Roswell Community Masjid breaks ground on what will be the World’s First Living Building-certified place of worship

Metro Atlanta will soon be home to another landmark building that champions sustainability in its design and performance. 

The Roswell Community Masjid — or Mosque — (RCM) is hosting a groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday, Dec. 6 for their eventual home, which hopes to become the world’s first Living Building-certified place of worship.

A Living Building certification is an ambitious international sustainable building certification program through the Living Building Challenge hosted by the International Living Building Institute; newly constructed buildings must meet 20 rigorous imperatives, along with additional requirements, to achieve the designation, across categories of place, water, energy, health & happiness, materials, equity and beauty. As of 2024, there are only around 35 buildings in the world certified Living Building — the highest ranking from the challenge — though hundreds more under other Living Building organization rankings like Zero Carbon, Zero Energy, Petal or Core.

The project takes inspiration from the landmark Kendeda Building at Georgia Tech, which opened in 2019 and is often cited as the world’s greenest classroom with its Living Building certification. 

Saad Dar, volunteer at RCM, is leading the marketing initiative on the mosque’s Beyond Walls project, which is spearheading the effort towards the designation. Dar said the project was first conceptualized in 2021, when RCM was looking for a new house of worship to accommodate its growing community along with upgraded facilities. 

“We wanted to have better facilities for our kids, our youth, for the elderly, and also for non-Muslims,” Dar said.

Community members who were also Georgia Tech students advocated for a sustainable design, inspired by the Kendeda building, and eventually the project decided to take on the Living Building Challenge.

When complete, RCM plans to have the building accessible to the public, similar to Kendeda building hosting classes but also made accessible to the public through a number of events and tours hosted there. 

“We had an ambition to not only have a mosque that’s open to Muslims, but also to non-Muslims, so that they can come and learn more about who we are, what we do, all of that,” Dar said. “This was sort of a vision that was developed to think about future generations and building something that’s sustainable,and environmentally responsible in-line with our Islamic values of environmental stewardship.”

The two-story building will feature prayer halls, classrooms, offices, and an event hall. Early renderings show what appears to be a solar array atop the structure.

Since the approval of the plan to achieve the Living Building certification RCM has focused on acquiring the land for future development, along with design to ensure it meets the ambitious standards of the challenge.

Trees being taken down from the current site along, with materials from a deconstructed barn onsite, will be reused, Dar said, to maximize reuse and sustainable building practices.

“Even the trees that we’re cutting on-site, we’re preserving certain trees and making sure that there’s a certain percentage of land preserved as part of the Living Building Challenge,” Dar said.

With the extra imperatives to meet the Living Building Challenge, planning and design was made more complicated and thus took longer to achieve, Dar admits. Some community members have understandably been cautious over the project cost and what the merits of pursuing this certification, he said.

“We’re working on that, because I think we did a poor job communicating it… we’re trying to build building something that reuses the water that comes in, or puts more energy out than it consumes or uses the materials that we have on-site, uses soap that is going to be able to go into the water system,” Dar said, adding that the last few months have been focused on ensuring the benefits of this building are properly relayed. “We’re investing in [the education component] now, because we realize that it is technical and we have to explain to people in a simple way, and [explain] why we really need it.”

Ultimately though, the extra efforts to meet the standards of the certification will pay off long-term in what the building means to the community at large, and non-Muslims.

“I think when we talk to our youth, when we talk to people in our community or even afar in the Greater Atlanta area or in Boston — I’ve got volunteers that want to join [us] from Chicago, because they’re very excited about what this projects means for Muslims in general, but also that it’s so innovative with a bold vision,” Dar said. “There’s the building and then there’s the people who are running the building… and what is the community itself representing?”

At a time where Islamophobia has been increasingly prevalent across the nation, Dar explained, a center that welcomes both Muslims and non-Muslims alike and showcases a core Islamic value of caring for the environment can go a long way to facilitating important conversations that otherwise might not take place — a place to facilitate the “collision factor,” as Dar referenced.

“This is a chance, an excuse, an opportunity for people that don’t normally meet each other to meet each other; because they have a shared interest or a common goal of sustainability, they get to interact and learn about each other,” Dar said. “The original mosques and universities of the Islamic civilizations were like this. The first university in the world was founded by an Islamic woman in Morocco,” Dar said, referencing the University of Al-Qarawiyyin founded by Fatima al-Fihri, which doubled as a mosque. “Maimonides himself, who was a Jewish scholar, went and studied there… so I think we are basically reclaiming our history, the way how Muslims were, by being inclusive.”

The new center is expected to be completed in 2027.

Note: This article was updated on Dec. 7 to clarify specifications about the program and building plans.