After many years of fundraising and submissions for planning permission to extend the main mosque in Canterbury, located at the University of Kent campus, the mosque decided together with Hay architects to hold a student competition to develop the concept for a new facade to the building that originally was a detached house.
When looking at religious architecture from all over the world, we noticed that several patterns are universal across cultures. Applying this, we found several classically Islamic patterns in Canterbury Cathedral to design an attachable facade that unified the culture of the Mosque and the predominantly Christian traditions of its locality.
The facade consists of a set of cut steel plates over tiles that fade from grey to turquoise, matching the transition from ground to sky and minaret domes.
