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A new home for the multi-faith congregations of the Westminster Faith Exchange, a council that promotes inter-religious community engagement in London.
The building provides three prayer spaces, a community room for people of all or no faiths, and offices for the council. The spaces of worship take inspiration from the vernacular styles of Jewish synagogues, Buddhist temples and Christian churches, without conforming to a single typology.
The building challenges the way we interpret contemporary spaces for worship, seeking to acknowledge the distinctions between beliefs whilst drawing attention to their common elements. In connecting not only those of faith but also the faithless, it is imagined that the Faith Exchange can become a place of learning, reflection, and the coming together of a richly diverse community.
This assemblage reconstructs photographic memories of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in a pandemic workspace–the bedroom–as part of a series of early studies in conflating spaces of worship.
In this exploded axonometric shows the three principal prayer spaces, which when brought together form a unified building at the scale of a city block.
Cut-away perspective of the public route through the centre of the building, around which the spaces of worship are arranged to maximise openness and transparency.
The structure and envelope draw on vernacular construction and craftsmanship techniques from each of the faiths represented within the building.