The Architecture of the New Mosque
What should a mosque built today look like? Architects, communities and scholars are finding they disagree — and the disagreement is producing some remarkable buildings.
The mosque built by immigrant communities in the 1960s and 1970s was often a converted terraced house or factory unit: functional, unpretentious, shaped by shortage of funds rather than architectural ambition. The mosques being built today — in many of the same cities, by the grandchildren of those original communities — are often very different: purpose-built, architecturally adventurous, confident expressions of a community that is no longer asking permission to exist.
Not all of them look like what you might expect a mosque to look like. A new mosque in Cambridge eschews the dome and minaret in favour of a timber-framed structure that its architects say draws on English vernacular tradition; a mosque in Germany is clad in green ceramic tiles that reference Islamic geometry without quoting it; a mosque in New York occupies a glass tower and is deliberately invisible from the street. The diversity of approaches reflects genuine disagreement about what a mosque is for, and who it should speak to.
