What Makes Mosques Meaningful? Examining Impacts of Character-Defining Elements on Architectural Meaning
Personal Biography
Ahmed AbdelMoneim Ahmed Ph.D. is an architect and a researcher who is known for the study of architectural conservation and specialized in the architectural heritage of the city of Alexandria. He has been working for the library of Alexandria since 2003 in the Alex Med research center (2003-2017) and the Center for Islamic Civilizations Studies (2017-2024). He is a co-author and editor of many publications concerning architecture in the Islamic world with a special concern for the city of Alexandria. His current work is related to the phenomenology of the human senses and perception in the field of architecture.
Paper Abstract
Revisiting the question: “What makes mosques meaningful?”, This research aims to examine the nature of interaction between mosque users and architectural character-defining elements that contribute to the mosque's architectural meaning. This question is applied within the context of the mosques in Alexandria's Ottoman town. The preceding sequential study to this one focused on the description of the physical character-defining elements of the architecture of 42 significant mosques. These buildings' reliance and value made them stand as examples of historical and cultural richness throughout half a millennium.
This time, richness, resilience, and architecture combined with human interaction managed to build an interactive meaning creation for the users of these buildings. The study transcends simple architectural documentation to investigate how these elements, when combined with human engagement, create spaces of spiritual and cultural meaning. The study of meaning creation by human interaction with architectural elements in historic buildings represents a gap in existing research. This research aims to address this gap by using a mixed research method approach. Where it combines qualitative research methods such as computational phenomenology, which employs NLP “natural language processing” to process and analyze the user’s responses to certain questions on their interaction with the buildings, and quantitative research methods utilizing frequency analysis and other methods to validate the qualitative results.
Among the resulting aspects of meaning creation examined in this study are space navigation, emotional associations, functionality, etc. The findings demonstrate how architectural elements and human interaction together are essential to the meaning that mosque architecture conveys. The study concludes that a mosque's essence extends beyond its physical form to include its users' lived experiences and cultural contexts.
This study, along with the previous paper, “What Defines Mosques?” claim to provide a comprehensive methodological and conceptual framework for understanding and assessing mosque architectural significance by incorporating the dynamic interactions between architectural elements and human meaning creation. In addition, they help architects and scholars to find, evaluate, and create a mosque's architectural elements of significant meaning to users.
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