Prayer Spaces. The everyday architecture of prayer.

A photographic archive of 200+ mosques and informal prayer spaces across northwestern Saudi Arabia, documenting places of faith and tracing their disappearance amid rapid urban transformation.

For more than six years, I lived and worked as an architect in northwestern Saudi Arabia, a vast and sparsely populated territory stretching between mountains, desert and the Red Sea. During that time, I began photographing the mosques and informal prayer spaces I encountered across the region.

Prayer structures are an almost constant presence in this landscape. They appear in towns and villages, beside highways, within family homes and worker settlements, and sometimes seemingly alone in the desert. In a region where distances are vast and prayer structures form part of the rhythm of everyday life, even the smallest and most remote communities have created places in which to pray.

What initially began as an observation gradually became a systematic photographic archive. To date, the project documents more than 200 prayer sites (600+ photos) across 15 settlements in northwestern Saudi Arabia. The images were made over several years and in very different circumstances: some settlements were documented on film, while others were photographed with a digital camera or simply a phone, depending on access, timing and the situation in which I encountered them. This variation has become part of the archive itself, reflecting the project’s gradual and observational nature.

The spaces vary enormously. Some are formally constructed mosques; others are small rooms, improvised buildings or extensions of private homes. Many were created by local communities or migrant workers using the materials and resources available to them, often outside formal planning processes. Their architecture can be extremely modest: a carpet, a niche indicating the direction of Mecca, a small loudspeaker, a handwritten sign. Yet these simple interventions transform an ordinary room or structure into a place of collective meaning.

The project deliberately turns away from the monumental architecture more commonly associated with mosques. Instead, it looks at an everyday architecture of prayer: buildings shaped less by architectural authorship than by necessity, repetition, adaptation and use. Individually, many may appear unremarkable. Collectively, they reveal a vernacular landscape of faith and the communities that have inhabited it.

Alongside the prayer spaces, a small number of photographs document the surrounding communities and their livestock. These images place the buildings within a lived landscape, where homes, animals, roads and places of prayer share the same ground.

Over the years, the meaning of the archive has changed. Northwestern Saudi Arabia is undergoing an unprecedented physical transformation. Settlements are being reorganised, populations relocated and existing structures removed as new development reshapes the region. Many of the prayer spaces I photographed no longer exist; others are expected to disappear.

The archive therefore extends beyond the photographs themselves. Each documented site is mapped and its status tracked: existing, due for demolition, or demolished. A photograph that began as a record of an ordinary building can consequently become the only remaining visual evidence of a place.

Prayer Spaces is ultimately a project about cultural memory and its relationship to the physical world. It asks what happens to memory when familiar, everyday places disappear, and what photography can preserve when the landscape itself cannot be preserved. By documenting these modest structures and the life around them before and during their disappearance, the project creates a record not of celebrated monuments, but of the fragile, ordinary places through which faith, community and daily life have been practised.

I have recently organised the archive into a dedicated website, bringing together the photographs, site locations and their current status. The website has not yet been publicly launched, but is accessible for review here: https://www.prayerspaces.space