The Diversity of Mosque Architectures
The mosque, an emblematic building in Islam, while theoretically requiring nothing more than marking the direction of prayer, has developed a number of distinctive architectural forms. Local building traditions and differing social and cultural contexts have influenced the diversity of mosque architectures and methods in which mosques have been built.
University Mosque
Depok, Jawa Barat, Indonesia Tengku Tengah Zaharah
Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia Sherefuddin’s White Mosque
Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Qubbah Mosque
Medina, Saudi Arabia Mud Mosque
Maree, Australia Great Mosque of Cordoba
Cordoba, Spain
Al-Abbas Mosque
Asnaf, Yemen The Central Mosque
Porto Novo, Benin Dar al-Islam Mosque
New Mexico, United States
Grand National Assembly
Mosque, Ankara, Turkey Mosque of the Shah
Isfahan, Iran Huajuexiang Mosque
Xian, China
Mosque of Hasan
Rabat, Morocco Mosque of al-Hakim
Cairo, Egypt Djingareyber Mosque
Timbuktu, Mali
Pictures courtesy ArchNet (MIT School of Architecture and Planning), to whom we are grateful.
The mosque has developed a number of architectural forms, including the “hypostyle”, the “four-iwan”, the “domed central space”, the “pavilion” and the “three-domed”. These forms have developed over the centuries and continue to be used and re-used to the present day. In the contemporary world, the practice of reverting to well-known mosque forms and the ease of use of the familiar over recent decades can be understood by Muslims everywhere to re-present themselves as Muslim. What has emerged is a pan-Islamic model, i.e. the use of domes and a minaret, a standard mosque architectural vocabulary that has no exact local reference point, but is increasingly read everywhere by Muslims and non-Muslims alike as “Muslim” places of worship. This is particularly the case in contexts where Muslims are a minority, such as Europe and North America.
The increasing standardisation of architectural vocabulary used in mosque construction presents challenges for maintaining the long-standing tradition Muslims have had in constructing architecturally diverse spaces of worship.
http://iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=111610
The Diversity of Mosque Architectures
By Sea of Galilee, archaeologists find ruins of early mosque
ILAN BEN ZION
Associated Press Updated Thu, January 28, 2021, 10:39 AM
Dr. Katia Cytryn-Silverman, an archaeologist with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, poses for a portrait at the site of the Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque, in Tiberias, northern Israel, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. Archaeologists said recent excavations at the ancient city of Tiberias have discovered the remnants of one of the earliest mosques in the Islamic world. The foundations of the Muslim house of worship date to the late 7th century.(AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
At the foot of Mount Bernice, stones from the Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque are visible through overgrown plants, in Tiberias, northern Israel, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. Archaeologists said recent excavations at the ancient city of Tiberias have discovered the remnants of one of the earliest mosques in the Islamic world. The foundations of the Muslim house of worship date to the late 7th century. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Stones from the foundation of the he Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque peek through overgrown plants, in Tiberias, northern Israel, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. Archaeologists said recent excavations at the ancient city of Tiberias have discovered the remnants of one of the earliest mosques in the Islamic world. The foundations of the Muslim house of worship date to the late 7th century. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Dr. Katia Cytryn-Silverman, an archaeologist with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, poses for a portrait at the site of the Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque, in Tiberias, northern Israel, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. Archaeologists said recent excavations at the ancient city of Tiberias have discovered the remnants of one of the earliest mosques in the Islamic world. The foundations of the Muslim house of worship date to the late 7th century. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
1 / 4
Israel Ancient Mosque
Dr. Katia Cytryn-Silverman, an archaeologist with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, poses for a portrait at the site of the Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque, in Tiberias, northern Israel, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. Archaeologists said recent excavations at the ancient city of Tiberias have discovered the remnants of one of the earliest mosques in the Islamic world. The foundations of the Muslim house of worship date to the late 7th century.(AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
TIBERIAS, Israel (AP) — Archaeologists in Israel say they have discovered the remnants of an early mosque — believed to date to the earliest decades of Islam — during an excavation in the northern city of Tiberias.
This mosque’s foundations, excavated just south of the Sea of Galilee by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, point to its construction roughly a generation after the death of the Prophet Mohammad, making it one of the earliest Muslim houses of worship to be studied by archaeologists.
“We know about many early mosques that were founded right in the beginning of the Islamic period,” said Katia Cytryn-Silverman, a specialist in Islamic archaeology at Hebrew University who heads the dig. Other mosques dating from around the same time, such as the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, the Great Mosque of Damascus, and Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque, are still in use today and cannot be tampered with by archaeologists.
Cytryn-Silverman said that excavating the Tiberian mosque allows a rare chance to study the architecture of Muslim prayer houses in their infancy and indicates a tolerance for other faiths by early Islamic leaders. She announced the findings this month in a virtual conference.
When the mosque was built around 670 AD, Tiberias had been a Muslim-ruled city for a few decades. Named after Rome’s second emperor around 20 AD, the city was a major center of Jewish life and scholarship for nearly five centuries. Before its conquest by Muslim armies in 635, the Byzantine city was home to one of a constellation of Christian holy sites dotting the Sea of Galilee's shoreline.
Under Muslim rule, Tiberias became a provincial capital in the early Islamic empire and grew in prominence. Early caliphs built palaces on its outskirts along the lake shore. But until recently, little was known about the city’s early Muslim past.
Gideon Avni, chief archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, who was not involved in the excavation, said the discovery helps resolve a scholarly debate about when mosques began standardizing their design, facing toward Mecca.
“In the archaeological finds, it was very rare to find early mosques,” he said.
Archaeological digs around Tiberias have proceeded in fits and starts for the past century. In recent decades the ancient city has started yielding other monumental buildings from its past, including a sizeable Roman theater overlooking the water and a Byzantine church.
Since early last year, the coronavirus pandemic halted excavations and lush Galilean grasses, herbs and weeds have grown over the ruins. Hebrew University and its partners, the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology, plan to restart the dig in February.
Initial excavations of the site in the 1950s led scholars to believe that the building was a Byzantine marketplace later used as a mosque.
But Cytryn-Silverman's excavations delved deeper beneath the floor. Coins and ceramics nestled among at the base of the crudely crafted foundations helped date them to around 660-680 AD, barely a generation after the city’s capture. The building's dimensions, pillared floor-plan, and qiblah, or prayer niche, closely paralleled other mosques from the period.
Avni said that for a long time, academics weren’t sure what happened to cities in the Levant and Mesopotamia conquered by the Muslims in the early 7th century.
“Earlier opinions said that there was a process of conquest, destruction and devastation,” he said. Today, he said, archaeologists understand that there was a “fairly gradual process, and in Tiberias you see that.”
The first mosque built in the newly conquered city stood cheek by jowl with the local synagogues and the Byzantine church that dominated the skyline. This earliest phase of the mosque was “more humble” than a larger, grander structure that replaced it half a century later, Cytryn-Silverman said.
“At least until the monumental mosque was erected in the 8th century, the church continued being the main building in Tiberias,” she added.
She says this supports the idea that the early Muslim rulers — who governed an overwhelmingly non-Muslim population — adopted a tolerant approach toward other faiths, allowing a "golden age” of coexistence.
“You see that the beginning of the Islamic rule here respected very much the population that was the main population of the city: Christians, Jews, Samaritans,” Cytryn-Silverman said. “They were not in a hurry to make their presence expressed into buildings. They were not destroying others’ houses of prayers, but they were actually fitting themselves into the societies that they now were the leaders of."
Originally published Thu, January 28, 2021, 9:59 AM
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/se ... 53029.html
ILAN BEN ZION
Associated Press Updated Thu, January 28, 2021, 10:39 AM
Dr. Katia Cytryn-Silverman, an archaeologist with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, poses for a portrait at the site of the Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque, in Tiberias, northern Israel, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. Archaeologists said recent excavations at the ancient city of Tiberias have discovered the remnants of one of the earliest mosques in the Islamic world. The foundations of the Muslim house of worship date to the late 7th century.(AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
At the foot of Mount Bernice, stones from the Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque are visible through overgrown plants, in Tiberias, northern Israel, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. Archaeologists said recent excavations at the ancient city of Tiberias have discovered the remnants of one of the earliest mosques in the Islamic world. The foundations of the Muslim house of worship date to the late 7th century. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Stones from the foundation of the he Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque peek through overgrown plants, in Tiberias, northern Israel, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. Archaeologists said recent excavations at the ancient city of Tiberias have discovered the remnants of one of the earliest mosques in the Islamic world. The foundations of the Muslim house of worship date to the late 7th century. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Dr. Katia Cytryn-Silverman, an archaeologist with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, poses for a portrait at the site of the Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque, in Tiberias, northern Israel, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. Archaeologists said recent excavations at the ancient city of Tiberias have discovered the remnants of one of the earliest mosques in the Islamic world. The foundations of the Muslim house of worship date to the late 7th century. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
1 / 4
Israel Ancient Mosque
Dr. Katia Cytryn-Silverman, an archaeologist with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, poses for a portrait at the site of the Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque, in Tiberias, northern Israel, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. Archaeologists said recent excavations at the ancient city of Tiberias have discovered the remnants of one of the earliest mosques in the Islamic world. The foundations of the Muslim house of worship date to the late 7th century.(AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
TIBERIAS, Israel (AP) — Archaeologists in Israel say they have discovered the remnants of an early mosque — believed to date to the earliest decades of Islam — during an excavation in the northern city of Tiberias.
This mosque’s foundations, excavated just south of the Sea of Galilee by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, point to its construction roughly a generation after the death of the Prophet Mohammad, making it one of the earliest Muslim houses of worship to be studied by archaeologists.
“We know about many early mosques that were founded right in the beginning of the Islamic period,” said Katia Cytryn-Silverman, a specialist in Islamic archaeology at Hebrew University who heads the dig. Other mosques dating from around the same time, such as the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, the Great Mosque of Damascus, and Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque, are still in use today and cannot be tampered with by archaeologists.
Cytryn-Silverman said that excavating the Tiberian mosque allows a rare chance to study the architecture of Muslim prayer houses in their infancy and indicates a tolerance for other faiths by early Islamic leaders. She announced the findings this month in a virtual conference.
When the mosque was built around 670 AD, Tiberias had been a Muslim-ruled city for a few decades. Named after Rome’s second emperor around 20 AD, the city was a major center of Jewish life and scholarship for nearly five centuries. Before its conquest by Muslim armies in 635, the Byzantine city was home to one of a constellation of Christian holy sites dotting the Sea of Galilee's shoreline.
Under Muslim rule, Tiberias became a provincial capital in the early Islamic empire and grew in prominence. Early caliphs built palaces on its outskirts along the lake shore. But until recently, little was known about the city’s early Muslim past.
Gideon Avni, chief archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, who was not involved in the excavation, said the discovery helps resolve a scholarly debate about when mosques began standardizing their design, facing toward Mecca.
“In the archaeological finds, it was very rare to find early mosques,” he said.
Archaeological digs around Tiberias have proceeded in fits and starts for the past century. In recent decades the ancient city has started yielding other monumental buildings from its past, including a sizeable Roman theater overlooking the water and a Byzantine church.
Since early last year, the coronavirus pandemic halted excavations and lush Galilean grasses, herbs and weeds have grown over the ruins. Hebrew University and its partners, the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology, plan to restart the dig in February.
Initial excavations of the site in the 1950s led scholars to believe that the building was a Byzantine marketplace later used as a mosque.
But Cytryn-Silverman's excavations delved deeper beneath the floor. Coins and ceramics nestled among at the base of the crudely crafted foundations helped date them to around 660-680 AD, barely a generation after the city’s capture. The building's dimensions, pillared floor-plan, and qiblah, or prayer niche, closely paralleled other mosques from the period.
Avni said that for a long time, academics weren’t sure what happened to cities in the Levant and Mesopotamia conquered by the Muslims in the early 7th century.
“Earlier opinions said that there was a process of conquest, destruction and devastation,” he said. Today, he said, archaeologists understand that there was a “fairly gradual process, and in Tiberias you see that.”
The first mosque built in the newly conquered city stood cheek by jowl with the local synagogues and the Byzantine church that dominated the skyline. This earliest phase of the mosque was “more humble” than a larger, grander structure that replaced it half a century later, Cytryn-Silverman said.
“At least until the monumental mosque was erected in the 8th century, the church continued being the main building in Tiberias,” she added.
She says this supports the idea that the early Muslim rulers — who governed an overwhelmingly non-Muslim population — adopted a tolerant approach toward other faiths, allowing a "golden age” of coexistence.
“You see that the beginning of the Islamic rule here respected very much the population that was the main population of the city: Christians, Jews, Samaritans,” Cytryn-Silverman said. “They were not in a hurry to make their presence expressed into buildings. They were not destroying others’ houses of prayers, but they were actually fitting themselves into the societies that they now were the leaders of."
Originally published Thu, January 28, 2021, 9:59 AM
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/se ... 53029.html
Re: The Diversity of Mosque Architectures
Book
Beyond the Divide: A Century of Canadian Mosque
Canada’s first mosque, the Al Rashid mosque in Edmonton, was built in 1938. In the years since, as Canada’s Muslim population has grown, close to two hundred mosques, Islamic centres, prayer spaces, and jamatkhanas have been built across the country. Beyond the Divide explores the mosques of Canada in their diversity, beauty, practicality, and versatility. From east to west and to the north, Tammy Gaber visits ninety mosques in more than fifty cities, including Canada’s most northern places of worship in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. For nearly a century Muslims have made mosques in a variety of spaces, from converted shops and vacated churches to large, purpose-built complexes. Drawing on site photographs, architectural drawings, and interviews, Gaber explores the extraordinary diversity in how these spaces have been designed, built, and used – as places not only of worship, but of community gathering, education, charitable work, and civic engagement. Throughout, Beyond the Divide provides a groundbreaking analysis of gendered space in Canadian mosques, how these spaces are designed and reinforced, and how these divides shape community experience. The first comprehensive study of mosque history and architecture in Canada, Beyond the Divide reveals the mosque to be a dynamic building type that adapts to its context, from its climate and physical environment to the community it serves. Above all, mosque designs depend on the people who gather in them, and what those people strive for their mosques to be.
Read less
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Divide-Ce ... 0228008263
Beyond the Divide: A Century of Canadian Mosque
Canada’s first mosque, the Al Rashid mosque in Edmonton, was built in 1938. In the years since, as Canada’s Muslim population has grown, close to two hundred mosques, Islamic centres, prayer spaces, and jamatkhanas have been built across the country. Beyond the Divide explores the mosques of Canada in their diversity, beauty, practicality, and versatility. From east to west and to the north, Tammy Gaber visits ninety mosques in more than fifty cities, including Canada’s most northern places of worship in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. For nearly a century Muslims have made mosques in a variety of spaces, from converted shops and vacated churches to large, purpose-built complexes. Drawing on site photographs, architectural drawings, and interviews, Gaber explores the extraordinary diversity in how these spaces have been designed, built, and used – as places not only of worship, but of community gathering, education, charitable work, and civic engagement. Throughout, Beyond the Divide provides a groundbreaking analysis of gendered space in Canadian mosques, how these spaces are designed and reinforced, and how these divides shape community experience. The first comprehensive study of mosque history and architecture in Canada, Beyond the Divide reveals the mosque to be a dynamic building type that adapts to its context, from its climate and physical environment to the community it serves. Above all, mosque designs depend on the people who gather in them, and what those people strive for their mosques to be.
Read less
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Divide-Ce ... 0228008263
Punchbowl Mosque | Finalist
Australia By Design Series 3 Punchbowl Mosque | Finalist
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ebc4PdbNcAc
Number 3 in the count down of the top 10 @aubydesign’s ultimate Architectural Statements for 2019.
***********
A ‘modern architectural masterpiece’: Punchbowl Mosque
In the south-west Sydney suburb of Punchbowl, the ritualistic and formal traditions of the Islamic faith find contemporary expression in a monumental ode to prayer.
Entry from the street leads to a forecourt. The minaret, traditionally a tower to amplify the call to prayer, here contains the separate women’s entry.
Buildings are simple: a budget, a brief, a roof over your head, and walls to keep the wind out. But of course, our hopes for architecture are like the hopes we have for our children – that they will be better than us, more than us, and, if nothing else, we pray they outlive us. They will take on the world’s joys and cares, and will be called upon to respond, architecture and children alike.
So, it’s not surprising that Angelo Candalepas felt some trepidation in taking on the commission of a new mosque in the western Sydney suburb of Punchbowl. As an architect, he has spoken about the weight of history in religious architecture and, as a practising Greek Orthodox Christian, he does seem an unlikely choice for this commission, at least on the surface. When Candalepas spoke to his then mentor Col Madigan, the older man said, “You wouldn’t give that sort of opportunity up.” Candalepas says, “It was an awakening.”
“There is a present trepidation about entering into the realm of the spiritual. A realm that has a transcending power over us, if fully comprehended,” he writes in Angelo Candalepas: Australian Islamic Mission. “Architecture is one of the arts that can allow a ‘universal’ understanding of emotional experience to form an epiphany.”
One hundred and two concrete domes, cast in situ, form the muqarnas. A small oculus in each of the domes admits light.
VIEW GALLERY
One hundred and two concrete domes, cast in situ, form the muqarnas. A small oculus in each of the domes admits light.
Image: Brett Boardman
There is method in commissioning a respected architect such as Candalepas (or Glenn Murcutt for that matter) to design a mosque. Gaining planning approval for new mosques has revealed some steadfast prejudices and fears. Permission was denied for a new mosque in Currumbin on the Gold Coast on the grounds that it was “too big” following concerted opposition that included vandalism and death threats. In Victoria, Bendigo Mosque was approved despite seventy thousand Facebookers and multiple legal challenges opposing and delaying the project. Pauline Hanson, you won’t be surprised, once called for a ban on the construction of mosques and Islamic schools. Zachariah Matthews, vice-president of Punchbowl’s Australian Islamic Mission, has said that commissioning contemporary design was a response to these known challenges. The mosque is a building to pray in. In a society that so often seems atomized, so often consumed by conflict, so often lonely, to build for prayer seems like a prayer itself.
It has taken more than twenty years to plan, fundraise, commission and deliver the Punchbowl Mosque. The congregation has raised the twelve million dollars needed, an extraordinary testament to the community’s commitment to the project. As director of the Sydney Architecture Festival, Timothy Horton described the project as a “modern architectural masterpiece,” and it was awarded the 2018 Sulman Medal for Public Architecture. It isn’t even finished yet.
Inside, the main prayer space appears to have been sculpted from raw concrete. The large dome draws the eye up, magnifying the spiritual significance of the space.
VIEW GALLERY
Inside, the main prayer space appears to have been sculpted from raw concrete. The large dome draws the eye up, magnifying the spiritual significance of the space.
Image: Brett Boardman
The brief called for a three-hundred-year lifespan; the architect proposed a thousand. In an age of catastrophic cheapskates, contract law and fast-tracking, this is more than hyperbole – it represents a kind of resistance. For Candalepas, concrete is the material of the ages. It has an almost transcendental significance. The Punchbowl Mosque is almost entirely cast in situ – like an ancient building, it appears sculpted as from raw material. There are few visible services, and heating and cooling is subsumed in the slab. The balance of permanent form and provisional mechanization is tipped toward the pre-industrial.
Candalepas has designed a complex that includes a two-level underground car park and a primary school, or madrasa – a type that evolved from the mosque to become the second most important religious building in Islamic tradition. The school, when built, will address the street and return to form a central courtyard. The mosque holds the rear corner of the site and is approached through a low portal in the street wall. Passing through, the mosque is before us, across a forecourt with a covered walkway to the right. To our left and pushing obliquely forward is a contemporary take on the minaret. My guide calls it “an Australian minaret” – no longer amplifying the call to prayer, it is more outcrop than campanile. It is no taller than the building and screened, open to the breeze. Its purpose is not for the muezzin to perform the call to prayer over the suburbs, but to house the women’s separate entry, ritual washroom and prayer gallery. In Candalepas’s arrangement, the women of the congregation now occupy a place traditionally reserved for men.
The entry to the women’s prayer gallery, accessed via the minaret.
VIEW GALLERY
The entry to the women’s prayer gallery, accessed via the minaret.
Image: Brett Boardman
The separation of men and women in Muslim spaces has its roots in Ottoman Islam and has become a global typological norm. To many of us in secular Australia, it will seem incongruous and, indeed, there is debate within the Muslim community as to the future of this tradition.
The men will turn right into a long washroom. They will perform a ritual washing, the wudu, which is accommodated in a utilitarian space but also one tuned for spiritual preparation. Indirect light creates a cool calm; timber and tile complement the concrete. It is tactile but unfussy. The men will return to the covered walk and then to the wide timber doors leading to the prayer hall proper. The entry is low, compressed to the height of the doors through which the domed hall opens around the prayerful. The sequence from street to prayer is an essay in the compression and release of space.
Prayer is one of the Five Pillars of Islamic faith. Prayer is a duty, a practice and a spiritual act of worship. The faithful must answer the call to prayer five times a day – facing Mecca, standing in intimate proximity, they will bow at the waist, prostrate themselves on seven bones, forehead to the floor. With each posture, appropriate prayers are recited, the physical ritual aligned with the spiritual offering. Prayer as powerful discipline.
A central dome sits over all, with a concrete ring beam cast on site. A thin band of clerestory windows floats the dome; a circle sitting over a square. In Islamic architecture, the laws of proportion are based on the division of a circle inscribed by regular figures – the circle is the clear symbol of the Unity of Being (wahdat al-wujud) that contains within itself all the possibilities of existence, as described by Titus Burckhardt in Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on Traditional Science and Sacred Art. For Candalepas, the circle is “an abstraction of all things found in the universe,” but it is the muqarnas that really makes the heart sing.
A timber screen physically and visually separates the women’s prayer gallery.
VIEW GALLERY
A timber screen physically and visually separates the women’s prayer gallery.
Image: Brett Boardman
In traditional Islamic architecture, muqarnas is applied ornamental squinches repeated in crystalline exuberance. In Punchbowl, as elsewhere, the squinches are deployed to negotiate the transition from circle to square. The Topkapi Scroll, dating from fifteenth-century Iran, contains some of the earliest pattern drawings for muqarnas, which has no intrinsic boundary or scale but can be repeated and scaled at will. In this, the muqarnas reminds me of Madigan’s tetrahedral grids, which he extended in drawings and on site, creating vectors and vertices to order the world around his buildings.
Candalepas’s muqarnas is not applied but cast in situ, a single pour making it structural ornament. They recall the coffered concrete dome of the Pantheon and the cascading domes of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, but the chief sensation is not of historical recollection but of originality. Their presence, unadvertised and unexpected on arrival, seem like a cast taken from the vault of heaven.
Above the large prayer space, the women’s prayer gallery is accessed via the minaret. The women are raised, almost level with the domed muqarnas; a timber screen provides physical and visual separation between men and women. Over two levels, the women look down to the men on one side and out to the courtyard on the other. In the prayer hall, the timber is modest and warm, and complements the concrete forms. However, on the reverse side – the women’s side – the steel frame and bracing are expressed, resulting in a harder, unfortunate mechanical articulation.
In plan, the screen appears as a sharp chamfered slice across the incomplete square of the prayer hall. This line is the clearest disruption to an otherwise orthogonal armature, aligning the prayerful to Mecca. It is an intriguing gesture that seems to render the screen between genders a tense provisional element. It is as if, being timber, it might be the first thing to perish in this thousand-year building.
The rituals of worship have informed the organization of space. The male ablutions room is a utilitarian space, but also one tuned for spiritual preparation.
VIEW GALLERY
The rituals of worship have informed the organization of space. The male ablutions room is a utilitarian space, but also one tuned for spiritual preparation.
Image: Brett Boardman
There are one hundred and two domes in all, and ninety-nine will receive calligraphic ornament. Each will be unique, inscribed with one of Allah’s ninety-nine names and the hilya, an ornamental calligraphy that describes the qualities of the Prophet. Craftsmen from Turkey and Iran have been commissioned to paint the inscriptions directly onto the concrete. The Prophet said, “Allah has ninety-nine Names, one-hundred less one; and he who memorized them all by heart will enter Paradise.”
The Most Merciful, the Giver of Peace, the Shaper, the Provider, the Giver of Honour, the Giver of Disgrace, the Giver of Life, the Bringer of Death, the Finder, the Indivisible, the First, the Last, the Timeless. Perhaps it seems indulgent to list even these few here, but the naming of Allah in this space will have a profound effect on the sensation of the room as if through nomenclature the faithful might be brought into his presence.
This kind of text and ornament is anathema to so much of modern architecture, an edict that sometimes seems dogmatic. These two crafts, architecture and calligraphy, are the highest orders of art in Islam. How rich the potential to communicate another sensation, another meaning, another hope beyond utility. Even as Islam, an aniconic religion, proscribes the depiction of sentient beings – God, people and animals – it has led to the development of a complex geometric and calligraphic art and architecture. The proscription isn’t a limitation on invention, but its foil.
Burckhardt describes the role of aniconism in Islamic art:
Islamic art as a whole aims at creating an ambience which helps man to realize his primordial dignity; it therefore avoids everything that could be an ‘idol’. […] Nothing must stand between man and the invisible presence of God. Thus Islamic art creates a void; it eliminates in fact all the turmoil and passionate suggestions of the world, and in their stead creates an order that expresses equilibrium, serenity and peace.
The apparent incongruity between Islamic tradition, Candalepas’s modernity and his Greek Orthodox heritage is resolved into an original, propositional whole, at once traditional and contemporary. Punchbowl Mosque takes on the world’s joys and cares, and it responds. It will certainly outlive us all.
Credits
https://architectureau.com/articles/punchbowl-mosque/
**********
Punchbowl Mosque / Candalepas Associates
Photo Gallery at:
https://www.archdaily.com/914578/punchb ... associates
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ebc4PdbNcAc
Number 3 in the count down of the top 10 @aubydesign’s ultimate Architectural Statements for 2019.
***********
A ‘modern architectural masterpiece’: Punchbowl Mosque
In the south-west Sydney suburb of Punchbowl, the ritualistic and formal traditions of the Islamic faith find contemporary expression in a monumental ode to prayer.
Entry from the street leads to a forecourt. The minaret, traditionally a tower to amplify the call to prayer, here contains the separate women’s entry.
Buildings are simple: a budget, a brief, a roof over your head, and walls to keep the wind out. But of course, our hopes for architecture are like the hopes we have for our children – that they will be better than us, more than us, and, if nothing else, we pray they outlive us. They will take on the world’s joys and cares, and will be called upon to respond, architecture and children alike.
So, it’s not surprising that Angelo Candalepas felt some trepidation in taking on the commission of a new mosque in the western Sydney suburb of Punchbowl. As an architect, he has spoken about the weight of history in religious architecture and, as a practising Greek Orthodox Christian, he does seem an unlikely choice for this commission, at least on the surface. When Candalepas spoke to his then mentor Col Madigan, the older man said, “You wouldn’t give that sort of opportunity up.” Candalepas says, “It was an awakening.”
“There is a present trepidation about entering into the realm of the spiritual. A realm that has a transcending power over us, if fully comprehended,” he writes in Angelo Candalepas: Australian Islamic Mission. “Architecture is one of the arts that can allow a ‘universal’ understanding of emotional experience to form an epiphany.”
One hundred and two concrete domes, cast in situ, form the muqarnas. A small oculus in each of the domes admits light.
VIEW GALLERY
One hundred and two concrete domes, cast in situ, form the muqarnas. A small oculus in each of the domes admits light.
Image: Brett Boardman
There is method in commissioning a respected architect such as Candalepas (or Glenn Murcutt for that matter) to design a mosque. Gaining planning approval for new mosques has revealed some steadfast prejudices and fears. Permission was denied for a new mosque in Currumbin on the Gold Coast on the grounds that it was “too big” following concerted opposition that included vandalism and death threats. In Victoria, Bendigo Mosque was approved despite seventy thousand Facebookers and multiple legal challenges opposing and delaying the project. Pauline Hanson, you won’t be surprised, once called for a ban on the construction of mosques and Islamic schools. Zachariah Matthews, vice-president of Punchbowl’s Australian Islamic Mission, has said that commissioning contemporary design was a response to these known challenges. The mosque is a building to pray in. In a society that so often seems atomized, so often consumed by conflict, so often lonely, to build for prayer seems like a prayer itself.
It has taken more than twenty years to plan, fundraise, commission and deliver the Punchbowl Mosque. The congregation has raised the twelve million dollars needed, an extraordinary testament to the community’s commitment to the project. As director of the Sydney Architecture Festival, Timothy Horton described the project as a “modern architectural masterpiece,” and it was awarded the 2018 Sulman Medal for Public Architecture. It isn’t even finished yet.
Inside, the main prayer space appears to have been sculpted from raw concrete. The large dome draws the eye up, magnifying the spiritual significance of the space.
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Inside, the main prayer space appears to have been sculpted from raw concrete. The large dome draws the eye up, magnifying the spiritual significance of the space.
Image: Brett Boardman
The brief called for a three-hundred-year lifespan; the architect proposed a thousand. In an age of catastrophic cheapskates, contract law and fast-tracking, this is more than hyperbole – it represents a kind of resistance. For Candalepas, concrete is the material of the ages. It has an almost transcendental significance. The Punchbowl Mosque is almost entirely cast in situ – like an ancient building, it appears sculpted as from raw material. There are few visible services, and heating and cooling is subsumed in the slab. The balance of permanent form and provisional mechanization is tipped toward the pre-industrial.
Candalepas has designed a complex that includes a two-level underground car park and a primary school, or madrasa – a type that evolved from the mosque to become the second most important religious building in Islamic tradition. The school, when built, will address the street and return to form a central courtyard. The mosque holds the rear corner of the site and is approached through a low portal in the street wall. Passing through, the mosque is before us, across a forecourt with a covered walkway to the right. To our left and pushing obliquely forward is a contemporary take on the minaret. My guide calls it “an Australian minaret” – no longer amplifying the call to prayer, it is more outcrop than campanile. It is no taller than the building and screened, open to the breeze. Its purpose is not for the muezzin to perform the call to prayer over the suburbs, but to house the women’s separate entry, ritual washroom and prayer gallery. In Candalepas’s arrangement, the women of the congregation now occupy a place traditionally reserved for men.
The entry to the women’s prayer gallery, accessed via the minaret.
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The entry to the women’s prayer gallery, accessed via the minaret.
Image: Brett Boardman
The separation of men and women in Muslim spaces has its roots in Ottoman Islam and has become a global typological norm. To many of us in secular Australia, it will seem incongruous and, indeed, there is debate within the Muslim community as to the future of this tradition.
The men will turn right into a long washroom. They will perform a ritual washing, the wudu, which is accommodated in a utilitarian space but also one tuned for spiritual preparation. Indirect light creates a cool calm; timber and tile complement the concrete. It is tactile but unfussy. The men will return to the covered walk and then to the wide timber doors leading to the prayer hall proper. The entry is low, compressed to the height of the doors through which the domed hall opens around the prayerful. The sequence from street to prayer is an essay in the compression and release of space.
Prayer is one of the Five Pillars of Islamic faith. Prayer is a duty, a practice and a spiritual act of worship. The faithful must answer the call to prayer five times a day – facing Mecca, standing in intimate proximity, they will bow at the waist, prostrate themselves on seven bones, forehead to the floor. With each posture, appropriate prayers are recited, the physical ritual aligned with the spiritual offering. Prayer as powerful discipline.
A central dome sits over all, with a concrete ring beam cast on site. A thin band of clerestory windows floats the dome; a circle sitting over a square. In Islamic architecture, the laws of proportion are based on the division of a circle inscribed by regular figures – the circle is the clear symbol of the Unity of Being (wahdat al-wujud) that contains within itself all the possibilities of existence, as described by Titus Burckhardt in Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on Traditional Science and Sacred Art. For Candalepas, the circle is “an abstraction of all things found in the universe,” but it is the muqarnas that really makes the heart sing.
A timber screen physically and visually separates the women’s prayer gallery.
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A timber screen physically and visually separates the women’s prayer gallery.
Image: Brett Boardman
In traditional Islamic architecture, muqarnas is applied ornamental squinches repeated in crystalline exuberance. In Punchbowl, as elsewhere, the squinches are deployed to negotiate the transition from circle to square. The Topkapi Scroll, dating from fifteenth-century Iran, contains some of the earliest pattern drawings for muqarnas, which has no intrinsic boundary or scale but can be repeated and scaled at will. In this, the muqarnas reminds me of Madigan’s tetrahedral grids, which he extended in drawings and on site, creating vectors and vertices to order the world around his buildings.
Candalepas’s muqarnas is not applied but cast in situ, a single pour making it structural ornament. They recall the coffered concrete dome of the Pantheon and the cascading domes of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, but the chief sensation is not of historical recollection but of originality. Their presence, unadvertised and unexpected on arrival, seem like a cast taken from the vault of heaven.
Above the large prayer space, the women’s prayer gallery is accessed via the minaret. The women are raised, almost level with the domed muqarnas; a timber screen provides physical and visual separation between men and women. Over two levels, the women look down to the men on one side and out to the courtyard on the other. In the prayer hall, the timber is modest and warm, and complements the concrete forms. However, on the reverse side – the women’s side – the steel frame and bracing are expressed, resulting in a harder, unfortunate mechanical articulation.
In plan, the screen appears as a sharp chamfered slice across the incomplete square of the prayer hall. This line is the clearest disruption to an otherwise orthogonal armature, aligning the prayerful to Mecca. It is an intriguing gesture that seems to render the screen between genders a tense provisional element. It is as if, being timber, it might be the first thing to perish in this thousand-year building.
The rituals of worship have informed the organization of space. The male ablutions room is a utilitarian space, but also one tuned for spiritual preparation.
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The rituals of worship have informed the organization of space. The male ablutions room is a utilitarian space, but also one tuned for spiritual preparation.
Image: Brett Boardman
There are one hundred and two domes in all, and ninety-nine will receive calligraphic ornament. Each will be unique, inscribed with one of Allah’s ninety-nine names and the hilya, an ornamental calligraphy that describes the qualities of the Prophet. Craftsmen from Turkey and Iran have been commissioned to paint the inscriptions directly onto the concrete. The Prophet said, “Allah has ninety-nine Names, one-hundred less one; and he who memorized them all by heart will enter Paradise.”
The Most Merciful, the Giver of Peace, the Shaper, the Provider, the Giver of Honour, the Giver of Disgrace, the Giver of Life, the Bringer of Death, the Finder, the Indivisible, the First, the Last, the Timeless. Perhaps it seems indulgent to list even these few here, but the naming of Allah in this space will have a profound effect on the sensation of the room as if through nomenclature the faithful might be brought into his presence.
This kind of text and ornament is anathema to so much of modern architecture, an edict that sometimes seems dogmatic. These two crafts, architecture and calligraphy, are the highest orders of art in Islam. How rich the potential to communicate another sensation, another meaning, another hope beyond utility. Even as Islam, an aniconic religion, proscribes the depiction of sentient beings – God, people and animals – it has led to the development of a complex geometric and calligraphic art and architecture. The proscription isn’t a limitation on invention, but its foil.
Burckhardt describes the role of aniconism in Islamic art:
Islamic art as a whole aims at creating an ambience which helps man to realize his primordial dignity; it therefore avoids everything that could be an ‘idol’. […] Nothing must stand between man and the invisible presence of God. Thus Islamic art creates a void; it eliminates in fact all the turmoil and passionate suggestions of the world, and in their stead creates an order that expresses equilibrium, serenity and peace.
The apparent incongruity between Islamic tradition, Candalepas’s modernity and his Greek Orthodox heritage is resolved into an original, propositional whole, at once traditional and contemporary. Punchbowl Mosque takes on the world’s joys and cares, and it responds. It will certainly outlive us all.
Credits
https://architectureau.com/articles/punchbowl-mosque/
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Punchbowl Mosque / Candalepas Associates
Photo Gallery at:
https://www.archdaily.com/914578/punchb ... associates
The Blue Mosque of Singapore
Masjid Malabar, also known as Golden Dome Mosque, is Singapore's only Malabar Muslim mosque.
In 2005, vice-principal Mohamed Nasim came across an article from 1956 during some research. A mistake in a photo caption prompted him to begin an 17-year journey that ended in him writing a book entitled The Blue Mosque of Singapore.
The photo, published in The Straits Times, captured the foundation stone ceremony of Malabar Mosque, and named H.A. Jivabhai as chairman of the Malabar Muslim Jamaath. Malabar Muslims are an ethnolinguistic group, typically from Malaysia, but with origins in Kerala, India.
“I knew he was not a Malayalee. How did a non-Malayalee become the president of a communal organisation?,” wondered Mr Nasim. This question impelled him to visit the archives and search for answers. Thus began a journey of discovery to research and document the history and heritage of the Malabar community in Singapore.
“It was only much later that I found out that it was a mistake,” Mr Nasim explained to The Straits Times. “I must thank the journalist for taking me on this journey. This goes to show that not all mistakes are bad.”
He later discovered that H.A. Jivabhai was a City Councillor, who was also Ismaili. Jivabhai had played a significant role in supporting the local Malabar community, as well as obtaining approvals for the mosque. He had laid the foundation stone of the Mosque, as captured in the photo from 1956, along with the Mufti of Johor, and was also present at the official opening by the President of Singapore Yusof Ishak in 1963.
Jivabhai was later appointed to serve as President of the Ismail Council for the Far East. The book features a dedicated chapter to Jivabhai and his contributions to civil society in Singapore.
“Over the years, I have heard many instances of my grandfather H.A. Jivabhai’s commitment and contribution to the Singapore fabric,” said his grandson Shehzad Karimi. “It gives me great pride and honour that Mr Nasim has documented his efforts so well. Whilst from different walks of life, we are all one community,” he added. “In fact, Nasim was a witness at my wedding.”
After many hours and days searching through records at the National Library, and interviewing the descendants of early settlers, Mr Nasim had enough for a book.
This resulting publication offers a whirlwind tour of the history and vision of the early pioneers of the blue mosque and their sheer determination, along with the help of volunteers from all walks of life, which enabled its completion. Today, its distinctive blue tiles identify it as an iconic landmark on Singapore’s Victoria Street.
A book launch event was recently held at OnePeople.sg, a centre built to facilitate an appreciation for diversity and to nurture cross-cultural exchanges. The Guest of Honour was Eric Chua, Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Culture, Community and Youth, and Social and Family Development.
Mohammed Nasim invited members of the Ismaili community to participate in the event, and shared various stories about the Malabar Mulsims and their close ties with the Ismaili Jamat in Singapore.
https://the.ismaili/global/news/communi ... -173435533