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Design Intervention

The changing shape of the mosque in Britain

East London architect Shahed Saleem is a man conflicted. He

wants to nudge British mosques away from their large

domes, onion-shaped arches and minarets its a look he

finds clumsy, folksy and imported. Beneath these domes lies

one of the few politicized buildings remaining for

architecture: look to New Yorks planned Park51 community

centre and mosque or Switzerlands November 2009

constitutional referendum banning the building of minaretsfor a sense of the stakes and potential to command headlines.

When I visited his studio in March, Saleem elaborated on his

ideas. Exploiting the flexibility of a mosque which need

only orient prayer towards Mecca, so may, for example, be

simply a line in the desert sand one could, he explained,

invent a fresh language, combine European and Islamic

design sensibilities and offer a very British evolution of

Islamic tradition. Saleem is designing the renovation and

extension of former bank into a new mosque and Somali

community centre for Londons Mile End Road; a glazed,

ornamented square curtain wall above the original structure

will reference not just Islamic architectural history but,

cunningly, also the nearby White Cube gallery in Hoxton

(another early 20th-century building extended upwards, with

a Modernist glass box hoisted on top). Locale and heritage

mingle in Saleems mosques. His approach is not unlike that

of architect Sir Frederick Gibberd, who incorporated

Brutalism into the mosque he designed for Londons Regents

Park (completed in 1977). Innovation, however, was stifled in

British mosques soon after. In part, the money had dried up,

and immigrant communities, counting their pennies, chose

not to plump for architects. Instead, they relied on pre-

existing or self-designed spaces.

I met Saleem again recently. He had written to me,

explaining that he now had a slightly different take on his

initial beliefs as a result of visiting two-dozen mosques, many

in northern England, for an English Heritage-commissioned

book he was writing. In 1990, the UK had 400 mosques; in

2010, there are 1,486. Saleems trip had made him realize he

was designing mosques without discussing his innovations

with the mosque-goers. This had humbled him. His new

approach, he said, is less fundamentalist if you like: less

About this article

Published on 13/10/10

ByPdraig Belton

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about ditching things because you think theyre tacky and

more about having regard for the architectural attachments

of ordinary Muslims.

It has become clear that those designing mosques and those

using them speak different languages: a recent development,

spurred when diasporas began to produce architects.

According to Heghnar Watenpaugh, an architectural

historian at the University of California, Davis: The designer

is speaking the language of good design, of formal

innovation. The users of the mosque want their mosque to

look like a mosque. It is an issue of legibility. Nasser Rabbat,

Aga Khan Professor of the History of Islamic Architecture at

mit, finds this a genuine architectural dilemma: Architecture

as a profession is quite a haughty one, with a bit of hypocrisy

[] most architects speak about the user but hardly trust his

or her taste.

All of this raises the question: when and how did minaret and

dome begin to signify mosque so powerfully andunambiguously? To Watenpaughs mind, the central pencil-

shaped minaret is an Ottoman mosque form. Furthermore,

in mediaeval Cairo, under the Mamluk dynasty, a dome

always and only meant a tomb. Not a prayer space.

Reinventing a formal language can seem out of step at a time

when mosques now tend to signify tradition, preservation

and protection. Funding by local subscription within young

communities delivers fewer resources to engage architects

and also reveals an innate conservatism, a longing for the

familiar buildings of the village. The language of diasporaseverywhere is often nostalgic: Dr Omar Khalidi from the Aga

Khan Programme for Islamic Architecture has called the

diasporic mosque an architecture of homesickness. Viewed

from another side, when Islam moves into the world, it tends

to assimilate with local architectural tropes, which, in turn,

become Islamic architecture. In the eighth century, Abbasid

Caliph al-Mansur constructed Baghdad along lines of the

conquered Persian city Firouzabad. In the IndianIslamic

Mughal empire (which ruled a large portion of the Indian

subcontinent between the 16th and mid-19th centuries), theinvoking of local Indic traditions was widespread: its visible

especially in the ornament and the corbelled shallow arches

that take the place of ByzantineIslamic voussoirs in Akbars

royal city of Fatehpur Sikri in the 16th century; Shah Jahans

17th-century Taj Mahal integrates Hindu decorative elements

starkly in its finial. The eighth-century Great Mosque of Xian

in China is Chinese in every respect. If there is an essence in

Islamic architecture, perhaps its in its journeying outward.

When two languages meet, what results first is a pidgin.

Intelligible phrases are sliced from their original languages,and pasted into a new one; in time, a local creole grammar

grows up. British Muslim architecture is at the stage of


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pidgin: the Zakariyya Jame Masjid (2005) in Bolton, and the

Harrow Central Mosque in northwest London (due to be

completed in 2011) both asked members to propose design

elements they favoured and came up with a replica door from

the house of the Prophet, tiles from Pakistan and eighth- to

tenth-century Kufic scripts.

How to nudge this process forward? Saleem suggests it

begins with contextualization: You may still use symbols

which originate in traditional Islamic imaginations I dont

think its just about ditching, submerging or replacing them,

but making your language relevant and accurate to the time

and social context. The swelling numbers of British-born,

second-generation Muslims may also bring more

contemporary frames of reference.

Recently architects have been attempting more daring

mosque designs. The Belfast-born architect Adrian Stewart,

for example, spurned minarets in his ecologically sustainable

expansion of Glasgows Masjid al-Furqan mosque (2009ongoing) and AngloSpanish architects Mangera Yvars

design for a planned Islamic garden next to the site of the

2012 Olympics in Newham, East London, was based on the

14th-century Alhambra palace in Granada, and combines a

mosque, school, youth facilities and residential

accommodation. The environmentally friendly design

incorporates wind turbine minarets borrowed from the

language of nomadic structures, tented cities and the curves

of calligraphy. Dubbed the mega-mosque it would have

been the biggest religious building in Britain and the largestmosque in Europe it is dogged by controversy and its future

is now uncertain. Saleem, for his part, has won planning

permission for his Mile End mosque: the white cube will be

decorated with ornaments relevant to the Tower Hamlets

Somali community who will pray there. He also has received

local planning consent for a mosque in Hackney; its design

has been abstracted from an Ottoman tile and repeated four

times. The early-19th century German philosopher, Friedrich

Schelling, may have called architecture frozen music; but

Islamic architecture in Britain seems to have started to flowforward again.

Pdraig Belton

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