-era temple standing from the faith's first phase. Construction on the Wilmette temple, on the shore of Lake Michigan north of Chicago, began in 1920 to a design by the French Canadian architect Louis Bourgeois; building proceeded through the Depression and the Second World War in stages as funds allowed, and the building was formally dedicated in 1953. It is the oldest Mashriqu'l-Adhkar standing today and is known within the faith as the Mother Temple of the West.
Shoghi Effendi's guardianship and the Universal House of Justice that followed it extended the form deliberately, placing one continental temple on each inhabited continent: Kampala, Uganda, for Africa in 1961; Sydney, Australia, for Australasia the same year; Panama City for Central America in 1972; Apia, Samoa, for the Pacific in 1984; and the widely photographed Lotus Temple in New Delhi, shaped as an unfolding lotus flower rather than a plain nine-sided drum, completed in 1986 and among the most visited buildings in the world. A newer generation of national and local Houses of Worship, smaller in scale, has since been built in Norte del Cauca, Colombia; Battambang, Cambodia; Matunda Soy, Kenya; Bihar Sharif, India; and Vanuatu's capital Port Vila, extending the institution below the continental scale for the first time.