The Laws of Foreign Buildings: Flat Roofs and Minarets - Michael ...

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For the Muslim community and also for the Cantonal court, the building type is
defined by its use. The factory building is already a mosque even before a minaret is
added. Their position is strictly socializing the building. The minaret itself is only ‘symbolic’
because it cannot be used to call for prayer. The minaret does not define the building
type hence they materialize it. In a second step, the campaign to ban minarets follows
this materializing move, by acknowledging that the minaret is only symbolic and does
not define the building type, which is exactly the reason why the initiative supposedly
does not violate religious freedom. For the committee, the minaret has been represented
as a political symbol for the anti-democratic tendencies of Islam, and is not necessary for
the exercise of Islamic religion. The initiative, if passed, would not stop the building of
mosques defined as prayer spaces without minarets. It would prove that minarets are not
technological requirements for the religious use of the building. But then the webpage
also states that the spread of Islam should be stopped with the help of the initiative. This
implicitly assumes that if mosques did not have minarets they would be less useful in
spreading the message of Islam. Thereby they mediatize the minaret, not with reference
to religion, but to politics.
If we ask whether the law prohibits the immigration of building types, an irritating
answer emerges: the initiative has been passed, but Switzerland will most likely not prevent
the immigration of the mosque as a building type, if it is defined as a use-type.
Rather, a new form of mosque without minarets will emerge and become stabilized. The
banning of minarets might probably also trigger new legal battles about which building
forms count as minarets, since they are not defined in the initiative. Immediately after the
initiative was accepted, several ‘minarets’ were built, for example on balconies or in gardens,
to provoke this question. Some graphic designers even marketed a sheet of construction
paper to ‘build your own minaret’ – ‘without building permit’ (Dirtyhands,
2009). If a church were to be turned into a mosque – which has never happened so far
in Switzerland – the question could arise whether the church tower is now a minaret and
would have to be taken down. As the debate about the ‘symbolic’ minaret in Wangen
shows, a ‘chimney’ can be a symbolic minaret, even if it is not used as minaret.
Conclusion: A Comparison
The two cases present a complex picture of how the law relates to ‘foreign’ forms. As a
summary, I compare the cases with respect to the different architectural theories
employed in the controversies by the opponents and proponents of foreign building
types. As it turns out, the question of what makes a building foreign and how it connects
to foreign lifestyles has been answered quite differently, and even in opposite ways, in
both of the two cases. In both cases, it is fundamental that the architectural theories that
shall prove whether a building is foreign or not are never spelled out, let alone explicitly
discussed. Instead, proponents and opponents alike adhere to the theory that fits their
case, and even endorse other theories depending on their needs.
In the case of modern architecture, the development starts with the opponents, in this
case the local authorities, which imply a mediatization of modern architecture. For them,
the dispute revolves around how styles relate to the local. The importers of modern architecture
answer with a technological theory. For them, it is not about the link of styles to
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