Eileen received guidance to build a meeting place for the community, and that I was to design it. It’s miraculous how the building all came together, considering that most of us were not builders by trade, and not to be paid for our work.

Elizabeth Grindley and I sat at the back of the site observing its irregular shape, like a human being stretched to maximum creativity, and decided the building had to be a pentagon.

The first miracle was finding an engineer, Simon Woolf, through an old school friend, whose speciality was designing large-scale timber roofs. We could so easily have had an engineer who saw steel as the natural material for building large span roofs concealed with a suspended ceiling. Lyle Schnadt, who led the construction crew, visibly shook when he saw what he had to construct, but our engineer Simon supported him in every way that he could. You should have seen Lyle sitting fearlessly across one of the vast timber beams as he craned and bolted it into position.

The American Douglas Fir timber came rough sawn, as the timber yard had no machine large enough to plane it! So Lyle devised a miraculous solution, involving burning the rough sawn surfaces with a blow torch, and then wire brushing them, producing the beautiful stone-like appearance that we now have. I hate to think how many days and weeks were spent using this unique technique, which is only practical when craftsmen give their time for free.

Another miracle was the construction crew itself, gathered from across the world, most of whom had never done any serious building work. Local stonemasons were amazed to see the high standard of our stonework. Richard Valeriano, from California, on seeing the first stone wall built by a local stonemason, asked to have a go, and developed his own Inca-like style; one of these walls was built with such precision that you cannot put a coin between the joints. One young man from Germany was able to spend almost an entire year building one of the remarkable stone walls. Ian Turnbull built the last wall in his own unique style. These walls were built with an immense amount of love.

I think Peter had a more village hall-scale in mind, so he got quite a shock when he eventually saw the size of the Hall. Originally it was to be called University Hall, however, eventually we decided on Universal Hall — a more inclusive, planetary name which does not overemphasise education.

George Ripley, with parts of an interview by Harula Ladd