The project, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is inspired by the historical role of the mosque as a civic center. The roof, perforated by more than 5,000 skylights, acts like a carpet hovering over the landscape, filtering sunlight and turning the interior into a diffuse space that extends beyond the building to provide shade to the outdoor areas. In the middle, a transparent cylinder runs through the building and houses two olive trees that reinforce the relationship that Islamic culture has with these trees.
The design also includes an open-air ablution space with volcanic stone finishes, classrooms, and a secluded garden landscape modeled on a desert oasis. A reinterpretation of the minaret features speaker clusters that ascend and descend a 39-meter steel-mesh tower for the call to prayer.
Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Photograph by Iwan Baan.
“Al-Mujadilah challenged us to design our first house of worship: How to interpret a traditional architectural typology through a contemporary lens? The mosque's role of seamlessly bringing together worship and study under one roof led to the building’s distinguishing architectural feature. Its undulating roof arches to shape a grand space for prayer at one end and morphs downward into a slung surface that shelters an intimate space for education at the other.
The roof harvests diffuse, sublime daylight from a field of light wells while minimizing heat gain from Doha's strong sun. The design was also inspired by Islamic art and architecture, in which abstraction serves to represent the transcendent nature of the divine. As a woman, the project was a special opportunity for me to design a space exclusively for women that is flexible and responsive to real-time, everyday needs.”
Elizabeth Diller.
Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Photograph by Iwan Baan.
Project description by Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Conceived by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chairperson of Qatar Foundation, Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women in Qatar is the first purpose-built contemporary women’s mosque in the Muslim world.
Created to foster a more inclusive Muslim society where women can contribute to shaping contemporary Islamic thought and discourse, Al-Mujadilah is situated in Education City, a 12-square-kilometre campus in Doha comprised of educational and research institutes.
The 50,000-square-foot building features a prayer hall, classrooms, open-air courtyard and multi-purpose spaces. Its signature roof admits and controls light in the main hall. It flattens and extends beyond the building’s footprint to provide shade for exterior spaces and peripheral programs. A field of more than five thousand light wells embedded in the roof slab modulate the abundant natural light to provide a soft, diffuse luminosity in the main hall. The main hall is rotated 17 degrees off axis to point the Qibla wall toward Mecca for prayer. In the Islamic tradition of mosques constructed in harmony with nature, Al-Mujadilah is centered around two olive trees that pierce through the roof and reach toward the sky.
As Al-Mujadilah’s main space for worship, the 9,400-square-foot prayer hall features an undulating Qibla wall, of which the asymmetrical curvature forms two key focal points: the mihrab (the niche indicating the direction of prayer towards Mecca) and the minbar (the platform used by the Imam to deliver the Friday sermon). At the mihrab curvature, a skylight bathes the niche in natural light during the day, clearly identifying it as the primary architectural and religious focal point of the space. DS+R’s design for the custom 35 meters by 20 meters carpet scaled a traditional prayer rug from the typical size for a single worshipper to cover the collective space of up to 750 worshippers in the prayer hall. Made of hand-tufted New Zealand wool, the pattern was recontextualized with a process of pixelation and shifting in intervals of each prayer row. The carpet’s central mihrab figure further reinforces the Qibla.
The prayer hall and multi-purpose space are lined by a curated library of Islamic texts that encourages research and study. With a capacity of more than 8,000 volumes, the extensive collection covers Islamic history, the history of women, and fiction and nonfiction books by Muslim female authors. Equipped with a retractable stage, modular furniture and temporary walls, the flexible multi-purpose space supports Al-Mujadilah’s educational program with the ability to host lectures, talks, classes, and workshops. During Ramadan, an extension of the prayer hall carpet is laid down in this space to increase the capacity of worshippers from 750 to approximately 1,300.
Embedded in an area carved from the dune near the southern entrance is a minaret conceived for this unique building. Traditionally, a muezzin would climb up the minaret to deliver the call to prayer five times each day. From the height of the elevated balcony, his voice would broadcast the call to the entire community. Over time, however, muezzins were replaced by electronic amplification and a recorded message. The Al-Mujadilah minaret reinterprets the ritual of human ascent up the tower. Instead of a muezzin, a cluster of electronic speakers “climbs” 128 feet to the top of a diaphanous steel-mesh tower five times daily. From the summit, the call to prayer is broadcast to the surrounding community. Afterward, the speakers descend back down to the garden. The tower is suspended in the air by cable stays that are anchored to a retaining wall. The tensegrity structure features a screen with a custom perforated pattern that recalls a mashrabiya, an element found in traditional Islamic architecture.
