With its light and dark clinker brick facade, the mosque in Cambridge, England, is in perfect sympathy with the surrounding rows of typical houses. The timber construction becomes clearly apparent in the entrance area, where the first of the thirty timber columns can be seen as they soar upwards like trees, merging with the lattice-like ceiling structure to form a vast tracery of timber. In addition to a prayer hall with a ceiling height of 8.5 m that can accommodate around 1,000 worshippers, the building includes a café and two apartments.
The design by London-based Marks Barfield Architects draws on the motif of a garden of paradise, with the interweaving branches of the trees forming the supporting timber structure. The Blumer Lehmann free-form team advised the architects on the implementation of the challenging structure during the development phase. Our know-how of digital processes and parametric planning came to the fore during the subsequent production. Together with our partners, we developed a modular system from design to production with 2746 components in 145 variants, thus overcoming the complex challenges of production, logistics and assembly. Precise labelling of the various components ensured efficient and clear organisation. Thanks to the exact timing, each component reached the construction site in England at the correct time, allowing seamless assembly by our team.
