Aysha Bakkar Mosque

Notes

In the Aysha Bakkar Mosque and community center, Tukan rightly acknowledges and uses a crooked site shape in a busy quarter of Beirut. The program required the provision of a prayer hall on the street level to serve the maximum number of believers, a religious library and a small apartment accommodating the Sheik of the mosque. The departure from the traditional mosque vocabulary was an attempt to create a contemporary building which retains the basic characteristics and atmosphere of a place of worship. The irregular boundaries of the site as well as the noisy location necessitated the generation of a form occupying fully the site closed enough to minimize the noise yet allowing for light to fill the space. The scheme is conceived as a series of shells, with light penetrating through the joints to create within the space an interplay of light and shadow. The Mihrab is part of the overall composition and is designed as the natural end of the shells that taper into it.
(George Arbid)

Sources

Mimar
Jafar Tukan

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