“In Remembrance of Sinan the Great” by Nuvist Architecture and Design

This mosque design is Nuvist Architectural Design Studio proposal for the “In remembrance of Sinan the Great” National Competition of Mosque Architecture in Turkey. It is a unique architecture design, you might not know if this is a mosque, because there are no domes and minaret in this design.

Text from Nüvist :
The mosques are not very unique buildings in terms of for usage, community relations or reflections of traditional and modern trends. They are significant for sanctity, mystically and figurativeness. Nevertheless, the mosques which are designed recently are not presentable in these features. There are not many examples for that. And there are too many extraordinary traditional examples especially in this historical geography (Turkey). So this situation is a little bit disappointing us.

In this context, we thought that there is no need to dome or minaret anymore for mosques buildings. We believed that it must be more than these. We have been thinking for a long time that mosque buildings can be discussing its own conditions. In this way, modern thoughts can achieve with these conditions. And also says in competition brief that “there is no competition area for the mosque” because the thing that asked for is the mosque itself. Thus, we can achieve design examples in this subject that has certain and strong rules. So we thought that we may catch the zeitgeist.

As usual, the all mosque buildings have construction and building elements like domes, arches, minarets, atriums in certain conditions until today. So we thought that we have a chance to improve these things in this competition.
Because we believe that there is no need to mosque building elements like domes, arches and minarets. They are all not necessity in this modern age. For example, we can create high-tech roofs now, so there is no need to domes anymore or create steel-arch and we don not need old-arches anymore. And specially minarets; minarets were one of the best important invention of its age. Because people has needed to hearsounds of the call to prayer. But now, we are using public address system for it. So why we are still using minarets ? In this way, we designed a just symbol for the minaret which represents the religion of Islam that is last religion in the four main world religions. And we designed skin-shell instead of a dome. Thus, we believed that we created modern dome that we called this “cloak” which represents also connections and fullness in all four main world religions. We designed that the synthesis of traditional and modern approaches.

Design by dofft