Faith Associates delivers inaugural Mosque Expo in the UK & 2nd Mosque Awards Ceremony celebrating leading faith institutions The expo brought together 1000 designers, suppliers, developers, mosque leaders, faith leaders and other members of the public to develop the 21st Century Beacon Mosque concept 21st Century Beacon Mosques are some of the leading faith institutions of the world,…
Thousands gathered in the town of Foca for the reopening of the 16th Century Aladza mosque, a historic Ottoman-era building that was blown up by Bosnian Serb forces in 1992 but has now been completely renovated. The Aladza mosque in Foca in eastern Bosnia, a masterpiece of Ottoman architecture which is on the UNESCO World…
With architects changing their ways in response to global warming, Phineas Harper asks: what does radical architecture look like in the era of climate change? A whole host of Stirling Prize-winning architecture practices have declared an emergency in response to accelerating climate change. Calling for a “paradigm shift”, they unveiled 11 pledges to bring architectural practice in line with planetary limits and…
Persian architecture studio Fundamental Approach Architects have won first prize in the Golshahr Mosque and Plaza National Design Competition in Iran, proposing an atypical mosque design for the city of Karaj. The winning proposal bypasses traditional mosque designs, blurring the lines between the contemporary structure, the city, and the surrounding landscape. In addition to a mosque’s evident religious function, the structure carries a big…
THE AMBER DENIM mosque sits at the back of a factory compound deep in the industrial sprawl north of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s frenetic capital (population: more than 18 million). Its walls are a Tetris grid of concrete blocks that recess in tiers toward open centers, like molds for tiny Aztec pyramids. Pipes left over from a plumbing…
Local architecture studio Candalepas Associates has completed a mosque with a decorative concrete-vaulted roof in Sydney, Australia. Located in the suburb of Punchbowl, the religious building provides space for 300 men and women worshippers to congregate. It distinguishes a central worship space with a concrete honeycomb structure, which takes visual cues from the aesthetics of Islamic architecture. The Mosque has…
Zeynep Fadillioglu – perhaps the first female architect to design a mosque, now on her third. In buildings where men and women are traditionally separated for worship, and women are often given a smaller space, Fadillioglu “purposely placed the women’s section in one of the most beautiful parts of the light-flooded dome” in Istanbul’s Sakirin Mosque. McKenzie concludes…
In the UK a new multi-million pound Eco-Mosque has opened in the centuries old university of Cambridge. Billed as Europe’s first such green mosque, its an inclusive space for prayer, learning and debate. “We have something called an air pump which extracts warmth from the surrounding air which also helps us with electricity bills. We…
