|
Project Name: Sobhanbag Mosque Location: Sobhanbag, Dhaka Architectural Consultant: Vitti Sthapati Brindo Client: Public Works Department Site Area: 813 sqm Total built area: 7626.89 Year of Commencement: 2019 Year of Completion: 2023 Design Team: Ar. Iqbal Habib (Team Leader), Ar. Ishtiaque Zahir, Ar Sareka Sadaf (Project Architect), Ar. Nazmul Huda, Ar. Limon Mahmud, Ar. Tanvir Ahmad, Ar. Nuruzzaman Structure: TDM Mechanical: Utility Professional Electrical: Qazi Nasiruddin Photographer: Mud Canvas |
|
Enduring Faith in a Changing City
The Sobhanbag Mosque has witnessed Dhaka’s transformation for nearly a century, standing quietly as the city grew, swelled, and redefined itself around it. Built in 1937 by Maulana Abdus Sobhan, it began as a sanctuary, intimate in scale yet vast in spiritual intent.
At that time, the neighborhood breathed with calm simplicity: a tree-lined road meandered past small homesteads and gardens, where the call to prayer floated softly through open air. The mosque belonged to that gentler Dhaka - a city of shadows and sunlight, of human scale and stillness - long before glass towers and the ceaseless hum of traffic claimed the horizon. |
|
|
The mosque, however, could no longer contain the growing tide of worshippers. Pressed against Mirpur Road, it had become cramped and unsafe; its humble structure strained to serve a congregation far larger than it was ever meant to hold. |
The City Tightens
Over the decades, the Sobhanbag Mosque adapted, reshaped, and renewed itself in quiet dialogue with the city it served. Its second transformation came in the early 1990s, when a local patron led a renovation that gave it its defining red-brick façade - an act inspired by the tectonic clarity of Louis Kahn’s National Parliament House. The design expressed a renewed sense of strength and belonging, its material language rooted in the tactile and cultural identity of Bengal.
But the city around it refused to pause. Dhaka surged upward and outward, its skyline tightening, its streets thickening with the unbroken pulse of urban life. Commercial façades crowded in, residential towers loomed closer, and the once-breathing edges of the three-storey mosque were gradually suffocated by the city’s hardening fabric of concrete. The space that had once opened gently to its surroundings now stood compressed, its modest form battling for light, air, and stillness. Within its walls, generations prayed. On Fridays and during Eid, the faithful overflowed into the street, their lines of devotion halting traffic and briefly silencing the city’s restlessness. |
|
Change was no longer a choice - it had become inevitable. Beside the mosque lay a small family graveyard, silent and immovable, anchoring memory even as the site grew compressed within a web of stone and urgency. In such a confined setting, the question was not simply how to build, but how to reimagine. How could a new mosque take form amid such density-protecting what was sacred while opening itself to the thousands who sought it each day? The answer lay not in replication but in renewal: envisioning what a mosque could mean for Dhaka today - a sanctuary that breathes between street and sky, between memory and modern life, a threshold where faith meets the city’s future. |
|
|
|
|
A Sanctuary Reimagined
Form Analysis:
The design of Sobhanbag Mosque begins with a search for clarity: a form that speaks of devotion without reliance on domes or arches. The cube was chosen as the defining geometry-pure, balanced, and resolute - drawing inspiration from Louis Kahn’s Parliament House, where geometry and the interplay of light and mass create a monumental yet grounded presence. This form, also recalling the simplicity of the Kaaba, carries both clarity and gravity: a pure, unadorned volume that expresses the essence of a mosque beyond domes or arches. |
|
Mosque Programs:
The new Sobhanbag Mosque accepts urban pressure not as a constraint but as context. Within a compact 813-square-metre site, it rises vertically, creating generosity through limitation - adding space without surrendering heritage or the public realm. Its cubic form contains a column-free prayer hall open to light and air.
Around this spiritual core, the ancillary functions unfold in quiet order: madrasa classrooms, a library with a garden court, residential quarters for Hifz students, and administrative spaces. Following Kahn’s hierarchy of served and servant spaces, each layer sustains the act of prayer while remaining discreetly in the background. The whole composition is precisely aligned to the qibla, rotated slightly within its plot to face west toward Mecca, setting both spiritual and geometric order. |
|
|
|
Podium Level: At ground level, instead of traditional archways, the structure is lifted on pilotis, open concrete columns that allow air, light, and pedestrians to flow beneath. This open plinth becomes a shaded civic threshold - neither street nor sanctuary, but a quiet in-between where the city exhales. Further, the footprint was pulled back approximately 15 feet from its previous alignment, restoring the footpath and street width.
|
|
Interior Architecture: Interior is designed through light and silence. From the stairwell to the main hall, brick lattices sieve daylight, drawing intricate geometries across marble floors. The transition from the tactile warmth of brick to the calm luminosity of stone marks the threshold between the secular and the sacred. The prayer hall, shaped as a seamless cube beneath a ceiling of circular voids, becomes a vessel of still illumination. These voids reinterpret the domed ceilings of Bengal’s Sat Gambuz mosques, transforming historic memory into abstraction.
Along the northern edge, a mezzanine accommodates the women’s prayer area, accessed through a dedicated stair. Its placement maintains a visual and spatial dialogue with the main hall, fostering inclusion without intrusion - a balance of dignity, participation, and privacy that nods toward a more equitable culture of worship.
|
|
The façades are punctuated by small cubic openings that regulate light and air while softening the sound of Mirpur Road. Here, monumentality is distilled rather than magnified: the vast voids of Kahn’s monumental vocabulary reinterpreted into a finer grain, scaled to the intimacy of urban Dhaka. A marble veil inscribed with the Kalima Tayyib resolves the dialogue of material and meaning. By day, it filters sunlight; by night, it glows softly, turning calligraphy into a luminous presence. The script, inspired by Sheikh Salim Chishti’s tomb at Fatehpur Sikri, embodies unity and devotion, filtering light into a devotional glow that animates the interior. The conversation between brick and marble becomes one between memory and clarity - brick grounding the mosque in its soil, marble lifting it toward transcendence. From afar, the façade reads as a visual dhikr—a silent remembrance declaring the building’s purpose amid the city’s restless rhythm. |
|
A slender minaret, bound by height restrictions, rises as a symbolic marker -minimal yet dignified, asserting presence through restraint rather than dominance. Even with so little land to spare, the mosque carves out moments of green calm within its compact footprint. A small courtyard adjoining the library opens to fragments of sky and foliage - a quiet refuge where students and visitors can pause between study and prayer.
A Continuation
What stands today is neither a shadow of the past nor a departure from it, but a continuation. The mosque listens to the city’s call for verticality, density, and adaptability - and responds with clarity and calm. It carries memory upward, holding fast to faith while stepping gracefully into the future. |
| Contributor: Ar. Faiza Fairooz |
