Mosques, like any religious places, serve as a landmark to a locality or neighborhood. The Gulshan Society Mosque, Dhaka, Bangladesh designed by Ar. Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury sits opposite to a water body as it stands adjacent to a graveyard. The form and interpretation of a mosque has morphed in numerous ways as it has travelled across different geographical landscapes. As it has entered the dense urban fabric, the stacking up of layers into a mosque is quite a novel form and is under experimentation primarily in densely populated regions.
As Bangladesh is a tropical country, both rainfall and sunshine have a fair share of their say in the landscapes of this delta. Deep shading and screen walls are common features that help the buildings around these regions to maintain an ambient indoor condition and reduce energy consumption. As this building is exposed in all directions without getting any assistance from the shadows of adjacent buildings, the facade system needs to address the critical issue of the sun all on its own.
Figure 1: Geographical location of the project and critical considerations of the directions.
Figure 2: Existing Images of the Mosque. Source: Arch20
IDEA
The aim of this task was to generate a kinetic skin that would respond to an external stimuli. As the solar cycle has a repetitive nature and with the mosque exposed to it on all of its sides, our aim was to create a skin that would slide vertically up on the East facade with the sun while on the South Facade it would slide horizontally from east to west in an attempt to keep the harsh sun away from the indoor spaces. The idea primarily rests on these two notions. The script was designed to mimic the current grid but the regular orthogonal grid would deform under an attractor point which would raise the East facade vertically while slide the South facade horizontally.
The intervention of RISE AND FALL // SLIDE AND GLIDE revolves around the idea that the whole system possesses the potential to respond while in motion. The static feature hugging the mosque next to the graveyard will all of a sudden come to life in a “techno-mystical” manner.
Figure 03: Grasshopper Pseudocode and Script
Figure 04: Responses of East Facade & South Facade. Source: Produced by James Alcock & Rishaad Mohammad Yusuff 
GIF: Gradual horizontal movement of the South facade. Source: Produced by James Alcock & Rishaad Mohammad Yusuff
Figure 05: Abstract render comparison 01
Figure 06: Abstract render comparison 02
RISE AND FALL // SLIDE AND GLIDE is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed at Masters in Advanced Architecture (MAA 01), 2021/22 in the course Computational Design I by-
Student: James Alcock and Rishaad Mohammad Yusuff
Faculty: David Andrés León, Ashkan Foroughi, Uri Lewis Torres