2015’s Designs of the Year nominees have been announced by London’s Design Museum and represent the global breadth of design talent, featuring some of the industry’s biggest names alongside rising stars and little-known firms.
Google’s self-driving car, Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Asif Kahn’s Sochi Olympic Megafaces are just some of the high-profile projects and designers to be represented in the exhibition at the Design Museum on March 25. Sancaklar Mosque in İstanbul, designed by Emre Arolat, also will be featured in this exhibit.
Located in İstanbul's Büyükçekmece district, the Sancaklar Mosque was built seven meters beneath the ground and was designed and by Turkish architect Emre Arolat. Arolat took inspiration from the Cave of Hira when he designed the mosque. The Sancaklar Mosque is the first underground mosque in the world, yet merges the essence of Islamic and Ottoman design. The mosque lacks a crescent and has a nontraditional minaret, and it 1,200 square meters of prayer space can accommodate 650 worshipers. The construction of the mosque started in May 2011.
“Inspired by the fact that a mosque does not have a predefined form and that anywhere clean may be a prayer room, this project focused on the ‘essence’ of a religious space, distancing itself from discussions based on form,” reads the website of the Design Museum, adding “the design aimed at representing purest forms of light and matter, just as a primary inner world, free from all cultural burdens. The disappearance of the building in to the slope of the site, anchored to the ground, creates the sense that it has always been a part of this landscape.”
BGN News