Mosque Tower

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Mosque Tower

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IND [Inter National Design]

Diagram skyline:
The current city dominated by towers or extensive suburbia has had a great impact on the appropriate presence of cultural and religious buildings. The mosque once the main protagonist of cities skylines has become encroached by construction developments that diminish its character.
Solutions to make ever-bigger mosques or to find places desolated so it can stand by itself are not tackling the main crisis the mosque faces, the ever-increasing dynamism of the city.
We propose not insist on enforcing tough regulations on the city but rather on inventing a new way of seeing the mosque as part of this new vertical city.
In fact the mosque played in many centuries the role of social condenser attracting several programs around it while giving by its openness of its courtyard a relaxing chamber in the usually hectic horizontal and dense city. We would like to keep this tradition which sees the mosque as in embedded part of the urban structure and not only as a detached monument. The city and the mosque should be in harmony.
The vertical mosque
If most of the city program is going vertical we propose to treat the city and the mosque as a continuous vertical arrangement of programs and activities. The mosque itself can then play the crucial role of allowing religious activities in combination with other programs such as school, auditoriums, and libraries. The mosque as a complex displays a great richness, which could be incorporated in the vertical city we propose.
The mosque in the sky
We support the idea of maintaining elements of the mosque, which help to communicate its purpose and function such as the dome, the minarets and the courtyard, yet in this proposal they are carefully reinterpreted.
The dome
If Sinan master the idea of the dome, we think that the best homage to him is to think further with other ways of interpret such a key element of Sinan?s ideal mosque. We propose to reverse the dome allowing the experience of seeing its roof from within the mosque itself. A hanging dome made of post-stressed concrete slab is a great engineering challenge that we think it is worth initiating nowadays.
The courtyard
As we mentioned before the role of the entrance courtyard of the mosque goes beyond its mere religious purposes since it is a crucial space of both filter to the city and chamber to it. It provides a quieter open-air environment that is suitable for such special moments as the funeral of a Muslim. It is also the place where the prayer start the sequence of cleaning him or herself before entering the ablution area and then the praying space. Our courtyard provides this needs but it is intended to function as such for a tower-city. From here women and man take their independent trajectories to first the ablution area beneath the courtyard and then to their respective spaces for praying below.