CANDALEPAS ASSOCIATES
ESTABLISHED 1999
SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES
Working from a light-filled converted listed building in Sydney’s CBD—where the original features of the three-storey brick wool store are on display—the multi-award-winning Candalepas Associates are practicing what they preach, creating ‘architecture where the human hand is obvious in its making, and a consideration of how people behave in spaces is understood.’ In doing so, Candalepas Associates are offering ‘something that has a cultural dimension... that is about the human spirit and how it can be touched by the things we create’. With this ethos eloquently expressed, Candalepas Associates have created a mosque of startling beauty—a building that instils great pride and a sense of belonging in its community, and one which, through the design and material choices made, will serve this community well into the future.
Punchbowl Mosque, 2018
Punchbowl, New South Wales
I think people forget this, but it can be made to appear as though it was a liquid, so if you are pouring your building into place…it’s like it is in suspended animation.
Angelo Candalepas, 2018
It is this suspended animation that is so beautifully expressed in the two major features of the Punchbowl Mosque—the concrete-ringed and plywood-lined dome, and the muqarna ornamental ceiling, featuring 99 quarter-domes. Each one of these smaller cast-concrete domes has one of Allah’s 99 names written inside it in gold calligraphy, and each one also features a 20mm skylight, enabling the building to be lit from outside, like a series of stars in concrete.