Amir Shakib Arslan Mosque

The design for a new mosque in an old structure southeast of Beirut explores the intersection of secular and religious ideas in Islamic sacred architecture.

Makram el Kadi and Ziad Jamaleddine, the principals at Brooklyn- and Beirut-based firm LEFT Architects, never planned on actually building a mosque when they embarked on an extended study of Islamic sacred architecture in 2013. But two years later, a client in Lebanon invited them to build one in Moukhtara—his village, southeast of Beirut—and they jumped at the opportunity to put ideas into practice.

For the pair—whose East–West practice reflects their ideas about the intersection of the secular and religious and of Christianity and Islam—the mosque is a problematic but fruitful form: In theory, it offers a variety of approaches, but too often it is pigeonholed into a rigorous interpretation. “There’s nothing that dictates what a mosque should look like in the Koran or the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammed,” el Kadi says. “The Arabic word for mosque—masjid—can mean ‘gathering place’ or ‘liturgical space.’ We were interested in how mosques link the sacred interior space to the exterior, everyday social life.”

The project involved the renovation of a hillside structure whose brick, cross-vaulted first floor was built in the 18th century and whose utilitarian second floor was added at the turn of the 20th. LEFT lopped off most of this upper level to create a terrace around a skylight into the 1,000-square-foot interior below.

The walls and ceiling of the single room inside are layered with locally sourced plaster, while the floor is covered in a carpet whose zigzag design represents a sound map of the mosque’s call to prayer. Outside, the mosque’s most striking feature is a minaret crafted from thin steel slats—more vertical screen than tower. The slats are folded such that people approaching the mosque from one angle read the word “Allah” in Arabic script but from another see a void. The same gesture appears below, where the slats form a canopy and wall that mark the mosque’s entrance. On the wall is the word “Insan,” which means “human.”

Gestures to such tensions—solid words vs. void, God vs. man—go to the heart of LEFT’s project, not just in the design of the mosque, but in their research into the form. To el Kadi and Jamaleddine, Islam is neither monolithic nor fundamentalist; it is open to interpretation, to doubt, to reason. They want their mosque to be a place where Muslims gather not just to pray, but to learn and debate. “The war against fundamentalism is at heart a war of ideas,” el Kadi says, “and architecture is one of those ideas.”

Project Credits
Project: Amir Shakib Arslan Mosque, Moukhtara, Shouf, Lebanon
Client: MP Walid Joumblatt
Architect/Interior Design/Landscape Architect: LEFT Architects, New York and Beirut . Makram el Kadi, Ziad Jamaleddine (principals); Gentley Smith (project architect); Rafah Farhat, Elias Kateb, Alex Palmer, Nayef al Sabhan, Tong Shu, Shun-Ping Liu (design team)
Structural Engineer: Antoine Bou Chedid
Electrical Engineer: Eng Bassam Ghazal
Construction Manager/Conservation Architect/Owners Representative: Arch Zaher Ghosseini
General Contractor: Acon
Lighting Designer: HiLights
Call to Prayer: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Nisrine Khodr
Size: 1,000 square feet
Cost: Withheld