Al Musalla

Al Musalla brings a place of worship to the cultural park at Qasr Al Hosn in Abu Dhabi, offering worshippers calm, secluded spaces set apart from the movement of the park outside. Located at the north-eastern corner of the site, the 1,100 m² building provides a contemporary setting for prayer within the city’s historic heart. 

Water shapes both the building and the experience of moving through it: it flows around and between a cluster of interconnected volumes, creating privacy without enclosing walls while recalling its role in spiritual purification. From the open park, worshippers enter the narrow gaps between the volumes, gradually leaving behind the noise and activity of the city, and reach the entrance halls, cave-like rooms where people can pause, sit, and talk before prayer, in an atmosphere inspired by the Cave of Hira, where the Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation. 

The sequence continues through the ablution spaces, where washing becomes a moment of preparation, before arriving at the prayer halls, large and aligned with the qibla. Glass tubes bridge the water between each volume, filling the passages with daylight so that each crossing extends the act of purification from the body to the mind. The plan mirrors itself on either side, so that women and men move through the same sequence in parallel. 

The geometry of the landscape returns overhead in a suspended ceiling of mud-crack patterns, punctuated by small circular openings drawing daylight into the enclosed volumes. Together with the hanging pendants, they create abstract constellations that recall both faith and the Bedouin tradition of navigating by the stars. In the prayer halls, copper cladding multiplies the light into endless reflections that evoke the cosmos and tie the detail of the ceiling back to the geometry of the whole, like a fractal. Elsewhere, concrete skylights bring daylight into the entrance and ablution spaces, while an inscribed concrete relief appears through a window that gives no sign of itself outside. 

Part of the wider transformation of Al Hosn, the building extends the dialogue between the fort and the Cultural Foundation out into the park. Drawn from the landscape and lit from above, Al Musalla offers worshippers a gradual passage from the city to prayer, through water, geometry, and light.