Güngören Mosque reconsiders the mosque typology through a contemporary lens. A mosque is usually positioned in the city as a singular object, a landmark, a center. But for us, what matters most is a function that is at least as powerful as its architectural identity: its role as a place that brings people together, a space for community. In this project, we conceived the mosque not as a standalone building, but as a continuation of the urban fabric, interwoven with its open spaces.

Recalling the courtyard

Just as important as the mosque itself is its courtyard. Cities in the geography of Turkey developed differently from Western cities; the classical tradition of a public square gathered around a civic building never took the same form here. Instead, the mosque courtyard, and functional spaces such as the fountain (çeşmebaşı), became the meeting points of the city, embedding themselves directly into urban development. Yet newer generations of mosques have increasingly turned inward, becoming self-contained objects, and in this process the courtyard’s role of bringing the surrounding community together has largely been lost. With Güngören Mosque, we set out to revive this traditional function within a contemporary mosque.

Not an object, but a weave

As a natural consequence of this approach, we planned the mosque not as a singular building but as a weave, an interlocking of built and open space. Our aim was to create a place that would not only serve religious function, meaningful only during prayer times, but one that would be part of everyday urban life, worth visiting at any time. The spatial layout therefore develops as a system in which the prayer hall and the open spaces are locked into one another.

A dome of light and textile

Upon entering the prayer hall, the central idea draws on a core tenet of Islamic theology: the direct, individual bond formed between the believer and God. We understood the most essential function of mosque architecture as serving this relationship, and shaped the prayer volume to speak to the human spirit. In doing so, we reinterpreted the dome, one of the mosque typology’s most fundamental archetypes, by bringing it together with light and textile, forming a new idea of the dome through beams of light and textile surfaces.

A niche for everyone

Rather than forming a single, homogeneous dome, we searched for a form in which every visitor could find their own corner, their own niche. This search became the foundation of the project’s core proposition for the mosque typology: that worship is as much a collective experience as it is a personal moment in which each individual forms their own bond.