Mumbai-based NUDES architecture office have revealed a new design called "Mosque of Light" as their entry in the Dubai Creek Harbor competition. The project was designed as a play in light with a multi-layered geometrical form to filter daylight softly into the prayer hall. The mosque explores the combination of light and built form around a spiritual experience.
Constructing places of worship has always been an intricate practice, managing to detach the human, and release the boundary between body, mind, and spirit. Holy presence has been crucial in designing and constructing sacred places, which is why almost all religious building possessed similar characteristics: grandiosity, monolithic material, natural elements, and a plan that compliments an individual’s circulation through the space. Contemporary religious structures, however, found a way to adapt to the evolution of architecture. Unlike the Gothic or Baroque periods, modern-day architecture does not have a dominant identity. It is, in fact, a combination of postmodernism, futurism, minimalism, and everything in between. Architects have found a way to transform these exclusive, religion-devoted places into structures of spirituality, manifestation, and fascination.
Here is a selection of contemporary religious buildings that prove once again that architects are breaking all boundaries of creativity.
Nora Mosque and Community Center from EAA Emre Arolat Architecture on Vimeo.
Emre Arolat Architecture has unveiled their design for the Nora Mosque and Community Center in Ajman in the United Arab Emirates. The 10,000 square meter site located just north of Dubai, is located near a massive high rise residence block. However, it creates its own unique ambiance and spatial setting with a composition of shell-like platforms that spring from the earth.
The Dubai-based firm, X-Architects, have found inspiration in the cultural and architectural heritage of Islam for their new design. The Revelation Mosque, a +2500 square meter project, aims to create a new "heart of the neighborhood" in Abu Dhabi, UAE. In creating a generous urban void among a towering context, the proposal offers an immersive escape from everyday life, where the public (regardless of religion) can gather, communicate, and interact with one another.
This essay by Jenine Kotob was originally published by Metropolis Magazine as "Why Now, More Than Ever, We Need A New Islamic Architecture."
At a time when Muslims find themselves at the center of the nation’s political stage, the topic of Islamic architecture in the United States is more relevant than ever. The American mosque has become a prominent symbol, within which identities, practices, and cultures converge. More often than not, this convergence results in conflicting goals, further resulting in mosques that fail to identify and serve the needs of their diverse constituents.
The theme for this year’s Venice Biennale is largely an invitation for architects and designers to expand and think beyond architecture’s traditional frontiers and to respond to a wider range of challenges relating to human settlement. With news of political crises continuing to fill the headlines of late, Aravena’s theme challenges architects to respond. One such response comes from Lucas Boyd and Chad Greenlee from the Yale School of Architecture. They believe that:
While [places of worship] do not provide a basic need for an individual’s biological survival, they do represent a fundamental aspect of not only an individual’s life beyond utility, but an identity within the collective, a familiar place of being—and this is something that we consider synonymous with being human—a requirement for the persistence of culture.
The two students came up with proposal designs on churches, synagogues and mosques that can be quickly built as “Pop-Up Places of Worship” in refugee camps. By presenting immediately-recognizable sacred spaces that are transportable and affordable, Boyd and Greenlee highlight spaces for worship as an absolute necessity in any type of human settlement. Through this process, the students also determine what, for them, is “necessary” in a religious structure.
AL_A has won a competition to design a new mosque within the Foster + Partner-designed World Trade Center complex in Abu Dhabi. The 2000-square-meter project, envisioned as a "pathway to serenity" rather than a single building, leads visitors on a journey through an informal park of palm trees that slowly align with the mosque's shifted grid as users approach the Prayer Hall. Once inside, visitors are facing towards Mecca.
"The mosque is envisaged as a piece of the city, one that reflects the journey from the temporal to the spiritual," said AL_A director Ho-Yin Ng. "The mosque and the garden become one, with the trees and the columns forming an informal vertical landscape and allowing Friday prayers to spill outside."
London based Mossessian Architecture, in collaboration with Paris based exhibition architects Studio Adeline Rispal, has won a competition to design a museum of Islamic faith in the city of Mecca.
The Makkah Museum will be located seven kilometers from the Grand Holy Mosque, which is visited by millions of Muslims each year. The museum "will offer a unique interpretation and reflection of faith to the millions of Muslims who visit Makkah from around the world and who, up until this point, have had no cultural institution of this kind to enhance their visit to the holiest of Muslim cities," write the architects.
Images have been released of a new mosque planned for Copenhagen. Designed by Henning Larsen Architects, the mosque will replace an existing one on the corner of Dortheavej and Tomsgårdsvej in the Nordvest district of the city. ”One of Copenhagen's slightly forgotten districts will receive a new architectonic pearl,” says Morten Kabell, the city's deputy mayor for technical and environmental issues. The Copenhagen Municipality has approved the project’s planning application and completion is expected for February 2016.
The competition isn't over yet as the jury for the Central Mosque of Pristina Competition has announced two second place prizes and no winner. Organized by the Islamic Community of Kosovo, the competition seeks to create a place "where understanding, humanity, tolerance, respect and sincere love shall be cultivated." Slovenian firm SADAR+VUGA was one of the two teams awarded second prize with their project 21PR22. Follow us after the break to learn more.
Another noteworthy proposal for the Central Mosque of Pristina in Kosovo; this time, from Zurich-based architecture firm, Dürig AG. They envision the new mosque as an interplay between the individual and the community. "Mosques are places of worship for the Islamic community where the single believer joins a larger body for the ceremonial act of worship and prayer." Singular elements combine to make a larger, more meaningful, whole. "Thus, [our proposal] stands as a materialized representation for the individual within the Islamic community of Kosovo."
Natural daylight softly descends through the modulated plenum, creating a uniform prayer hall. Perforations throughout the facade and interior wooden panels enable a visual transparency that, Dürig AG expects, should spawn a dialogue between individuals inside the mosque and pedestrians in the city.
