Sidi Saiyyed Mosque, Ahmedabad
The Old, Within the New
A walkable website about a place people walk past, built so you can check what it tells you.
Places people walk past.
Some places are so familiar that people stop seeing them. Old mosques, old gates, old walls. They’re just there, and nobody asks what they’re holding.
Those places have so much story to tell. I wanted to build something that helps people slow down and actually look.
I picked Sidi Saiyyed Mosque in Ahmedabad and made a website you can walk through.
But why would anyone trust a random website with information about a place?
That question shaped everything. So I didn’t put the proof in a footer. I built it into the walk: a research tab where you can read credible sources about the place, right where the story is.
Walk it. Hear it. Check it.
You move through the mosque in first person. Drag or use the arrow keys to look around, W and S to walk, scroll to inspect. There are nine places to wander through, from the city outside to the water and the surrounding city.
Sound moves with you. Outside, you hear traffic. Step inside and it softens into muffled sound. There’s a sound on/off button in the top right, and the recordings are licensed and credited on the page.
A rough demo of the idea, generated in your browser. The real site uses licensed recordings. Tap Outside or Inside.
Every place has a Field Guide entry, and every entry keeps what you can see apart from what I think it means. Here’s the jali, the carved stone screen:
See: what is visible
A carved screen turns stone into a field of light and shadow.
Read: my interpretation
I wanted to know how much attention a piece of stone could hold.
Then there’s a research thread. I went looking for the sources, and the site lists them by type so you can decide what belongs in your own Field Guide:
- AMC Heritage City (museum and heritage): the official city heritage page describes the carved screens as delicate stone traceries, with the finest ones showing a tree of life.
- Sahapedia (academic): records that the mosque’s back-wall windows contain stone jalis and that the central window has none. It also separates documented description from interpretation.
Route memory
A Field Guide fills up as you explore, with room for your own notes. Unfinished is allowed.
The map shows where you’ve been: solid lines are paths you walked, dotted lines and question marks are places still waiting.
Why this belongs here
A marketing team has the same problem as a visitor to a heritage site: why should anyone believe this? I try to build the answer into the experience, with labelled claims and sources people can follow, instead of hiding it in fine print.
It’s the same habit behind the tags on my case studies.
If a place has a story, people should be able to walk into it. And check it.