Hajj Architecture

Architizer News

Hajj Architecture

November 17, 2011

The Abraj al-Bait project under construction, looming over an almost microscopic Grand Mosque. Photo: Daily Mail.

Last week, prompted by the three million people who made their annual pilgrimage to Mecca, BD Online’s Oliver Wainwright expressed concern for the frightening pace of development surrounding the undisputed center of the Muslim world. Wainwright remarked on the escalating number of pilgrims making the yearly hajj, contrasting this with the static notion of Mecca as a physical place, particularly one that must receive and safely circulate all Muslims who wish to fulfill their Islamic rites. What, he asks, does this “compulsory mass tourism” do to the built environment? Read on.

Thousands of Muslim pilgrims performing the annual hajj rituals in the tent city of Mina. Photo: Daily Mail.

The Abraj al-Bait clock tower rising before the Grand Mosque. Photo via.

A glaring example of steroidal construction surrounding Mecca is the 600m clock tower completed last year, currently the second tallest building in the world and now occupying the footprint of an eighteenth-century Ottoman fortress that was razed to the ground. Wainwright called the design a “surreal inflated parody of Big Ben,” a mega structure that ruthlessly dwarfs the Grand Mosque with grand claims of coinciding Mecca time with Greenwich Mean Time.

The growing Muslim population has also become justification for the construction of a $10 billion complex consisting of 39 towers complete with hotel rooms, retail units and restaurants all surrounding the Grand Mosque. The Mosque itself will undergo a $21 billion expansion program to alleviate congestion and bring an extra 2.5 million people into the prayer halls.

Rendering of the $10 billion Jamal Omar project. Image: Construction Week Online.

Image: Construction Week Online.

While these mega-projects are beginning to blur the line between an authentic place and its banal, Las Vegas-style simulacrum, the notion of preserving Mecca in its original form is clearly an unfeasible alternative. As we learned from Wainwright, pilgrimage activities of recent years have caused dangerous levels of overcrowding, resulting in a large number of fatalities at various religious sites, not just Mecca.

In response, firms like MVRDV have proposed building infrastructure to help organize traveling worshippers as they perform ritualistic activities in these heavily concentrated sites. In fact, a three-story bridge was recently realized to better equip one station for this rapidly changing communal religious experience.

Pilgrims flooding the bridges into Jamarat. Image: Reuters.

Those with a nostalgic streak must keep in mind that St. Peter’s Basilica, a comparable religious destination in the Christian world, underwent a series of even more radical renovations, starting off as a simple wooden structure built over a burial site and expanding over time into a massive domed church erected from stone, whose plans had passed through the hands of Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo.

Thus, as Wainwright suggests, these religiously rooted places often transcend the impulse to conserve. Their continuously changing designs are viewed as adaptations in the service of a higher being and therefore aligned with a grander trajectory. Much like how 19^th century French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc insisted that his contemporaries accept the explicit use of iron support beams in Medieval Gothic spaces, the transformation of Mecca is one viewed as a duty of present day worshippers to a greater force. Yet it appears that the greater forces of globalization are also at play here, and, as we can already see, they are threatening to reduce an extraordinary place into yet another site of production.

Drawing of Mecca in 1850. Image: Wikipedia.

UPDATE: According to the BBC, a high-speed railway connecting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina is set to be completed by 2012, intended to ease pilgrimage traffic during the Hajj. The trains will hold over 165,000 passengers a day, stopping at five different stations, four of which will be built by Foster + Partners and Buro Happold. Though the projected date of completion is next year, 90% of the buildings that need to be expropriated to make way for the railway have unknown owners, pointing to significant speculative delays.