Eco-Mosque In Germany Gets Wind Powered Minarets - Fantastic!

I know what you're thinking. An environmentally friendly mosque with wind powered minarets - is it going to fly away? Is it a German government plan? No, no. Just your average Norderstedt eco-mosque, with wind turbines IN its minarets. Ah, see, not so malignant now.

According to The Guardian, the Muslim community in northern Germany is "pioneering renewable energy sources" by building a mosque with turbines in its minarets for optimum wind and sunlight.

The project is going to cost a humble €2.5m (£2.2m) for the mosque in Norderstedt, near Hamburg, and it'll be the first to turn a minaret into a wind-fuelled power source.

A minaret of a mosque is the place from which a muaddhin (muezzin) calls the adhan - the call to prayer. Just visualise a giant fan blowing in the background. Fantastical.

The eco-friendly building is the brainchild of the Hamburg architect Selcuk Ünyilmaz:

"I thought about how we could give sacral architecture an ecological focus," he said. "My design combines the modern with the traditional, so I wanted to give the minarets a contemporary function."

More from The Guadian:
The wind turbines will be housed in two 22-metre-high minarets and Ünyilmaz plans to install a pair of 1.5-metre glass rotor blades in each tower. At certain times of the day light will be beamed at the blades to create a kind of light show.

In order to persuade some of the more sceptical members of the congregation of the merits of his the design, Ünyilmaz looked for other mosques with similar wind turbines. But he could not find any other examples that had already been built.

The German mosque will not be the first of its kind, however, as the Islamic missionary group Tablighi Jamaat is also planning to build an environmentally friendly mosque with wind turbines in its minarets in time for the London 2012 Olympics.

Ünyilmaz's scheme has come at a fortuitous time. Germany has approved a 2022 exit from nuclear energy and there is pressure to make up the shortfall by boosting the renewable energy sector.

The community in Norderstedt might be in tune with the energy zeitgeist but is does not yet have funds for the project. However this is not something Sütcü is too worried about. "We are confident that we can raise the money," he said.

The coastal town is perfectly situated for wind energy production, and the minarets will help cover the building's overheads, providing about a third of its energy. Ünyilmaz said that was one of the reasons he opted for turbines instead of solar panels, which would not produce electricity at night. "We are in the north and I don't think there's a day here that isn't windy," he said.


From The Guardian | June 13th 2011 | Siobhan Dowling

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