Gasulhana, Hatme & Mevlud Central Building, Bijelo Polje Development, Montenegro Architecture

Gasulhana, Hatme & Mevlud Central Building, Montenegro

Montenegrin Religious Building – design by Rifat Alihodzic, architect

22 Jul 2013

Bijelo Polje Religious Building

Design: Rifat Alihodzic

Location: Bijelo Polje, Montenegro

photo from architect

Central Building for the use of Gasulhana, Hatme & Mevlud

The Gasulhana, Hatme & Mevlud Central Building is designed to be a place where deceased is taken care of in a religious sense, the place greeting and serving friends when they express condolence, the place of religious prayer of the deceased.

photo from architect

Basic philosophical theme which was taken as the archetype of the spatial and compositional concepts, is the equal treatment between the state of birth, life and death. Three cubes, identical in their desing, allegorically are three essential conditions of each person in the life cycle.

photo from architect

The position of these cubes in the spatial composition of the building is set around a central column that represents the center of the circular canopy which underlines life path that begins with the birth, life continues and inevitably ends up in death.

Death in Islam does not consider tragic, but early in the second, the afterlife, and this approach had a direct impact on the design of the building.

photos from architect

Avoiding the traditional form of Islamic architecture and traditional language of all the elements, there was a desire that the facility receives the full expression of time in which it occurs and thus articulate victims of permanent life changes in line with contemporary trends in Islam in Europe which seeks Muslim population in Montenegro.

An attempt was made to be applied formal language read as a powerful spiritual message to every man regardless of his confession.

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Also, this project represented Montenegro for 2010 Aga Kahn Award for Architecture and was nominated for Mies Van Der Rohe European Union Prize 2011.

“On a parcel of land that contains a historic Muslim graveyard, near the city of Pijelo Polje, the central mortuary is the first of its kind to be built since the Second World War, and provides a purpose built space in which to perform funerary rites required under Muslim tradition, which were previously being carried out in crowded conditions in the city’s high rise apartment buildings. The interior takes as its inspiration traditional Bosnian domestic architecture, since funerary rituals historically took place at home. The exterior with its sculptural forms reflects the building’s spiritual component, and is designed to integrate the building well with the historic cemetery surrounding it.” – The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, 2011

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