ReincarnationWhen Showcase Magazine published its feature on the Jannatul Ferdous Mosque, it described a building that sets itself apart through restraint. Set into the green landscape of Sreemangal in Sylhet, the mosque our team designed reads as a single white volume, reached by an asymmetric trail of concrete blocks laid through dense vegetation.
The brief, our principal architect Kh. Abdal Hossain has explained, was deliberately modest. Rather than treating the mosque as a monument, the client — Khaja Tipu Sultan — asked for a simpler building understood first as a social space: somewhere the community could gather and remain together after prayer. That idea shaped the plan.
A building without walls around it
There is no boundary wall defining the premises. Worshippers can step in from three sides of the hallway that wraps the prayer hall, so the mosque opens to its surroundings instead of fencing them out. The geometry is a rotated square, layered with secondary structures and external screens that throw a delicate pattern across the facade. Inside, a column-free prayer hall holds roughly 650 people across about 6,600 square feet, with ablution areas and gender-separated access folded into the program.
“Ethereal, delicately perforated and self-supporting, the minaret signifies the mosque’s presence”
Kh. Abdal Hossain · via Showcase MagazineLight as material and meaning
Light is the project’s organising idea, treated as both a physical and a spiritual element. Fins wrap the space and soften the daylight into a diffused glow while drawing air through for natural ventilation. A freestanding minaret, perforated by a simple geometric wooden screen, marks the mosque in the wider landscape. A triangular-grid wooden screen animates the interior with shifting shadow, and its pattern is echoed in the marble floor — the warmth of timber set against the stark white architecture.
