Chaplain Abdelaal’s lifelong mission to please Allah inspired his award winning CAD thesis “Prayer as a Generator or Architecture in Islam.”
Just months after 9/11 re-ignited his passion for the true teachings of Islam, Mohammed presented his thesis exploring the connection between Prayer to Allah and its effect on architecture to a group of astonished classmates.
Mohammed Abdelaal – Prayer to Allah and Its Effect on Architecture – November 2001
“Mohammed Abdelaal, with his design for an Islamic Awareness Center for Boston, was the most successful at boiling his theoretical concerns away. He began his research by considering how Islam should inform architecture in a more intimate, organic way than simply serving as a paradigmatic historical style. This initially led him down various abstruse alleys of inquiry but, in the end, he contented himself with a parallel between the “fixed and flexible” aspect of praying and the fixed and flexible requirements of an architect’s design brief. This, together with his conviction that Islam requires a building to be professionally competent, left him free to let his architectural imagination take over completely. And, hence, he arguably came up with the most successful piece of architecture, with its great semi-circular sweep of a façade punctured, punctuated by a rhythm of beam endings.”
" ... its great semi-circular sweep of a facade ..... "
".... punctuated by a rhythm of beam endings."
