The Laayoune Grand Mosque

Situated at the edge of the desert where the urban grid meets the dunes, the Laayoune Grand Mosque is designed to balance symbolic grandeur with the necessities of climatic survival. Conceived as a "City within a City," the project integrates educational spaces, a library, and a vast prayer hall into a unified civic complex.

The design reinterprets traditional Almoravid geometry through contemporary engineering, utilizing a lightweight, perforated GRC (Glass Reinforced Concrete) skin. This high-performance facade filters harsh desert sunlight into a cool, spiritual luminescence, transforming the building into a climatic shelter as much as a place of worship.

Structurally, the Minaret serves as the visual and physical anchor of the site. Inside, the prayer hall utilizes a unique structural grid to minimize vertical columns, creating a vast, uninterrupted floor plate that reinforces the sense of communal equality during prayer. Externally, the plaza functions as a civic condenser, providing a shaded public realm that mitigates the heat island effect while anchoring the spiritual life of the growing city.

Technical Specifications:

• Passive Cooling: The building envelope features a "double-skin" masonry system with deep reveals, creating self-shading façades that lower internal temperatures by 8°C without mechanical cooling.
• Acoustics: The dome utilizes a custom-milled GRC (Glass Reinforced Concrete) shell with integrated micro-diffusion panels to ensure perfect speech intelligibility without echo.
• Illumination: A circadian lighting system is embedded in the ceiling coffers, automatically adjusting the color temperature from cool daylight (Dhuhr prayer) to warm amber (Isha prayer).