Religious Arts; Honor Award

L.E.FT Architects with Iheba Guermazi and Beya Othmani

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

According to a popular myth, the Island of Jerba off the coast of Tunisia hosts 365 mosques, one for every day of the year. This points to the unusual density of Muslim spaces of worship on this small island. For centuries, Jerbians adopted ingenious spatial strategies to face pressing social and environmental challenges. The scarcity of natural resources, especially water, and the risk of social conflicts between different ethnic and religious groups pushed Jerbians to shape an innovative territorial model. The islanders chose not to have a central urban center and divided their densely populated territory into small, equitable agricultural patches where each extended family could be entirely self-reliant. Consequently, small-scale, rural, family-run mosques populated an island that viewed urban agglomerations as a threat to its fragile social and ecological balance.

For our installation, we wanted to follow the Jerbian tradition and imagine for the gallery space in Jeddah a 366th private mosque prototype. Prototype 366 represents a “de-composed” mosque for one person. The installation consists of the minimum elements of a Jerbian mosque (a stand-alone mihrab, a washbasin, and a seat), fabricated out of cold-rolled carbon-steel plates emerging from a pile of basalt rocks. The mosque user can circumambulate this 17-cubic-meter volume of natural rocks when performing the necessary liturgical steps in preparation for prayer. The installation wall displays steel plates with etchings of representative mosque plans from the island.

Jury Comments

The artistic forms incorporated into this sacred space are meaningful and elegant. They contribute a sense of interactivity with the space and suggest habitation even when the space is void of worshippers. It is occupied even when it is empty.

Project Team Members

Ziad Jamaleddine / L.E.FT Architects
Iheb Guermazi / Architecture Historian
Makram el-Kadi / L.E.FT Architects
Beya Othmani / Art Curator