Case study: Cambridge Central Mosque

Cambridge’s elegant new mosque has comfort and sustainability at its heart thanks to the involvement of the environmental engineer at the project’s inception. Andy Pearson looks at how Skelly & Couch’s creative design worked with the grand scale of the prayer hall to provide natural ventilation and daylighting for more than 1,000 worshippers.

The Cambridge Central Mosque has been badged by the media as Europe’s first ‘eco-mosque’ and ‘the greenest mosque in Europe’. It’s easy to see why: the building is designed to be naturally lit during the day and naturally ventilated throughout the year, while its visually impressive timber columns helped minimise embodied energy in the building’s structure.

Perhaps more impressively, its eco-credentials did not result from a detailed sustainability brief from the client – they are simply the result of good engineering. ‘There was no defined eco-brief as such; we work with Marks Barfield Architects a lot and we always strive to develop sustainable solutions,’ says Mark Maidment, director of the project’s building services engineer Skelly & Couch.

The mosque, which opened its doors to worshippers in May, is certainly impressive. It comprises a long, mainly single-storey building that occupies a rectangular site in a predominantly residential area of Cambridge. Visitors enter the building after passing through a formal garden with trees and a water feature facing onto the busy Mill Road. They then pass beneath a giant entrance canopy supported on four tree-like timber columns, each of which is lit from above by a large, glazed oculus, before entering through a row of glass doors set into a glazed façade.

Note, in case you can't see the structure, your scale might be off. All you need to do is zoom out to view the structure:
To zoom out in rhino
press :
ctrl+shift+E

Videos on the Mosque online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbTYrQ0vVjo

Dezeen Link:
https://www.dezeen.com/2021/01/20/cambridge-central-mosque-marks-barfield-architects/