_The mosque between modernity and tradition: A study of recent designs of mosque architecture in the Muslim world

In this study of four recent projects of mosque architecture in the Muslim world, the works of architects Abdel Wahid El-Wakil, Rasim Badran, RobertVenturi and Halim Abdel Halim conciliate the cultural heritage of Arab-Muslimsocieties with the Western modernizing design methods that have been introduced since the beginning of the twentieth century. The designs of the four architects addressed the apparent dilemma of the duality between tradition and modernity, in an effort to suggest a character for the identity of the contemporary mosque architecture in a dynamic cultural environment. The study seeks to discern and to evaluate the theoretical models and the methodology employed in the design process of each project, with the intention of understanding their cultural compatibility. All the projects are located within the same general area, Iraq, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and all are based on the hypostyle mosque, although they differ in their fundamental use of the architectural vocabulary. Reflecting on the hypostyle mosque and its traditional place in the liturgy as well as its identifiable historical transformations, we can weigh the responses of each design solution to its contextual requirements and to a historical continuum.