Al Hosn’s Musalla scoops Architectural Award

The stylised The Musalla Al Hosn has walked away with the prestigious A+ Architizer Architectural Award.

Image UAE News Agency

Abu Dhabi is celebrating after being put on the architctual world map once again after The Musalla (prayer hall) Al Hosn received top honours in the eighth annual A+ Architizer Award in the Internal Design and Creative Ceilings category.

The Architizer A+Awards is one of the largest architecture awards programmes in the world and is organised by Architizer.com, a global online community of architects.

The Musalla project, designed by architecture firm CEBRA and developed by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi, triumphed over shortlisted competitors from Detroit in the US, Lisbon in Portugal, as well as Beijing and Hefei in China.

Speaking about the award, Saood Al Hosani, acting undersecretary of DCT Abu Dhabi, said: “The Musalla at Al Hosn site has already received global recognition for its creative design, and this latest award from the prestigious Architizer Award further validates DCT Abu Dhabi’s commitment to excellence in our initiatives.

“Al Hosn is a physical manifestation of the emirate’s heritage and its link to the past. The Musalla, however, represents a wonderful symbol of the emirate’s continuous cultural growth, and DCT Abu Dhabi’s commitment to both preserving the past whilst looking to the future.”

Built in 2018, Al Hosn prayer hall is a series of  small, interconnected buildings that form a cave-like structure pushed halfway into the park-scape’s water feature. It was this and the interior’s suspended ceiling with circular openings punctuating the otherwise closed spaces as skylights, along with the combined pendant lights that appear as abstract star formations that evoke associations to the region’s heritage of stargazing for navigation that caught the judges’ attention.

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The concrete ceilings of the entrance hall and ablution spaces are contrasted in the prayer halls by wooden formations with copper-clad insides, which create endless reflections of light linking the ceiling detail back into the overall scheme of the project, much like a fractal.

This prestigious A+ Award is the second time that The Musalla has walked away with a coveted international prize. In December 2019, it received  first prize award in the category of Completed Building – Religion at the World Architecture Festival 2019, held in Amsterdam.

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