Description

While the Ismaili Centre in London stands in the midst of a 19th-century urban environment, the newer and larger Ismaili Centre in Lisbon is situated on the outskirts of the capital and occupies an “island” surrounded partly by traffic arteries and partly by high-rise developments.

The entrance to this configurational composition of several buildings and six courtyards is marked by half an octagon. Immediately behind this small entrance hall, one enters a peaceful courtyard garden, whose longitudinal and transverse axes, with water channels and a fountain at their intersection in the centre, recall the Persian Chahar Bagh garden layout so popular in Moorish Spain. To the left of this artificial and primarily representational courtyard lie three communal buildings with cultural and social functions, to the right an exhibition building. The upper storeys accommodate offices and rooms for educational purposes.

The axis from the entrance through the courtyard garden directs the visitor in a straight line towards a projecting entrance in the ambulatory and leads on to the vestibule and portal of the prayer hall. The vestibule and prayer hall are slightly raised, detaching themselves from the rest of the complex. The prayer hall, which the Ismaili call Jamatkhana, is 35 metres wide and 25 metres deep. Thirty-five shallow cupola clad in beige-coloured Lioz limestone are supported by a tubular steel space frame that supports the entire ceiling. Three of the walls are clad with panels: squares, hexagons and octagons form a tessellated wall decoration that is particularly distinctive. The mihrab on the qibla wall is not denoted by a niche but solely through its position in the centre of the rear wall.

If it were not for the powerful presence of its façades, which stand out in the otherwise anonymous surroundings, one might mistake the Ismaili Centre in Lisbon for a nondescript edge of city industrial complex. The latticework that encloses the Jamatkhana consists of a composite structure of 10 centimetre thick tubular­ steel and 20 centimetre wide strips of pink-coloured Sintra granite cladding and serves multiple purposes: it is wall, window and pattern. Accordingly, the structure and decoration share the same form. The entire northwest wall of the prayer hall has no infill panels and is fully glazed from floor to ceiling. From here, subdued evening light streams into the space.

The architecture of the Ismaili Centre in Lisbon draws on influences from Spain, Persia and India. The Alhambra in Granada and the Divan-I-has in Fatepur Sikri can be regarded as distant relatives. However, the ensemble is memorable not only for these references but also – or rather, above all – because of its treatment of ornamentation. As seen increasingly in architecture since the nineties, here ornamentation has found a new expression, in which structural and applied elements have entered into a hitherto unknown synthesis.

The Architectural Review, no. 3/2003, pp. 52- | L’Architecture d’Au­jourd’hui, no. 338/2002, pp. 22- | Detail, no. 9/2004, pp. 978-, p. 1081 | Jodidio, Philip: Under the Eaves of Architecture. The Aga Khan. Builder and Patron, Munich 2007, pp. 184- | The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture, Comprehensive Edition, London 2004, p. 444 | Richardson, Phyllis: New Sacred Architecture, London 2004, pp. 86-

---

Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.