But the Vali-e-Asr mosque, designed by the Iranian architects Reza Daneshmir and Catherine Spiridonoff, is stirring controversy in a country that hosts some of the world’s most glittering places of worship. Iranian hardliners are refusing to recognise it as a mosque, complaining that it does not have a minaret or proper dome, and that it is dwarfed by the theatre. [...]
The conservative Mashregh News said: [...] It was “an insulting, postmodern design” that is “empty of any meaning”, it said.
— The Guardian
Designed by Iranian Fluid Motion Architects and nearly 10 years in the making, the modern appearance of the almost completed Vali-e-Asr mosque in Tehran is facing harsh opposition from Iran's conservative establishment.
"The Vali-e-Asr mosque doesn’t have a minaret, nor a dome; neither did the first mosque," the design architects Reza Daneshmir and Catherine Spiridonoff tell the Guardian. "A mosque is a place for worship, and the Qur’an doesn’t dictate a special structure for it. It’s what it contains that is important."
6 Comments
It's not just what is in a house of worship that is important. The building itself is important as a symbol, or as a conveyor of symbolic content.
It's unclear to me how a mosque that looks like a melting cheesecake conveys symbolic content important to the followers of Islam. Maybe it does, but it seems that the architects have ignored the symbolic realm altogether, since their statement says that they don't feel it is important.
You're siding with Iranian hardliners ;)
This is irrelevant. The land is stolen from the Manavi family because of their religion.
Praying on stolen land is HARAM.
Humans are symbolic creatures.
Our languages determine in large part how we experience the world, and languages are symbolic systems. Our entire view of the universe is mediated by symbolism. To abandon symbolism is to estrange us from our own nature.
This Mosque has been built on stolen land. It was expropriated by the Islamic Republic in 1980 because the owner, Davoud Manavi, was a Jewish/Baha'i.
This is what the Nazis did in Germany, and now the architects are celebrating their achievements of their creation.
Have you no shame?
The Manavi family
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