Contemporary Mosque architecture _ inspirations

C O N T E M P O R A RY M O S QU E A R C H I T E C T U R E WORLD SELECTION

1 | 1980 | ŠEREFUDINS WHITE MOSQUE

12 | 2015 | LIGHT OF ALLAH

2 | 2006 | MOGAN MOSQUE

13 | 2016 | BAIT UR ROUF MOSQUE

3 | 2007 | CHANGDOAN MOSQUE

14 | 2016 | AMIR SHAKIB ARSLAN MOSQUE

4 | 2007 | PENZBERG ISLAMIC FORUM

15 | 2016 | AL WARQA’A MOSQUE

5 | 2009 | TURKISH CULTURAL CENTRE

16 | 2016 | JUMA’A MOSQUE

6 | 2010 | AL IRSIYAD MOSQUE

17 | 2018 | VALI’E’ASR MOSQUE

7 | 2012 | ISLAMIC CEMENTERY OF ALTACH

18 | 2018 | AUSTRALIAN ICC

8 | 2014 | SANCAKLAR MOSQUE

19 | 2018 | CAMBRIDGE MOSQUE

9 | 2015 | AL ISLAH MOSQUE

20 |

10 | 2015 | SHAHPORAN MOSQUE 11 | 2015 | DA CHANG MCC

SELECTED MOSQUE LIST

| HOUSE OF ONE

SELECTED MOSQUES ON THE MAP OF THE WORLD

1

The White Mosque serves as the religious and intellectual centre for the community. Its geometrically simple plan encloses a complex, slope-ceilinged, skylit volume, pure, abstract, sparsely ornamented and painted white. The archetypal Bosnian mosque has a simple square plan crowned by a cupola and entered by means of a small porch. The White Mosque’s plan conforms to the archetype, but its roof is a freely deformed quarter of a cupola, pierced by five skylights, themselves composed of segments of quarter cupolas.

Ĺ EREFUDINS WHITE MOSQUE | Zlatko Ugljen

Visoko | Bosnia and Herzegovina | 1980

2

Mosque near the Mogan lake is based upon three important references: It is beneficial to pray near the Mihrab wall.

The mihrab wall in classical Ottoman mosques is bringing light to the interior.

Located in the nature, praying in the outdoors under the open sky is beneficial, the lifted mihrab wall is referencing to the namazgah.

MOGAN MOSQUE | Hilmi Guner

Ankara | Turkey | 2006

3

This mosque on the suburban periphery of the port of Chittagong in Bangladesh seeks to fulfil the traditional role of a mosque as both a place of spirituality and as a gathering place for the community. The architect began by identifying the essential elements of a mosque to create a new form and articulation for a typology that goes back for a millennium and a half. The result is this monolithic and spare mosque, pared down to two identical cuboid structures.

CHANDGAON MOSQUE | K.M. Chowdhury

Chittagong | Bangladesh | 2007

4

A small Muslim community in Bavaria has built itself a forum with prayer room in a contemporary architectural style - a courageous undertaking based on a desire for integration. With its distinctive but in no way provocative or confrontational appearance, the building and its delicate tower fit into the surroundings.

PENZBERG ISLAMIC FORUM | Jasarevic architekten

Penzberg | Germany | 2007

5

From the architect. The municipality of Doetinchem together with the Turkish foundation organized a closed design competition, which was won by Atelier PUUUR in 2007. ‘The architectural design should be a bridge between the religious tradition of the Turkish community and the ‘here and now’ of Doetinchem in the 21st Century.

TURKISH CULTURAL CENTRE | Puuur

Doetinchem | Nederlands | 2009

6

The primary shape of the mosque takes the form of a square, which seems the most efficient since Muslims pray in straight rows facing a specific direction or the Qiblah.The structural columns are arranged in such way that the façade seems like it is not supported by any frame. This shape also alludes to Ka’bah, the most important structure in the Islamic world, to which all Muslims’ prayers are directed.

AL IRSIYAD MOSQUE | Urbane (Ridwan Kamil)

Kota Baru Parahyangan | Indonesia | 2010

7

The design of a cemetery is based on the beliefs and their funeral rites, which in turn say a lot about the particular understanding of nature and social relations.

The aim of the design is a very open and clearly laid out the overall concept. A delicate weave of wall panels in various heights frame the graves and the built-structure. The ‘finger-like’ grave-scale fields allow implementation in stages, - the grave fields extend into the pristine landscape. The planned grave fields are bordered by low walls and form separate rooms. They are each divided into a compact area for organized grave burials and a small room with sitting-bench.

ISLAMIC CEMENTERY OF ALTACH | Bernardo Bader

Altach | Austria | 2012

8

From the architect. Sancaklar Mosque located in Buyukรงekmece, a suburban neighborhood in the outskirts of Istanbul, aims to address the fundamental issues of designing a mosque by distancing itself from the current architectural discussions based on form and focusing solely on the essence of religious space.

SANCAKLAR MOSQUE | Emre Arolat

Istanbul | Turkey | 2014

9

We seek the notion of an ‘Open Mosque’. As an integral part of the Punggol community, the new mosque aspires to be a model of openness, reflective of contemporary Islamic aspirations in Singapore. The idea of openness extended beyond the formal manifestation of visual porosity, accessibility and climatic openness, to the embracing of different needs within the Muslim community. At the greater community level, in addressing the role of the mosque in promoting religious understanding.

AL ISLAH MOSQUE | Formwerkz

Punggol | Singapore | 2015

10

The existing mosque is a converted Georgian house, which is Grade II listed. This project extends the mosque in to a new 3 storey building to the rear of the main house. The new mosque accommodates the main prayer hall and further halls on upper floors. The facade is derived from a tile pattern found at the Seljuk palace at Kay Kubadabad in Turkey (right). The palace was a complex of summer residences built for Sultan Kayqubad c.1220, and is located on Central Anatolia, about 100km west of the Seljuq capital at Konya The mesh screen covering the facade between the stonework, has been sampled from the window patternwork at the Woking mosque, in Surrey Woking was the first mosque built in Britain in 1889 by W I Chambers, an English architect. By citing the patternwork at Woking, this mosque is creating an internal loop of referencing, rather then deriving its aesthetics only from the Islamic world, it is instead also using indigenous sources.

SHAHPORAN MOSQUE | Shahed Saleem (Makespace)

London E2| Great Britain | 2015

11

This is a poetic sanctuary that shows people both the brilliant Islamic culture and our vision for a better life. This is also a homelike cultural center that provides a spiritual home for local residents especially Muslims.

Dachang County is a Muslim enclave near Beijing. To revive the Islamic culture and improve the quality of culture life, the local government developed a cultural complex integrating the functions of theatre, exhibition, convention and community center.

Based on traditional mosque, the building subtly interprets the spatial structure of mosque with new materials and technologies. The surrounding arches shrink into elegant curves from the bottom up, while the cambering petal-shaped arches of the reflection in the water look even more vivid and graceful. The dome sees the translation and abstraction of Islamic symbols rather than simple mimicking. We constitute the dome with petaloid shells and creatively transform the interior space into a semi-exterior roof garden flooded with sunshine, fresh air and vegetation.

DA CHANG MUSLIM CULTURAL CENTRE | SCUT (He Jingtang)

Da Chang | China | 2015

12 The designer kept considering how to give full play to the designing with the poor investment. The entrusting party demanded that the hall of praying and worshiping shouldn’t be over 50sqm, which couldn’t allow the church to release the size vertically because generally religious building needs to be towery to create the atmosphere.

At last the designer decided to use the round structure which can create bigger space experience with the most tensioned structure. Such a structure means a belt of sky lighted windows attaching to the round structure at the top, allowing the daylight to stream in and form a round halo, enriching the details and the space.

LIGHT OF ALLAH | SCUT (He Jingtang)

Xingping | China | 2015

13

After a difficult life and the loss of her husband and near relatives, the client donated a part of her land for a mosque to be built. A temporary structure was erected. After her death, her grand-daughter, an architect, acted on her behalf as fundraiser, designer, client and builder to bring the project to completion. In an increasingly dense neighbourhood of Dhaka, the Mosque was raised on a plinth on a site axis creating a 13-degree angle with the qibla direction, which called for innovation in the layout.

BAIT UR ROUF MOSQUE | Marina Tabassum

Dhaka | Bangladesh | 2016

14

The 100 sqm project includes a renovation of an existing masonry cross-vaulted space and the addition of a minaret, grafted onto the existing structure as a symbolic landmark, next to the 18th century old palace.

“Rather than the traditional inert Cube/Dome/Minaret volumetric expression of normative mosque architecture, the design offers a lighter reading of the typology, an ephemeral tectonic presence” “As we now know, these two spaces (the religious space within and the public space of the street without) were hybridized in the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings where the public space of the city intersected the public space of the mosque.”

AMIR SHAKIB ARSLAN MOSQUE | L.E.F.T. Architects

Moukhtara | Lebanon | 2016

15

Text description provided by the architects. Designed with the intention of capturing the historical premise of a mosque as a communal space for worship, Al Warqa’a Mosque is a structure that also functions as a gathering place for the community. With the proliferation of the iconic Turkish Central Dome mosque typology in the UAE, the architects sought to return to a simpler design that is less focused on the mosque as an icon, and more as a social space. Al Warqa’a Mosque echoes the spatial simplicity of Prophet Muhammad’s 7th-century house in Medina, which is considered the first mosque in history. In what came to be known as the Arab Hypostyle typology, the original mosque structure was distinguished by an open courtyard surrounded by rooms supported by columns.

AL WARQA’A MOSQUE | IBDA DESIGN

Dubai I UAE | 2016

16

JMP’s design is drawn from a long look back into the seventh century to trace Qatari principles in designing religious edifices’

‘This close adherence to Islamic principles, coupled with a strong reference to historic Qatari examples, imparts a recognisably local feel and cultural authenticity.

JUMAA MOSQUE | John McAslan + Partners

Doha I Qatar | 2016

17

A new generation of Iranian architects are following in the footsteps of a pre-revolutionary avant gardewho pushed the boundaries of traditional Persian architecture by using traditional elements in modern designs. “Our biggest source for this project was the Qur’an itself,” the architects said. “We tried to design this mosque with modesty, simplicity and good faith, and not a mosque which would get its pride from its structural height. The Vali-e-Asr mosque is located near the students’ park and the City theatre. We wanted it to connect better with the younger generations.”

VALI - E - ASR MOSQUE | Reza Daneshmir, Catherine Spiridonoff

Tehran | Iran | 2018

18

The Australian Islamic Centre sets out to define a new architectural language for contemporary Australian Islam, challenging our assumptions of historical architectural typologies and aesthetics. At the same time as respecting the fundamental principles and requirements of Islamic architecture, Murcutt has pushed beyond the semiotic language of the traditional mosque, reimagining its geometry, colours, materiality and spatial organisation to create an accessible contemporary place of worship, learning and community.

The new Australian Islamic Centre represents a progressive vision for architecture as a tool for cultural expression and enabler of intercultural dialogue in a tolerant multicultural society.

AUSTRALIAN ISLAMIC CENTRE | Glenn Murcutt + Hakan Elevli

Newport | Australia | 2018

19

“The Cambridge mosque creates ideas about how to form the spiritual space and the outer shape which affects the neighborhood,” The mosque is set to be equipped with several spaces for women, including a soundproof mother-and-toddler area and a women’s treatment room for natural therapies. “The new space is formed by tree-like timber structures with an organic atmosphere reminiscent of a forest. The outer shell is made of brick, reflecting the neighborhood’s existing architecture.”

The mosque is also slated to feature an Islamic funeral facility, a cafe, a Qur’an school for children equipped with digital technology and an Islamic garden open to all local residents, where many of the plants and fruits mentioned in the Holy Qur’an will be grown.

CAMBRIDGE MOSQUE | Marks Barfield Architects

Cambridge | Great Britain | 2018

20

The idea behind all this is as appealing as the “building” itself is odd. The plan is to bring the world’s three big monotheistic religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, together. It’s so to speak a church, a mosque and a synagogue at once. A priest, an imam and a rabbi are to pray here right next to each other. A piazza with a roof on top is to serve as a meeting ground for them and their communities.

HOUSE OF ONE | Kuhn Malvezzi

Berlin | Germany | concept - ongoing