Hassan II Mosque
— — a minaret pointed at Mecca over the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“A great prayer hall built out over the Atlantic at the western edge of Casablanca. The minaret rises two hundred and ten metres, taller than any other religious tower in the world, and a green laser at its top traces the line to Mecca after dark. The hall holds twenty-five thousand worshippers, with room for eighty thousand more on the marble esplanade outside. A glass floor in one chamber looks straight down at the ocean. At low tide the swell rolls under the foundations and breaks white against the seawall.
Hassan II Mosque, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Hassan II Mosque sits on a promontory on the Atlantic coast of Casablanca, in the Casablanca-Settat region of Morocco. It was commissioned by King Hassan II to mark his sixtieth birthday, designed by the French architect Michel Pinseau, and opened in 1993 after seven years of construction by some six thousand Moroccan craftsmen. It is the largest mosque in Africa and, after the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, among the largest functioning mosques in the world. Unusually among Moroccan mosques, it is open to non-Muslim visitors on guided tours outside prayer times.
The mosque is faced almost entirely in Moroccan materials: marble from Agadir, cedar from the Middle Atlas, granite from Tafraoute, and zellij tilework cut by hand in the workshops of Fez and Salé. The minaret rises 210 metres and held the title of tallest religious structure in the world until 2019. The titanium-clad doors of the prayer hall weigh several tonnes and open electrically. A retractable roof, twelve hundred square metres in panel area, slides open in fair weather to let the Atlantic light fall across the central hall.
Roughly a third of the mosque's footprint extends out over the Atlantic on a reinforced platform, a siting that draws on a Qur'anic verse describing God's throne as upon the water. In the lower hammam-and-ablution chambers, a section of the floor is glazed so that worshippers can see the ocean directly beneath them. The seawall takes the full force of Atlantic swell; storms in winter throw spray well above the esplanade, and the prayer call at maghrib carries out over the breaking water.