The Equilibrant Hub

Balancing between the mind, the soul, and the body has always been humans' goal in life. For this special project, it was the same goal that we had to fulfill. This is a project that feeds this very purpose. It is simply an open hub for a gated community. A hub that feeds their minds/souls, as well as their physical entities. The brief was to design a hub and a mosque for one parcel of a big gated community. The program is simply an open multi-purpose space, a convenience store, a coffee shop, and a mosque. What made it even more interesting is that the designated land plot for this hub had a huge water tank underneath and had no building permit on it unless it was a light -steel- structure. So, the project mainly faced three major challenges which we’d rather name potentials. The challenges/potentials are, the diversity of the program, the existing water tank, and the structural system which we were obliged to embrace for the project. Given all the above, the design had to answer these questions. How do we combine three -not only different but- diverse activities in one building? How do we integrate them all? How do we take advantage of an existing water tank? How do we orientate the mosque to the Qibla direction given the water tank's rigid existing grid of columns? “Do not interrupt the flow, but rather float over.” This was basically the motto for our design. So, the main idea was about building a character, a balance. Designing an equilibrant building, an equilibrant hub. So, we thought of creating an array of steel frames covered with a unified aluminum panel envelope, to unify the visual aspect of the project while using the existing pump room -above ground- as a transition between the recreational/commercial zone and the prayer zone. The steel frames are supported by the existing structure of the underground water tank and elevated from the ground to gain room for the project’s sanitary system, avoiding any interference or leakage with the water tank. Having two sections in the existing water tank, one for clean water while the other is for irrigation. We thought, why not use the hub to function as a water recycling apparatus to supply the irrigation part of the water tank? Located near the residential area, the challenge was to orientate the mosque to the Qibla direction given the existing rigid column grids, where we chose four columns diagonally to face the Qibla. These columns support the inverted dome, in which the aluminum golden-plated curtains are hung from, and settled on the concrete slab. The aluminum golden-plated curtains are inspired by the geometry of the stalactites -attached to the roof- and stalagmites -attached to the ground- that are naturally formed inside the caves. This is the geometry from which the Islamic ornaments muqarnas -squinches- originated.