 Welcome everyone, thank you for joining us today. It is with great pleasure, I would like to introduce Zia, Zia is a great friend, a great friend and also a colleague from Columbia University. He is also a partner at our company called Lifton, an architecture firm based in Beirut and in New York. And I have heard about Lifton before and I started my own practice because of in conversation and I was very pleased about the work that they do. It has always been a source of inspiration and also a role model for all development that is in our company. So it is a great pleasure to have Zia tonight to share a little bit of background on projects and your work and also to celebrate your own success. Thank you. Thank you for being here. So tonight I'm going to have a short lecture and it's really comprised of three complex presentations. First I'm going to talk about our office practice. And then I will talk about Amir Chekhiwars language which is the most which I have just completed in the rural area of my level. Through that I'm going to try to talk about the research we have been conducting at our studio but also at Columbia University. So usually it's going to be a pleasure. So usually we try to start our lecture with this relatively old project of ours which is really a bathroom renovation apartment inside Manhattan. And we start with that detail because we think that this project is emblematic of the representative of the office approach which is carried from the interior scale all the way to the urban architecture. So what you're looking at here is really the design of the glass door of the bathroom which is designed in a way to hinge around the toilet paper to see if the toilet paper intersects the plane of the door kind of sticking outside. And it allows kind of the ease of replacement of the toilet paper. So if you ever use a bathroom with an amount of paper somebody can easily repair the bathroom by exchanging the toilet paper. So the solution starts from this or the problem starts from this kind of pragmatic utility where to put the toilet paper in order to rely on the new architectural solution. So in this case it's the mechanical tool that is the door which allows us here to challenge the thin membrane that divides public and private and domestic space. The first project I will talk about is a book called The House in Fakirada. But I don't know if it depends on this idea of public-private again to the architectural scale. The project sits on the corner side, kind of hugs the side and it bends gently to create a common area of the door. But the main idea was that the client came to us asking for a space where they can host socially back down kind of very frequent places. On a rather really small site with not much space basically to have a big family. So we decided to use the roof as kind of the main public space over the kind of socially that we have. And for that we created a loop in line with the private part of the house without ever entering it. So one can arrive to the house, basically climb from the outside, go out to the roof and then go back to the house without ever entering the private area. So just going to scan through some of those pictures. You can see here it's still under construction, almost finished actually. And then you see some of those circulation kind of thread that rushes in the interior without ever entering the space as well as the spaces of the house. Because it has this benches, it doesn't design the dining table so that it kind of fits into the space as well. Also allow a little bit of conversation happening later as well as the plastic table. So the second house again is with similar issue of public private. This is kind of a side research that we've been conducting at our office which looks at the politicians houses in Lebanon. These are some of the houses for the last 30 or 40 years now. They've been taking over what's supposed to be the kind of public venue where the constituent can interact with their representative. So it's kind of like a downfall but privatized. And it happens at the scale of the house and it happens across the country. Each religious sex having their own kind of house, the dissident, the politician. These are some of the examples, historical examples. Those houses are typically, they have this large room but also they have smaller rooms where you can have those back door teeth to be struck and kind of politically happening in the back areas back in the front areas. So we were also approached to do a house for the politicians a few years ago. We kind of tried to kind of learn from that kind of back in the political technology in Lebanon of politicians houses. And we created a house that has, instead of having a vertical separation, it has this 40 by 60 meter floor with the public areas below, which kind of aggregate of big spaces from the private synergized areas above. And the house became really kind of an indication of those massing on top of the public versus private, which were then challenged with these vertical spaces that cut across the verticality of these absolute horizontalities. Again, a third project that must be completed a few years ago and now is actually dismantled, which is the very big exhibition center located in Lebanon. So if you know the history of the region, you would know that actually Lebanon went through a civil war from the early 1970s until the 1990s, mostly in downtown area, which was demolished, the levels of which were kind of dumped to the sea to create this landfill area where the new city is supposed to be projected, supposed to be grown. And we were hired to design an exhibition center that here on this exact site. But what the client saw was a kind of ground, which is avian out of sand. We saw it as a place where it really embodies the history and violence of war, but also a kind of projection of what the city will become in the future. For that we created a building that has basically corrugated facade, aluminum facade, that will reflect the growth of the city around it. So the building becomes basically the indicator of the city that will be projected onto the site. So the more basically the building sits in this nothingness, it has a very fine kind of green facade, but also very delicate given the construction side, the violent construction of what would happen on that side in terms of reducing the dust and rubble etc. But also as the building, as the city goes around, the building will be reflecting the identity, the continuously being shaped identity of the site. And you can see also the effect of the collage technique of reflecting different buildings from different contexts and collaging them on the facade of the building. What happened is the building we made and the status has never evolved because really the city around it was never built because of many political and social economic issues and the building was eventually demolished without ever reflecting anything. A small gallery that we just finished in Beirut, which is of Hamrassi. Hamrassi is an interesting street that we've been researching and talking about it very quickly with some students at Columbia University. It's really a modern street that is home-blown. It doesn't have as modern as the building that you see in terms of the free-standing object of the plaza etc. But actually it's a series of rather generic office buildings and residential buildings facing north with kind of experimentation with glass facade in the early 50s and late 60s. And on the west, on the south with kind of deep parking in the sun. But it's really a street that is kind of closely with fabric and this is one of the drama that the students have produced trying to basically escalate the history of those buildings and understand the robust ground floor that has in terms of stairways, shortcuts, small commercial units as well. So you see this is kind of one of the details and most of those buildings have these internal streets that run across the sites. Nearby we're working at the same time on this gallery that is a gallery that really sits in the basement. And one of the kind of early lessons that we learned is trying to really create a similar relationship from the one we were just discussing, which is trying to bring light deep down and trying to create a continuous circulation from the sidewalk all the way down to the gallery space. So the facade really is this slit kind of opening, maximizing the openness to the sidewalk. And then as you basically descend down into the stair, the main cascade of the stair into the gallery with the kind of views back into the side in front of the concrete. The last project that I talked about before talking about the mosque itself is a collaboration project that we've been working on with Steven Orr Architects in New York, which is in the Beirut Marina located also in downtown Beirut at this site. And the way Steven sees the project is like really the continuation of the concrete which is this promenade by the water that becomes here public and kind of ramps up on the roof of the building, which I'm going to go through it very quickly. But then kind of expanding the site to become this public platform with rules, effect compounds, as well as the city area vegetation. And underneath it is commercial spaces that are related to the water edge itself. Alright, so next came the mosque. And as a research first, one of the first things that strike us was that Islam, as we understand it today, is perhaps one of the fastest growing religion in the world today. It's expected to be the biggest, basically, faith by 20.5. And it's a religion that we discussed before. It's considered to be bottom-high meaning there are more youth than elderly people, especially when you compare it to Judaism and Christianity. But what was interesting is that although Islam, Islamic population making was very young, there was a paradox that is we still built in those kind of historical or historicist terms when it comes to the architecture of the mosque. So contemporary mosque today is really in this crisis world where each community or each country is looking for what is authentic and what is the real mosque architecture supposed to be. Of course the minaret etc. are kind of signified of the mosque. But really the mosque is never really described in the Quran or in the religious text of what it's really supposed to be, in terms of architecture or even station. So there's really no reference, one reference to what the mosque should look like. Again, early in 2011, another event happened in Switzerland which was the banning minaret to happen in the whole country when mosques were built, which was kind of an early, if you wish, indication of Islamophobia that we see more of it today. At the same time we're invited to this prior quadrillion of performance and design in 2011 for which we kind of adopted the Mosque of the Monde, I'm sorry, the Monde by Odorossi who really said that it's really the space of the imagination, architecture, imagination to start. And it's a theater that basically travels in Venice in the water. And basically what we did was we graphed and come to the theater, the only four minaret left in Switzerland, kind of as an act of defiance perhaps, but also we created this map, which is really the Mediterranean map where this mosque, the Monde now, will be traveling between east and west and negotiating and questioning this civilization of divide between modernity and what's supposed to be the condition of Islam. So the carpet was actually like a praying area, which is a minimum mosque, all that you need basically to perform. And it was located at an angle within the traditional space, and actually now accepting exhibits here. The second kind of, or third round of research that we went to when looking at typology or the architecture of the mosque was some of those design transportation we had at architecture school at different times, here and recently more of it at the Monde University. And if you look at the translation of the mosque in Arabic, and you might know that as a Turkish audience here is that Jama and Masjid are both more than 65 months. Of course in Arabic Jama is a place of gathering or of collections, where Masjid is really a place of prostration where somebody could question. But there is these two translation and the students were focusing on the Jama as this expanded motion, which is a place of gathering that that's only dedicated to religious functions only. So these are some of the visuals that I'm going to go through quickly of some of those ideas that the students were experimenting with. For instance this one, kind of the student combined with the mosque that operates at different times, and she also worked on the skylight system that the person performed doing function, providing proper kind of sun, direct sun, east-west based on the time of the day, but also on the sun needed or on the light quality that the museum space itself. So finally we arrived to the point where the existential question come to be here is what is Islamic architecture, and if there is anything as such as Islamic architecture, which kind of produces many other questions as problematic perhaps. So when we ask what is Islamic architecture, are we also allowed to ask for instance what is western architecture, and is therefore comparable to Christian or Buddhist architecture. So when we say Christian architecture, we need to talk about the architecture of the church, the church that holds itself. When we talk about Islamic architecture, we're not only talking about the mosque, we're talking about any kind of architecture that used in the Islamic world across 4,400 years, across kind of a huge swath of geography all the way from the east, far east to Mediterranean and further west. When did Islamic architecture start? Is really the question that every state of architecture poses and that there is always the need to know when did it exactly start, as if there is a creation point after which Islamic architecture started to be. Usually it's associated with the prophet and the history of basically the early history of Islam, but really is Islamic architecture born again with the prophet at that very specific moment, or where does it end? Also history of architecture works usually depends on the Islamic architecture and throughout the 18th century. There is no survey or studies or research that's done after the 18th or early 19th century of Islamic architecture, which means Islamic architecture has always been understood through this lens of medievalization. It's always a medieval entity to research and look at. It never experienced the same modernity as these people. So Islamic architecture has to start and end. Is Islamic architecture only traditional? Yes, usually this is how it is described. Or is it based on Islamic period? So when you find yourself, you know, faced with this huge value of work, we try to start to classify, right? So is it first in Mayan or is it all the way to the Ottoman? That's one way of basically the discipline structure of Islamic architecture. Is it architecture in the land of Islam? This is perhaps the most logical solution that they arrive on, which is all the architecture that's happening in the Islamic world. Let's call it Islamic architecture for now. Does it assume unity or diversity? More often than not, it looks or it succeeds. So whatever is happening in Anatolia or whatever is happening in Anatolia, there should be a relationship of always seeing them looking, seeking to find that idea of Islam being related to one entity or to one divine. Does it have any diversity? Of course it does. When you look at the architecture in India versus in Europe and in Russia or in Morocco, there are differences. But then it's refrained that this is actually diversity with the unity or unity of diversity. So there's always kind of loopholes that we find historians trying to define Islamic architecture with. Is it universal? Of course every religion is universal but the trick here is that if the religion is universal it is practiced in a very universal way. It is practiced in a similar way in different periods or in different regions. But this is very useful usually for architect today. Because it is universal then you can abstract it and you can appropriate it. So you can share example here. This is abstract as being the split essentially Muslim or Arab. So it could be appropriate, it could be transformed like the institution of the Bajor Lubeh and France where it is becoming mechanized. It's a mechanized Bajor Lubeh. So now it is modern. Before that it was traditional. What is Islamic about Islamic architecture? I don't know. Nobody is able to answer that. Is Islamic art also secular or architecture? Is it to begin with the second and the religious divide? Is it to begin with the western paradigm that is imposed on Islamic architecture? So when you ask what is Islamic architecture there is even more questions that are cool that are even more problematic to begin with which really start to unravel the whole distance that we understand today. And this is where kind of the mystery became even more rigorous in our studio and at school as we kind of faced with the idea of designing the mosque soon after. One can trace some of those problems and today the decision to fletcher, banister fletcher in the history of architecture which is really a book done not long ago but now it's in its 21st ethnic division. So it's being still published and used and taught at architecture school across Europe. And it's trying to be, what he was trying to do is to trace basically the evolution of architecture. So there's Trump, there are all these different civilizations so there are two kind of branches, there are the hefty branches Italian, French, German, and there are all these dead-end branches, the Byzantine architecture here, the Mexican and you have the Sarsenic which is really what we see called Islamic architecture in the early 20th century. Sometimes it was from the Armenians, some of them were Burish, Oriental etc. So in a way this of course the street keeps on growing and here in the American this is the flat iron building, yes, you were wondering. But this is basically the logical progressive evolution of architecture that some civilization and culture did not really flourish and others did. So in a way all those civilizations here were denied any notion of modernity that's why when we talk about Islamic architecture it ends in the 18th century because modernity is something new, it's something that the Islamic word has never experienced so we don't need to talk about it because it really ended there and this is I think an alternative. Of course the earlier Orientalist lecture on the painter visited the Middle East Cairo and other places and they include these fantastical paintings of what the Arab Islamic words just looked like. Of course they never sat me in a mosque to know any of these figures but they kind of walked through the city, went back to Paris to their own studio and then they enlarged it, they kind of put together a new imaginary of what Islam or what the space of Islam was to look like. Of course in these ridiculous figures here there are these obsessively armed figures here also very strange to that context around that time in Cairo. But again this is a construction of what Islam ought to look like at that time. The argument we're making here, this is not that different from what we see in this picture which is going to be this new propaganda video kind of put out by acts that are very much staged where there is this mosque. This mosque is very much part of the picture or part of their argument. This is authentic, this neoclassical mosque and also is what Islam could talk about as a people. They're also looking for what is most likely about this unique about Islam. But then the next day they go ahead and they start destroying other mosque and shrines of other religious texts or also minor religious texts. So this idea of the Orientalist imagining what Islam looked like at this unique moment in time or ISIS imagining what Islam ought to look like today trying to impose. But if we look at art, architecture, culture, cultural production, literature because history always found negation and more of paradoxes when you set out this argument at the beginning. So this is really prototypical Dutch neoclassical painting in the 1655. But if you look at it carefully this is actually what you call the museum in Europe. You see that there is this assimilation of what is considered an Anatolian carpet at the time used here as a tablecloth. So what is supposed to be a typical western classic painting is actually absorbing and assimilating Islamic visual culture. But you also see it in buildings like this one which is often described by competitors or as an architecture as hard to classify. What is this, isn't that, is it from an Anatolia? You cannot really classify it in one category or the other. Even if you look at it, literature produced even all the way up to the 19th century by this Italian poet Reine who described himself as a half-mustard Idlis, but he doesn't report. So again, it's really a kind of a job. It's to position yourself outside what you expect Muslim to be or hope to be. So we drew a map, we called it a city, and it's a collection of mosques. There were 1,400 years across geography, all the way starting from the prophet's house here all the way to contemporary mosques, the Arab dog. But the project was set to fail from the beginning. It really was asking the question, can we unify the Islamic world in one drop? And the answer was no, because as you look through this slide, the piece is exhibited in the back of this piece here, you'll see that there is no mosque typology, there's no one plan that you can say is the authentic or is the original. But actually there's a hybrid, so always a hybrid typology that keeps on evolving and adapting to its own context and culture, its own politics and economy, etc. But there are traces and there are things to learn from the maps. So as we start to kind of try to draw it further, we found characteristics that could be perhaps highlighted, but the early mosque was really integrated into the city, it wasn't only integrated into the physical fabric, but it was also integrated into the society that was supposed to serve, it was built by the people who went up using it, but it's also in the proximity to where they lived and where they were. So the Mayat Mosque, for instance, in Damascus, the Grand Mosque of Damascus, really sits on the church which really sits on that road and that road before it. So it's really what you can see today as one of the most important Islamic architects of the mosque or typology is really an unordination of all these civilizations before it. But it's also integrated itself into the market, and this is one of the characteristics that we know of today, but then there's the courtyard, and it's clear the way, and it's introducing the same way. Another interesting mosque that we can look into which is a kind of a mosque in Thalist, and it's really a university, it's one of the oldest universities that we're creating today, and we'd like to graduate from it. But we see also the mosque now kept sometimes growing in the fact that it was tentacles expanding and occupying those pockets with different schools and different classrooms. As we keep going this is time and year, for me this is time and year, and this is the most professional mosque. But unlike the Mayat Mosque with the circulation between the market and the sacred space and the religious space itself, it's happening in sections this upper balcony that kind of settles itself from the bustling market below, but it's really still part of the city itself. But we also try to understand the few, few points that were never really in the picture. So this is Aga Khazor mosque in Iran, which really sits underwater in the system that is kind of integrated in the city, and the building is no less than a piece of architecture that kind of belongs to that water system to begin with. We also included an agricultural mosque. There's always the emphasis on looking on urban mosques. Islam is always described as an urban religion for some reason, which means that for the best part of the 20th and 19th century nobody was looking at agricultural mosques or at the northern areas of the Islamic world to study them to begin with. So that kind of part of the history is kind of our absolute at this point. So we try to expand some of those. This is for instance Hassan Khadri Mosque. The mosque sits in this agricultural field. The whole town was built around agriculture as the industry of that community. And then as we come closer to the modern period, we start seeing of course the infrastructure, the highway, we start seeing the modern zoning happening in the center. And we start also seeing that the mosque becoming larger in scale, if you notice, but also becoming isolated, right? When people live here they have to drive to reach to this mosque. This is the National Assembly in Dhaka. This part of the National Assembly is actually mosque and it's really part of that monument. This is the National Mosque in Malaysia as well. This is the mosque in Baghdad by Walter Gropius. This is another period that is totally missing from the history of architecture, which is the modern period in the Islamic world. The map really tried to erase the innovation. It's really looking at the map, at the plan and to study the plan, trying to change any kind of bias towards aesthetic or towards understanding the mosque from a stylistic perspective and really focusing on the way it sits in the context and the way it's organized especially. But again, you can see smaller mosques. You see this one, China 15 wide mosque in Bosnia, which is really one of the most interesting modernist mosques in the 1980s. And here I get an exception, I just picture a bit because it's so small to notice, but it is often compared to modernist architecture in Europe, but actually it was really the thing that is sitting in the backyard of this community, serving that community. And then there are these grand moments where you see you can see the most international and international people in the world. The mosque really, not unlike the water, the water tank, as it were, infrastructural, this one tried to link to an airport. It's really sitting in between the runways and connected to those terminals. This is the other terminal on this end, the Royal Danube. But this is, I think perhaps it's an interesting moment also not very good at. In the history of architecture, I didn't find any reference. We had to kind of make up the plan by looking at the aerial view and sending somebody a picture on the inside. It's not really documented or analyzed, but this is an interesting moment where the architecture is actually trying to belong to this kind of global network of movement, of travel. And it is a piece of infrastructure as much as the terminal itself. And then of course we end up with those grand mosques like the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi which really, its context is this beautiful, supposed to be kind of the Islamic landscape that you can already see from the sky. And also it sits of course in the sea of parking lots, not life anymore. You know, with this huge drop of area and the Rahlam becoming here almost a space like itself, which is kind of the VIP part of the mosque, which is inside behind the space of the mosque itself. So that map we've been working on and populating and it's really exhausted, but it's in no way complete. We first exhibited it at Oslo Kinale, this past summer architecture of Kinale, as this long table, low table, that Piken has to basically squat to basically look and almost try to basically to be able to see more carefully. And then in it we're kind of also a call to prayer that's also going to be playing here in the exhibit, which was designed by the Rahm Salam Dhabi which is also an interpretation of what the call to prayer should look like or should be allowed to date. So unlike the table here in the XJX, we went for the kind of more diorama effect. The curtain wraps around the space by itself. On the floor you can kind of follow through and see the different mosque type of which you can have titled based on the theme that we kind of extracted from them. So this is on the interior and then on the exterior we created another timeline here. It's a timeline what we call, if this is really the construction of Islam and the construction of mosque architecture, the outside is the destruction of that same timeline except that we focus mostly on the 20th century. And this is to say that yes you can look at those monuments and deduce what Islam architecture is, but maybe there's another history to be written when you look at what has been destroyed and demolished as opposed to what has been built and made as monument of states, of patrons or of sultans, etc. So I just took a few and now I took a few slides just to give you a sense of what happened. We hear about ISIS and what they're doing today which is obviously horrible and disgusting, but in the early 30s you see for instance in the USSR Stalin's atheist 5 year plan which is really trying to consignorize the world by destroying or transforming 25,000 mosques kind of in 105 year plan. But then there's a turning point there's in 1979 in KSA there was a siege of Makkah by extremist sergeant who were trying to basically destroy Makkah and then there's really in 1979 if you look more carefully at the political institute of that region it's really a turning point from what happened before to what happened after in 1979 there was the first war in Afghanistan against the USSR by backed up by the United States in order to fight communism and there was the surgeons of kind of Sunni extremists at this point Taliban included. But also in 1979 there was the Iranian Revolution in case you want anyone else to happen which brought to the fore here kind of Hsia extremist. So it was a turning point in history early 1970s beginning 1980s where we start to see this kind of extremist Islamic political movement which is really in fact all I'm trying to say here is that all these movement are contemporary and modern and not historical as within kind of thought and as being old history of violence continuing in the region of course you know by 2015 ISIS is the biggest kind of news with all the kind of erasure of history and archaeology in Syria and Iraq but when you question the universal aspect of the of the mosque architecture you also have to question the universal matter which is really here represented by Corbusier or the Lord that's supposed to be the humanist interpretation and should look like the proportion of the positions and we playing with the Corbusier figure in our office earlier was militarized as we looked at in terms of history of war and conflict and perhaps resistance later it became a drunk when we looked at some of the competition we worked on like the PS1 competition in New York which was kind of a party space but here today we're looking at the Corbusier, you know, modular kind of expanded to include position that really these do not fully cover our document so here it kind of documented the position of any person standing or sitting or etc or what you should you can see it here on your left there is a man and a woman version of that modular and the exhibit becomes really structured now these pieces the man the modernary interpretation and the the first piece being documenting the architecture of the Amir Shalil Aslan what we are talking about right now so during all of this kind of research driven by design important to note here that we were not historian, we were architecture designers we were architect and we used the drawing techniques as a work of understanding that history and representing it was formed at the same time being critical of it but at the same time we invited to do a design mosque and kind of quaint town of Amir Tal in rural area Shouf mountain in Lebanon located really at this intersection here at this very corner which is an 18th century structure that connected this 18th century old palace which was the client residence coming from Beirut passed by several pounds and really continue up to the mountain and here you keep going up to another location the cedar of that forest this is the site as we were handed to us this is kind of the old structure it was added in the 70s this building which we first destroyed and the interior was really 120, 150 square meters space that's supposed to be transformed into a mosque but from the beginning we were not sure what the mosque did like so we were obsessed with this idea of a ghosted mosque or maybe a silhouette of mosque that exists and does not exist for one the orientation doesn't work with Mecca so we had to kind of rotate the building to face the proper direction and then we start experimenting with this idea of ghosting or shedding the mosque that the silhouette of the mosque that's formed as you walk and move around it so at a certain point it's a building kind of converted dome here which I'll talk about in a minute but at the same time as you rotate and you move around it the structure becomes very transparent and kind of blends itself with the kind of this very rich backdrop that's also at night partially lit, partially not lit so that it appears and disappears as well and it was generated by this idea of kind of shredding directionality versus Mecca the element kind of takes really parallel to Mecca which you see here in the space of the museum we kind of also trace that direction in the physical space itself and then we're playing with this idea of the model you know whether it was is this the shadow or is this the real element of the kind of second animal that was added onto the mosque but it was a mosque that's supposed to be kind of the anti thesis mosque of what we know of Shamsibah Shamsibah for instance which is really a cube that is contained in by itself it's introverted, it's looking inward and what you were interested in actually to rewrite that language by introducing those extroverted curves concave and convex that helped us first define kind of the main public space which is this plaza, the civic plaza that we added in front of the mosque but also helped us kind of shape those different sub-spaces, the roof garden that we opened that's also accessed from the side view and it created all these this is what we call a rotated axonatic view which is kind of taking the model and looking at its spatial potential at each and every moment whether it was from the inside or from the outside or tangential to it and you would see for instance the different spaces that the structure and look here try to frame or define in and around the mosque as you walk around it trying to define to the roof and to the roof garden itself we were also reading many theologians that kind of worked on critically understanding the history of Islam like Yusuf Ziddi and Muhammad Al-Arkoum Muhammad Al-Arkoum is very interesting figure who really kind of wrote the history of Islam from a humanistic point of view looking at the humanism as in the tradition itself Yusuf Ziddi who is Indonesian and we talked about the word akra which means lead which is the first word supposedly that came to the prophet that asked him to read the Quran and he's saying ok God asked us to akra to lead, he didn't ask us to recite so they must make a difference there reading is not reciting so to read the Quran is to be actually critical of it and to think about it with a moment of critical faculty and perhaps to interpret it so it's not a meta text it's not a text that is given to us as a question or interpret what I decided is really about mimicking and basically saying the words without thinking about them which kind of came into play in the interior of the mosque itself which I would show in a second this is a book by Muhammad Al-Arkoum about humanism in Islam and then giving the kind of very frail structure that we came up with that would work with this idea so in the middle of we needed more kind of structural support and then here we started to mobilize kind of the new idea of calligraphy calligraphy as a structure perhaps so we incorporated the word in Sam human being on the ground and of course there is the word on the minaret that was we were asked to begin with to kind of have it as part of the architecture but what's interesting for us is that the construction of the drawings here becomes the structural drawing of the calligraphy starts and the structure and so to speak of course this is not new it has many precedent in terms of incorporating the text within the Islamic art itself and also the early traveler to the Middle East, the Oriental especially we're looking at the Islamic word and the Islamic architecture and they were finding it very offensive because it doesn't have the purity of form versus structure versus ordinate and that all amalgamated together and hence it was disregarded as being worth the study so this structure was prefabricated and it's all in place and suddenly you see the emergence of the text if you read Arabic you can see it these are some of the early studies the word Allah here is actually made out of this life-olded plate so when you look at it from one side you would see it written as a void kind of a moment of doubt you don't know if it's really there or not and then when you look at it straight ahead it's a world of positive plates that kind of forms the word itself kind of some of the details of the winner and the way we kind of steal it is by form of kind of structure itself embrace itself at the same time with text and the calligraphy so rendering and it was really a Google mosque and the president for us was another small town a smaller town it was needed to and it's like any town there's nothing special here there's a church, there's a mosque there's an hour town there are two kind of churches and this is really not unusual as you guys know in this part of the world but what's nice about the Amar town that we studied that has also a little fountain here has a statue, we had a statue kind of celebrating an important figure but it also had this really small fountain next to the mosque being used for the pollution but it really becomes like a pit stop along the way where people fill their kind of bottom water and take a rest in this plaza in a similar way our mosque was attached to this 18th century palace that literally sits on the canal on the kind of spring sorry on the spring that runs through it and like all traditional architecture in that region like the baths here in Istanbul you know the baths which is here sits on the spring and it's used for all kinds of purposes like the streets for agriculture it's used kind of to be heated and then it runs into the wall of the bath to heat the room it's used to grind the food historically it's used as a very noisy fountain in the middle of the palace so that if you're talking there's a sense of privacy around you and then it continues and runs into the town below so our mosque was really kind of attached to the system so what we did is we took this naturally kind of running spring connected to this fountain that we revived that was there sitting on site and then we should also connect it to the ablution area it's all continuously running water and it goes back in the joint the spring itself so the first thing we did was to kind of revive the school that's now active and then the water runs into the ablution area which is always running water which kind of became instantly also another stop on this kind of fountain route it sits at this high altitude of the mountain there is kind of regeneration of bird flocks here the region of different times so we were hoping that also the project with time would have kind of an IV going on it and it becomes also perhaps a stop or a refuge for kind of birds that we kind of studied and we looked into perhaps having the opportunity to house them within the structure itself the interior the interior is really simple it's kind of white out stucco that's imported from Aleppo which is kind of available in the region and then the Mehrab is the only, really the Mehrab is the only fixed pond which is going to give you the direction to Macke and here it's done in reflective Aleppo now which is if it is a fixed pond it's also a fixed pond that needs to be questioned so I didn't talk about that earlier but the history of Islam even the direction to Macke is not really was only defined later so at a certain point the Prophet's house was facing the Qutus the Dome of the Rock and then the Umayyad when they built the Dome of the Rock was actually in competition with the rulers in Macke so even this direction to Macke that we take for granted was actually negotiated through time and then became what we know of it today but that kind of became opportunity for us to also talk about that very specific historical one the carpet here was designed also in collaboration with the Lebanese artist which is really a visualization of Quranic verses and it gives you this blurred ground kind of unstable ground the pattern is printed on it so with time it will wear out and it will show the use and abuse of the space so there is a kind of skyline that is also facing Macke and that kind of links through which you can look back at the mineralic one and then the back wall which is a small kind of reading area of the world inscribed in the wooden pattern this will be soon a small shell and this is kind of a visual relationship between the interior of the mosque and the double-climbing and the mineral is usually this urban center where this kind of interior life forms back into the space of the mosque when the mosque opened I think it performed in the way we hoped it would which kind of spilt all the way outside to the plaza with these kind of carpets everywhere and then who wins your mosque this kind of spin on who wins your architecture which is a research conducted partially at Columbia University looking at who wins what for us today especially when you talk about regions like the Gulf with this huge kind of project built by chief laborers but here who wins the mosque was kind of a series of people that really came together from different parts of Lebanon you know the Wender the Surveyor the Surveyor this is kind of the local Krews guy, these are kind of Christian from north anyway this is not really important and it's not even an important story to say except to say that this what happens when you build in that part of the world and this what had happened historically when you look at the architecture of the mosque is that for instance Kordava Mosque in Antalusia was built by Jewish and Christian expert at the construction industry when Islam came and invaded and became kind of the rule of the land in the same way when it shifts and Antalusia became Christian they used local Muslims expert to maintain and to upgrade the mosque itself so this is nothing really new and nothing really strange to talk about but unfortunately today I think it's something to highlight just to say that there is really no that our entire history needs to be rewritten thank you we will skip a formal Q&A and we will do since you are here and we will have multi-food upstairs and this exhibition to look at downstairs please join us to celebrate thank you so much and please any questions I think Zia will be happy to answer so please don't be shy ok thank you for coming