Mosque as ‘House of God’ and as ‘House of Community’. An inquiry into adaptive reuse of an abandoned mosque in Pakistan

Abstract

The mosque holds an indispensable status in the Islamic culture. From the beginning of Islam, the mosque became an important place for religious gathering and a hub of different social-political activities for the community. In present times, mosques are sometimes only seen as a 'House of God', solely used for religious gatherings. In the early days of Islam, however, the mosque served more purposes. The main theme of this paper is to investigate this initial idea and hybrid functions of the mosque and interpret them according to modern requirements and using them for adaptation of abandon mosques to providing extra services to the community. In this regard, the paper discusses design-based research on re-using an abandoned mosque known as 'Mosque Rajgan', in Pakistan. An important challenge was to find a new program and thus also a new meaning for the mosque which is not in use since the early 1970s. The rural and almost idyllic location of the ruined mosque was an extra condition to consider. The research resulted in a design strategy to reuse it as a center for worship, and a cultural center for the community and as a central point for promoting important heritage sites in a radius of 40 km around the mosque. Through this, the aim was to revive the importance of the multi-religious and multi-cultural layered history of the region around the abandoned mosque building. As a result, a design strategy was proposed to find the balance between the spiritual values of the mosque with societal and cultural values to revitalize the mosque building as 'House of God' and as well as 'House of Community'.