Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures @ SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE University of Queensland

A Building under Siege: Moscow's Congregational Mosque

Collaborators: Kate Malaia & Manu P. Sobti

How does the politics of construction and reconstruction impact the architecture of signature buildings in a xenophobic context? How do such buildings emerge in opposition to context and remain in the state of contentious siege? In 2011, within the purview of legally unclear demolitions and constructions, the city of Moscow was going through yet another mayoral scandal. The building at the center of the controversy was the Congregational Mosque of Moscow - a structure that had served the needs of at least 3 million followers of the Muslim faith within the metropolitan area’s total population of more than 15 million inhabitants. Recognized as an urban landmark and founded as a charitable endowment (waqf) through generous donations of land and money from Moscow’s elite merchants in 1904, its architecture was attributed to architect Nickolay Jukov, also famous for his “Moscow Art Nouveau” buildings.

This congregational mosque remained Moscow’s only functioning mosque for most of the Soviet era until its unfortunate demolition in 2011, when structural problems were cited in official reports. Initially, the plan was to rebuild the mosque identically while fixing these problems, but later in the process it became a completely different design. Not only was the scale of this new project radically different from the past, but so was its style and function. While the old building could have been attributed to the Art Nouveau, the new, yet-unfinished edifice shall have traits of multiple styles and epochs, including, for instance, even a reference to the Moscow Kremlin towers.

While analyzing the story of this mosque and its role as a signature building in Moscow’s volatile history, this research investigates the changed status of the building after the collapse of the USSR that effectively transformed the mosque’s patronage base. It uncovers the current meaning of the building in Moscow’s shrinking, though hardline Muslim ethos, interrogating the politics of its demolition, as especially relevant to religious expression/intolerance in a changing Moscow and modernizing Russia.