Design Principles inspired by Cambridge Central Mosque
🚲 I went to visit Cambridge Central Mosque because I had heard great things. Visiting was really inspiring, and afterwards I kept thinking about the design process that had created a place that is so beautiful, soulful, functional, sustainble…
🤓 I’ve derived a few design principles from my visit. And I like the idea of drawing on these when I’m designing things which are not mosques. Aka, everything I design, usually within the Huddlecraft — o — sphere.
🖼️ But first, a couple of photos to give you a flavour of the place (although may not do it full justice):
7 design principles:
1. Make a hierarchy of your aims (it needn’t prevent multiple outcomes)
Our tour guide made a point of repeating that this is a mosque. The space must, first and foremost, help people to connect with Allah. In the process of designing the mosque, all other aims and objectives come second to this.
Once the mosque has been built it becomes many things to many people (and beings). The atrium can be an event space. The garden can enhance biodiversity. The mosque can connect Muslims and non-Muslims in the local area. Community cohesion and biodiversity are wonderful objectives to have, but would it have been helpful to the designers to give equal attention to all objectives? Would they have created a more perfect mosque that way? I seriously doubt it.
It can be hard to be clear about what matters most when everything seems important and urgent. It can be harder still when you hold a value of inclusion. For me it’s useful to remember that a narrowing of focus can actually serve all objectives better in the end.
2. Apply beauty to draw people in, provide good bike parking to bring them back
At the mosque it’s clear that they have created something so beautiful and so special, that a strong field of attraction exists around it, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The free tour opens up what could otherwise feel like an exclusive space, inviting people in. There were some people in our tour group who had made a substantial journey that day, just to come and visit the mosque, to see and feel this place in the flesh.
That was partly due to the attractive power of beauty.
But once beauty has drawn you in, what then? If it’s skin deep it might lose its hold over you and you’ll drift away again. I was struck by just how practical and useful and functional the mosque was too. LOTS of space to stow your shoes away when you take them off. Which sounds silly, but I’ve been in mosques where your shoes are lost in a shoe mountain and it’s hard to find them again! There was plenty of parking for bikes and cars. Would you travel across the country for these things alone? No. But they might be the reason you keep going back.
3. Take people on a journey
I loved how the series of spaces inside the mosque have been designed to evoke different feelings.
The garden brings you in off the busy street, embraces you and calms you. When you walk into the atrium, the noisy street feels far away. Once you take off your shoes, you can feel the cool of the marble floor. You feel calmer still. Then you go through into an ante-room before entering the mosque. It is smaller, with a lower ceiling, carpetted, more intimate. It draws you in, it is even quieter, you feel safe and the outside world is almost totally forgotten. It provides a contrast when you walk into the mosque space, which has the highest celing yet, with the wooden trees that draw your eyes upward (to the heavens), conjuring a sense of scale and wonder.
This series of spaces felt like they had been conceived of as a journey. And if rooms in a building can be a theatrical experience, then perhaps we can design anything to be that way.
4. Fuse ancient with modern
I found zero tension between the old and the new within the design of the mosque. The spaces felt both traditional and Islamic — drawing on geometry and patterns that reach back in time — whilst at the same time feeling contemporary — like when you walk into the bathroom and feel the warmth of underfloor heating underfoot. Both ancient and modern seemed to be richer for enhancement from the other.
Our guide told us that the mosque has a green roof which is watered with waste water from the building below. Of course you wouldn’t find this in a traditional mosque, but it’s still totally in keeping with Quaranic principles, just expressed in a new way.
On reflection I’m not sure exactly how Cambridge Central Mosque have made this marriage so harmonious. But I felt inspired to play a bit more with this ancient/modern collision in my own work, when I can.
5. Bring artistry together with simplicity and restraint
To build on the previous idea, I was also struck by the succesful collision of visual complexity with minimalism and restraint. Islamic art is often very decorative, featuring complex geometry and patterns. Whilst this was very much present in the mosque, it was offset with so much simplicity and even minimalism in places, which for me, made the detail all the more beautiful. The craft felt all the more noticeable, probably in the same way that a painting might sing when hung on a plain white wall in a gallery.
I think it’s (relatively) easy to apply this principle when working visually, and much more interesting to think about how we might apply it in other places. When is our writing overly gaudy? When have we provided far too much of a good thing in our learning programme design? When can we do more by doing less?
6. Ask people what they want and cater to their multiplicity
I loved how many options there were for women in the mosque, to pray with a variety of levels of privacy, according to their preference. There is even a soundproof room (where the Imam’s voice comes through on speakers) where families can pray if babies are screaming and children are crying. Not because families should take their children in there when that happens, but because some parents feel more comfortable this way, and this option will mean that they don’t feel they need to take the children outside and leave the mosque.
This is a great example of talking to people, and consulting them, to remove as many barriers as possible to accessing what they want or need. In this case, removing barriers that might prevent people from coming to the mosque. I think the thing to take away here is that when women were consulted during the design of the mosque, the full variety of their needs was catered to. It wasn’t simply a process of finding out what the majority of women wanted, it went further than that.
7. And lastly, plant a garden
That’s it! That’s the design principle. And if you can’t plant a garden, go to one. And if you can’t go to one, bring one to you. Etc.
