Oasis Magazine 40 BRITAIN Contemporary Islamic Architecture in Britain The most recent mosque was designed and not built. 'That cartoon look, all plastic domes and minarets': thus Ali Mangera, one of the more interesting of contemporary British Islamic architects (and himself a young Muslim), synopsises most Islamic edifices built in the United Kingdom through the past four decades. Mangera's own designs for a 'Markaz' in West Ham jostled up by the site of the 2012 Olympics, conceived as a mediaeval Islamic garden transposed onto modern London, evoked comparison to the Alhambra of the land of his birth. Like the plans for Belfast-native Adrian Stewart's 'green' expansion of Masjid al-Furqan in Glasgow, Mangera's do not feature minarets – and so, are perhaps naturally Swiss-friendly. It did not help things when the tabloids decided to dub it the 'mega-mosque'. Which brings us to the vexing question: has planning permission killed the Islamic architect in Britain, and in Europe? Were the interesting buildings—together with the large ones (the London Central Mosque by Regent Park, designed by the modernist Sir Frederick Gibberd who designed the Didcot Power Station; bankrolled by the Churchill War Ministry in 1940 to recognise Muslim contribution to the war effort), and a few of the boorish ones (the Alhambra music hall, occupying from 1854-1936 the inches presently lying underneath the Odeon in Leicester Square)—all inextricably destined to be products of another age, drunk with an Islamophilia which was the preserve of well-heeled enthusiasts? Lord Ahmed is after all far from the first Muslim in the House of Lords; that was Lord Stanley of Alderley, Bertrand Russell's uncle. In the Nineteenth Century, they were all doing it. In diplomacy and the army, it was seen as a positive advantage. There is also a second dynamic at work, town hall truculence to the side. Dr Omar Khalidi from the Aga Khan Programme for Islamic Architecture has called the diasporic mosque 'an architecture of homesickness'. Contrast this with Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which has been emblematic equally of good times and bad in that emirate, completed just the 4th January of this year; its architect Adrian Smith described it as lurking within an Islamic architectural vocabulary, taking its treble-lobed footprint from the shape of the Hymenocallis flower, and viewed from base or top evoking the onion Ottoman dome of the Islamic design idiom. Set alongside the backing of nations, whether emirates eager to display their financial pomp or a Nasrid emirate of Grenada acutely aware of impending banishment from the Iberian peninsula, community subscription delivers fewer resources but also innate conservatism, a longing for the familiar buildings of the village. The taste of diasporas everywhere is maudlin, and heartbreaking. Architecture was for Schelling frozen music; but is Islamic architecture in Britain frozen? If so there are points of Within England at least, the first work of Islamic architecture was completed in 1889, adhering to Indo-Saracenic sketches by a keen Anglo-French Muslim convert named Émile Prisse d'Avesnes. The India Office had loaned these bound drawings, in an album called L'art Arabe, to one Dr Gottlieb Leitner—an equally keen Hungarian-born Orientalist and by twenty-three, Professor in Arabic and Muslim Law at King’s College, London. The architecture comprised part of a short-lived Oriental Institute, and the resulting Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking (where, by curious happenstance, H.G. Wells's Martians first elected to land) trailed only by a nonce the conspicuous Arab Hall (1864-79) which George Aitchison designed to house the thousand Islamic tiles his friend, the painter Lord Leighton, had somehow accrued from Damascus. (Sir Richard Burton posted in several from India, for completeness.) By the end of Leitner's project, the Anglo-proto-mosque's architect, Scottish neoclassicist Sir William Chambers, commented 'We wish the Mosque at Woking had been built at Jericho or some place distant enough never to have troubled us.' One gleans they may not have got on. BY PáDRAIG BELTON ARTS & CULTURE » Britain » Contemporary Islamic Architecture in Britain
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Oasis Magazine40
britain
Contemporary Islamic Architecture in Britain
The most recent mosque was designed and not built. 'That cartoon look, all plastic domes and minarets': thus Ali Mangera, one of the more interesting of contemporary British Islamic architects (and himself a young Muslim), synopsises most Islamic edifices built in the United Kingdom through the past four decades. Mangera's own designs for a 'Markaz' in West Ham jostled up by the site of the 2012 Olympics, conceived as a mediaeval Islamic garden transposed onto modern London, evoked comparison to the Alhambra of the land of his birth. Like the plans for Belfast-native Adrian Stewart's 'green' expansion of Masjid al-Furqan in Glasgow, Mangera's do not feature minarets – and so, are perhaps naturally Swiss-friendly. It did not help things when the tabloids decided to dub it the 'mega-mosque'.
Which brings us to the vexing question: has planning permission killed the Islamic architect in Britain, and in Europe? Were the interesting buildings—together with the large ones (the London Central Mosque by Regent Park, designed by the modernist Sir Frederick Gibberd who designed the Didcot Power Station; bankrolled by the Churchill War Ministry in 1940 to recognise Muslim contribution to the war effort), and a few of the boorish ones (the Alhambra music hall, occupying from 1854-1936 the inches presently lying underneath the Odeon in Leicester Square)—all inextricably destined to be products of another age, drunk with an Islamophilia which was the preserve of well-heeled enthusiasts? Lord Ahmed is after all far from the first Muslim in the House of Lords; that was Lord Stanley of Alderley, Bertrand Russell's uncle. In the Nineteenth Century, they were all doing it. In diplomacy and the army, it was seen as a positive advantage.
There is also a second dynamic at work, town hall truculence to the side. Dr Omar Khalidi from the Aga Khan Programme for Islamic Architecture has called the diasporic mosque 'an architecture of homesickness'. Contrast this with Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which has been emblematic equally of good times and bad in that emirate, completed just the 4th January of this year; its architect Adrian Smith described it as lurking within an Islamic architectural vocabulary, taking its treble-lobed footprint from the shape of the Hymenocallis flower, and viewed from base or top evoking the onion Ottoman dome of the Islamic design idiom. Set alongside the backing of nations, whether emirates eager to display their financial pomp or a Nasrid emirate of Grenada acutely aware of impending banishment from the Iberian peninsula, community subscription delivers fewer resources but also innate conservatism, a longing for the familiar buildings of the village. The taste of diasporas everywhere is maudlin, and heartbreaking.
Architecture was for Schelling frozen music; but is Islamic architecture in Britain frozen? If so there are points of
thawing: the Olympics may not see its British Alhambra, but Mangera faces better odds in an intervention in the opposite side of London, a North London Cultural Centre in Harrow whose curvilinear form, he says, is meant to mediate the urban and suburban environments to its either side. Mangera's challenge here is not planning permission – that much he's received – but rather one he has set himself, of knitting together with adequate interstitial spaces the religious, communal, residential, nursing home and dining facilities it encompasses, to permit these activities to merge and overspill into a whole representing human life.
There also are three inner-city projects underway by a young East London architectural practice, Makespacearchitects. Partner Shahed Saleem sees each as a minute intervention into an existing urban fabric, involving close engagement with locals in an ongoing negotiation amongst the communities' expectations, the planning authority's policies and the architects' vision. He indicates the formal openness of the mosque, open to suggestion and mandating only the qibla which can be a line drawn in sand, itself as an intuitive site of negotiation between the mosque's need to have meaning for those who use it, and the symbolism it embodies of its own ongoing local evolution as a genre. It is, he says hopefully, 'a unique and exciting building type on the British urban landscape and architectural scene'. For Makespacearchitects, there are three such interventions at the moment: one in Hackney, where reference to Islamic architectural history is through a pattern quoted from the Alhambra, without reverting to the formal elements of minaret and dome; one a former nightclub in Lewisham at the end of an indistinguished Victorian terrace, given traditional minaret and dome to meet the planners' wish for a landmark on a nondescript street, and for a nod at the Muslim population of the quarter; and an awkward site in Bethnal Green by a rail station, in which a minaret is formed by pulling up one corner of a cube shaped block.
Islamic architecture in today's Britain thus has both its strategic visionaries and its tactical surgeons. Perhaps not so frozen, after all.
Within England at least, the first work of Islamic architecture was completed in 1889, adhering to Indo-Saracenic sketches by a keen Anglo-French Muslim convert named Émile Prisse d'Avesnes. The India Office had loaned these bound drawings, in an album called L'art Arabe, to one Dr Gottlieb Leitner—an equally keen Hungarian-born Orientalist and by twenty-three, Professor in Arabic and Muslim Law at King’s College, London. The architecture comprised part of a short-lived Oriental Institute, and the resulting Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking (where, by curious happenstance, H.G. Wells's Martians first elected to land) trailed only by a nonce the conspicuous Arab Hall (1864-79) which George Aitchison designed to house the thousand Islamic tiles his friend, the painter Lord Leighton, had somehow accrued from Damascus. (Sir Richard Burton posted in several from India, for completeness.) By the end of Leitner's project, the Anglo-proto-mosque's architect, Scottish neoclassicist Sir William Chambers, commented 'We wish the Mosque at Woking had been built at Jericho or some place distant enough never to have troubled us.' One gleans they may not have got on.
by Pádraig belton
ARTS & CULTURE » Britain » Contemporary Islamic Architecture in Britain
OASIS 12_v5.indd 40 10-06-15 11:38 PM
britain
Contemporary Islamic Architecture in Britain
The most recent mosque was designed and not built. 'That cartoon look, all plastic domes and minarets': thus Ali Mangera, one of the more interesting of contemporary British Islamic architects (and himself a young Muslim), synopsises most Islamic edifices built in the United Kingdom through the past four decades. Mangera's own designs for a 'Markaz' in West Ham jostled up by the site of the 2012 Olympics, conceived as a mediaeval Islamic garden transposed onto modern London, evoked comparison to the Alhambra of the land of his birth. Like the plans for Belfast-native Adrian Stewart's 'green' expansion of Masjid al-Furqan in Glasgow, Mangera's do not feature minarets – and so, are perhaps naturally Swiss-friendly. It did not help things when the tabloids decided to dub it the 'mega-mosque'.
Which brings us to the vexing question: has planning permission killed the Islamic architect in Britain, and in Europe? Were the interesting buildings—together with the large ones (the London Central Mosque by Regent Park, designed by the modernist Sir Frederick Gibberd who designed the Didcot Power Station; bankrolled by the Churchill War Ministry in 1940 to recognise Muslim contribution to the war effort), and a few of the boorish ones (the Alhambra music hall, occupying from 1854-1936 the inches presently lying underneath the Odeon in Leicester Square)—all inextricably destined to be products of another age, drunk with an Islamophilia which was the preserve of well-heeled enthusiasts? Lord Ahmed is after all far from the first Muslim in the House of Lords; that was Lord Stanley of Alderley, Bertrand Russell's uncle. In the Nineteenth Century, they were all doing it. In diplomacy and the army, it was seen as a positive advantage.
There is also a second dynamic at work, town hall truculence to the side. Dr Omar Khalidi from the Aga Khan Programme for Islamic Architecture has called the diasporic mosque 'an architecture of homesickness'. Contrast this with Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which has been emblematic equally of good times and bad in that emirate, completed just the 4th January of this year; its architect Adrian Smith described it as lurking within an Islamic architectural vocabulary, taking its treble-lobed footprint from the shape of the Hymenocallis flower, and viewed from base or top evoking the onion Ottoman dome of the Islamic design idiom. Set alongside the backing of nations, whether emirates eager to display their financial pomp or a Nasrid emirate of Grenada acutely aware of impending banishment from the Iberian peninsula, community subscription delivers fewer resources but also innate conservatism, a longing for the familiar buildings of the village. The taste of diasporas everywhere is maudlin, and heartbreaking.
Architecture was for Schelling frozen music; but is Islamic architecture in Britain frozen? If so there are points of
thawing: the Olympics may not see its British Alhambra, but Mangera faces better odds in an intervention in the opposite side of London, a North London Cultural Centre in Harrow whose curvilinear form, he says, is meant to mediate the urban and suburban environments to its either side. Mangera's challenge here is not planning permission – that much he's received – but rather one he has set himself, of knitting together with adequate interstitial spaces the religious, communal, residential, nursing home and dining facilities it encompasses, to permit these activities to merge and overspill into a whole representing human life.
There also are three inner-city projects underway by a young East London architectural practice, Makespacearchitects. Partner Shahed Saleem sees each as a minute intervention into an existing urban fabric, involving close engagement with locals in an ongoing negotiation amongst the communities' expectations, the planning authority's policies and the architects' vision. He indicates the formal openness of the mosque, open to suggestion and mandating only the qibla which can be a line drawn in sand, itself as an intuitive site of negotiation between the mosque's need to have meaning for those who use it, and the symbolism it embodies of its own ongoing local evolution as a genre. It is, he says hopefully, 'a unique and exciting building type on the British urban landscape and architectural scene'. For Makespacearchitects, there are three such interventions at the moment: one in Hackney, where reference to Islamic architectural history is through a pattern quoted from the Alhambra, without reverting to the formal elements of minaret and dome; one a former nightclub in Lewisham at the end of an indistinguished Victorian terrace, given traditional minaret and dome to meet the planners' wish for a landmark on a nondescript street, and for a nod at the Muslim population of the quarter; and an awkward site in Bethnal Green by a rail station, in which a minaret is formed by pulling up one corner of a cube shaped block.
Islamic architecture in today's Britain thus has both its strategic visionaries and its tactical surgeons. Perhaps not so frozen, after all.
Within England at least, the first work of Islamic architecture was completed in 1889, adhering to Indo-Saracenic sketches by a keen Anglo-French Muslim convert named Émile Prisse d'Avesnes. The India Office had loaned these bound drawings, in an album called L'art Arabe, to one Dr Gottlieb Leitner—an equally keen Hungarian-born Orientalist and by twenty-three, Professor in Arabic and Muslim Law at King’s College, London. The architecture comprised part of a short-lived Oriental Institute, and the resulting Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking (where, by curious happenstance, H.G. Wells's Martians first elected to land) trailed only by a nonce the conspicuous Arab Hall (1864-79) which George Aitchison designed to house the thousand Islamic tiles his friend, the painter Lord Leighton, had somehow accrued from Damascus. (Sir Richard Burton posted in several from India, for completeness.) By the end of Leitner's project, the Anglo-proto-mosque's architect, Scottish neoclassicist Sir William Chambers, commented 'We wish the Mosque at Woking had been built at Jericho or some place distant enough never to have troubled us.' One gleans they may not have got on.
by Pádraig belton
ARTS & CULTURE » Britain » Contemporary Islamic Architecture in Britain
OASIS 12_v5.indd 41 10-06-15 11:38 PM
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