3 surprising ways the mosque can inspire your next office redesign

Your company just announced that they’ve acquired new office space and they are soliciting ideas from all employees on how best to design it for maximum productivity and performance. Your instinct will probably be to jump online and look at office design inspirations from Google, Facebook, and other “best places to work” companies.

What if, instead, you drew inspiration from an institution that has been the center of the Islamic economy for hundreds of years, an institution that’s deeply rooted in spirituality yet played an active role in the Golden Age of Islamic civilization. This is, of course, the masjid (mosque).

The masjid may seem a simple building with little to offer as inspiration for modern office design. However, here are three surprising ways that the masjid can help inspire your next office redesign:

1. HIGH CEILINGS

Have you ever wondered why houses of worship tend to have such high ceilings? Perhaps the early architects knew something about how human think inside buildings. According to researchers from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, “ceiling height can affect how a person thinks, feels and acts, and when a person is in the space of 10-foot ceiling or more, they’ll tend to think more freely, more abstractly vs. more detail-specific thought.”

In a house of worship, free thinking and abstract thinking is critical to connecting with spiritual concepts such as the unseen, the hereafter, and divine messages. Our modern workplaces, which place a high emphasis on creativity and innovation thinking, may want to take a cue from traditional houses of worship and raise their ceilings too.

2. PRIVATE/PUBLIC OPEN SPACE

People hate open-office plans due to their lack of privacy and noise levels. However, a mosque can provide a model for a productive open-office plan through the following three elements: