Qasr Al Hosn’s Musalla wins top award at World Architectural Festival 2019

ABU DHABI, (Pakistan Point News - 17th Dec, 2019) The Musalla (mosque) section of Abu Dhabi’s iconic Al Hosn site designed by architects, CEBRA, won the top award in the Completed Building Religion category at the World Architectural Festival 2019 held from 4th to 6th December in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The annual festival and awards ceremony, one of the highest-profile events dedicated to the architecture and development industry in the world, announced the winners for its 2019 edition at a special event in the Dutch city.

The Musalla project, which was developed by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi, DCT Abu Dhabi, triumphed over competitors such as the Novena Church project in Singapore, the Mary Help of Christians Church (Chaweng) in Thailand, and The Thickness of Emptiness Funerary Chapel in Spain.

"Qasr Al Hosn is a key part of the fabric of the culture and history of Abu Dhabi, the symbolic birthplace of the emirate. But it is also a symbol of the continuation of Abu Dhabi’s cultural growth as we preserve the past in the present," said Saif Saeed Ghobash, Under-Secretary, DCT Abu Dhabi, adding, "The recognition of the work done with the Musalla represents the innovative design that Abu Dhabi wants to be recognised for, and the winning of this prestigious award is confirmation that our ambition to achieve excellence is strategically paying off.

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The team of architects who worked on the Musalla aimed to create an area that appropriately reinstated and re-energised the most significant cultural and heritage site in Abu Dhabi and to make the location accessible to a larger, global audience. As the project won first place, the World Architecture Festival judges noted, "Through the landscapes, they have enhanced this heritage site, and in doing so, created architecture."

The architects created a unique structure at the site incorporating "Voronoi shapes" into the design, which symbolise the emirate’s coastal desert landscape, echoing mud cracks that are an intrinsic part of the local landscape. The geometric design lands somewhere between building and landscape, with all the new buildings designed to almost disappear as landscape objects, and the Qasr Al Hosn fort remaining the dominant building on site.

The colour of the concrete is also exactly like the local sand, which further integrates building and landscape, with the Musalla seeming to "grow out of the ground".