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The historic city
of Cambridge, UK will soon be home to Europe's first real
eco-mosque.
Designed by Marks
Barfield, the same design firm known for the London Eye and the
Kew Gardens Treetop Walkway, the £13 million project will be
built on a 0.4 hectare brownfield that was purchased two years
ago, just for the purpose of building a new structure that hopes
to inspire other mosques to abide by the long-standing
environmental principles originally laid out in the Quran.
"Islamic
civilization has been based on the rejection of waste as an
under-estimation of God's blessing," says Tim Winter (also known
as Abdul Hakim Murad), chairman of the trust responsible for
funding the project. "So in the construction of the new mosque
here in Cambridge, we were very much in the forefront of the
local environmental movement in that we are using the latest
heat pumps, conservation technology and green roofs so that
we'll have an almost zero carbon footprint."
Featuring its own
green roof, natural lighting provided by beautiful skylights,
and energy locally generated by ground-source heat pumps, the
mosque will also be faced in brick - allowing it to complement
the existing buildings in the neighbourhood. The design will be
Europe's first true eco-mosque, preceded by a partially
eco-friendly mosque in Levenshulme that was completed in 2008,
but did not use renewable energy and materials sourced from
India.
Cambridge's mosque
will accommodate up to 1,000 people with dedicated areas of
worship (ablution, teaching, children's area and morgue) in
addition to its cafe and meeting rooms for both Muslims and
non-Muslims.
The design draws
its inspiration from 'the Garden of paradise' and water - the
source of all life to create a calm 'oasis', with the 'trees'
set out on a generous 7.8 x 7.8 metre grid forming the main
mosque structure. The prayer hall is the heart of the building,
organized around the mihrab with the principal dome above it.
Between the structural 'trees' within the prayer hall, soft
natural light filters in through circular glass domes. Twenty
new cypress trees creating a new permeable green edge around the
building.
Source:
http://iqna.ir
Date: 2010/07/21
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