Modern
Sancaklar Mosque
2011–2013 · Büyükçekmece
A dome-less underground mosque (2013, Emre Arolat) cut into a slope above Büyükçekmece Lake. An austere, cave-like hall lit by slivers of daylight.
- Minarets
- 1
- Built
- 2011–2013
- Architect
- Emre Arolat
- Patron
- The Sancaklar family (Sancaklar Foundation)
- District
- Büyükçekmece
History
The Sancaklar Mosque stands in Büyükçekmece on the western edge of Istanbul, about 25 km from the historic core, on a slope overlooking Büyükçekmece Lake amid a neighbourhood of suburban housing. It was commissioned by the Sancaklar family through their foundation, who wanted a mosque for this district. The design is by Emre Arolat's practice (EAA — Emre Arolat Architecture, founded by Arolat with Gonca Paşolar); construction ran from 2011 to 2013 and the mosque opened for prayer on the first Friday of 2014. Sancaklar immediately became an event in world architecture: it deliberately abandons the familiar image of a mosque with a great dome and a formal façade and offers instead a radically austere, almost cave-like prayer space. The building won a World Architecture Festival award (2013), the ArchDaily 'Religious Building of the Year' award (2015) and the RIBA Award for International Excellence (2018), and it features in the BBC series Civilisations.
Architecture
Sancaklar is set into the hillside and lies almost entirely below ground: the only visible elements are the horizontal walls of the forecourt, the terraced drystone landscape, and a single vertical mass — a minaret that reads more as a watchtower than a classical minaret. The mosque has no dome; doing without it is the building's central architectural gesture. The prayer hall of roughly 700 m² is conceived as a simple cave-like space: you descend a stair into it, leaving the noise of the city above. Inside are rough walls of kayrak slate, a board-marked concrete qibla wall that curves with a subtle directional break, and a narrow vertical slit for the mihrab. Light enters from above through cuts and fissures in the ceiling, falling in bands across the stone; the minbar is made of plain semi-circular stone steps. The whole architectural language is the materiality of stone, concrete and light in place of ornament and gilding.
Photographs
