24 LISTENER MARCH 14 2020
I
t seems like just months since
the mosque shootings. It seems
like decades.
“It is a strange in-between
place,” says Abdallah Alayan,
recent master’s graduate of the
University of Auckland school
of architecture and planning.
“It is crazy to think it has almost been
a year, but we are doing as well as we
can. Being close to my family is really
important.”
In the breezy space of Ilex Cafe
in Christchurch’s Botanic Gardens,
Alayan is attentive and articulate,
enthusiastic about his surroundings –
the building is one of his favourites in
Christchurch – but cautious in hold-
ing the conversation too close to the
memory of his brother.
On March 15, 2019, Alayan’s
brother, Atta Elayyan, a 33-year-old
software developer and goalkeeper for
the Futsal Whites indoor football team,
was killed while praying at the Al Noor
Mosque. Alayan took four months
off university to be with his family
in Christchurch before returning his
attention to an architectural project that had
suddenly become desperately relevant.
In the months before the shooting, Alayan
was working on an idea for his thesis, a series
of four architectural responses to the other-
worldly landscape of Fiordland aimed at
engaging the spirit for the religious and non-
religious through sound, water, medi tationand hauntingly evocative built spaces.
It was an audacious plan – in an
increasingly secular society, he says, the
spirit is not seen as deserving architectural
importance. “In an architectural context it
is not a priority. We are so preoccupied with
issues such as climate change and building
waste and social housing, which are all sourgent – something that feels
negligible, like the spirit, is
ignored.”
It was also a potentially naive
proposal “in the sense that it
was so unlikely to eventuate”.
For a while, he considered
changing his proposal tosomething more realistic, but then, as he was
weighing up his options, March happened.
“I thought, no, I have to do this. It made
so much sense and the urgency of the topic
became really acute.”
The resulting work, Faith in Fiordland,
was joint winner of the 2019 New Zealand
Institute of Architects Resene Student
Design Award along with Jeremy
Priest’s Protest Academia. It is hopeful,
ethereal and elegant, a pilgrimage
of built spaces taking the visitor on
a pathway between Te Anau and
Milford Sound.
It is not, he says, defined by what
happened in Christchurch. It addresses
tourism and the unmet potential of
the built fabric in Fiordland, which
is currently dominated by prefabri-
cated long drops, sheds, jetties and
“very average commercial touristic
buildings”, and the lack of physical
spaces responding to non-religious
spirituality.
“Spaces for spiritual engagement
are usually designed
within a religious
typology, but the
majority of people IAWAKENING
THE SPIRIT
As the one-year anniversary of the Christchurch
mosque shootings approaches, one family member
unlocks the potential for spiritual well-being through
architecture. by SALLY BLUNDELL ● photograph by MARTIN HUNTER
ALAYANFAM
ILYC
O
LLECTI
O
NTHE HEALING PROCESS
Tragedy: Abdallah
Alayan, above left, with
his brother, Atta Elayyan,
who was killed in the
March 15 mosque attacks;
Elayyan with his daughter,
Aya, left; Alayan, right.