A mosque, points out the architect Julia Barfield, has no fixed appearance. It varies with location: in Egypt, in Andalucía, in Turkey, in Indonesia, on the Arabian peninsular, wherever Muslims need a place to pray, the building takes on the characteristics of the local style. In China it might be a series of pavilions with pagoda-like roofs; in sub-Saharan Africa it might be built of mud bricks or rammed earth. It might be covered by a single dome, or many, or by a flat roof supported on multiple columns. It might be made of stone, or timber, or concrete.

In Britain, mosques go back to the late 19th century, when one was hollowed out of an existing terrace in Liverpool and another was purpose-built in the Surrey town of Woking. Yet it is still not entirely clear what the typical style of a British mosque might be: the most common approach, often driven by the demand to serve as many people as possible within limited budgets, is to build a plain box that is then decorated with motifs referring to the main country of origin of the congregations – Ottoman for Turks and Cypriots, Moghul for people from the subcontinent – or from which the bulk of the funding came.

The new £23m mosque in Mill Road, Cambridge, which will open in the next few weeks, is the most determined attempt yet to build in a way that is of its own place and time. It’s the brainchild of Timothy Winter, also known as Abdal Hakim Murad, a convert to Islam who teaches at the University of Cambridge and is dean of the Cambridge Muslim College. The building, which has room for 1,000 worshippers, will serve the city’s Muslim population in general, as well as Winter’s students. It has been funded, he says, by more than 10,000 donations “large and small”, from private individuals to governments such as Qatar. Two thirds of the total has come from “a raft of Turkish donors, both business and government”. Winter says that these gifts have come with no strings attached, in terms of the selection of imams or the spiritual direction of the mosque.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Solar panels on the roof of the mosque, which employs a host of environmentally friendly technologies. Photograph: Marks Barfield Architects

Winter is noted for his opposition to extremist interpretations of Islam and for his wish to create a better understanding between those inside and outside the faith. He is also the son of John Winter, a sensitive and skilful modernist architect in one of whose creations, a steel-and-glass cuboid on the edge of Highgate cemetery in London, he grew up. It’s not surprising, given his background, that he aimed to achieve “social integration” with the wider local community and that he wanted to commission a notable work of contemporary architecture.

The architects, chosen in a competition in 2009 (it has taken a while to raise the funding), are those who designed the London Eye – the practice of Barfield and her late husband, David Marks, proteges of the hi-tech architectural offices of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. And, if it’s surprising to see them make the transition to a place of worship from an internationally recognised tourist attraction, you can see in both projects an ambition to make a building’s visible structure impart symbols and meaning.

With the Eye, it was all about refining the detail of the wheel so as to turn it from a fairground ride into an urban icon. With the mosque, the design effort has been concentrated on tree-like columns whose highly engineered timber branches, spreading out and intertwining, hold up the roof. Light filters through from circular openings above. A grove of 16 such columns is created in the prayer hall that is the main space of the mosque, anticipated by others in the building’s entrance atrium and portico.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the decorative screens in the Mill Road building. Photograph: Marks Barfield Architects

If there’s a touch of the Foster-designed Stansted airport in the repeating structure, the curves and the materials tell you that something else is intended here. Spiritual rather than physical transport, you might say. Barfield explains the design as a reference to the Qur’anic idea of paradise as a quadripartite garden. It owes something to the gothic vaults, this being an exalted form of British religious architecture that possibly has an Arab influence, and it owes something else to the internal stone forest of the great mosque of Córdoba. The overall effect is an abstract Arabesque, a way of building inspired by the spirit rather than the literal details of traditional Islamic architecture.

Other parts of the project strive to interpret traditional themes in their own way. Keith Critchlow, a specialist in Islamic geometry, has advised on the patterns underlying Marks Barfield’s roof structure and has contributed decorative elements of a more obviously traditional design. Brick patterns in the atrium walls inscribe the name of Allah. Emma Clark, a garden designer and an expert on Islamic ones, is also drawing on Qur’anic descriptions of paradise to create a hopefully contemplative haven at the front of the building, in what is one of the less scenic parts of the famous university city – small brick houses, a busy road and industrial premises are among the neighbours.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A room for female worshippers to conduct ablutions before prayer. Photograph: Marks Barfield Architects

At the same time, Winter’s desire for integration and openness are pursued. If the prayer hall has a certain confidence and quiet grandeur, the building steps down towards the front to fit in with the scale of its surroundings. Clark’s garden is open to anyone, believers or not, and there is a cafe next to the atrium to draw visitors in. The design, as Winter wished, aims for exemplary levels of sustainability and energy efficiency.

It doesn’t entirely hang together. There’s an unevenness of tone between the different contributions, which take different positions on the path from literal to abstracted interpretations of traditional Islamic design. The installation, currently under way, of some Turkish-looking features from the Turkish donors will be something else again. One is reminded of Stansted in a different way, where the elegant structure has been embarrassed by the rampage of retail at its base.

The dissonant elements, it should be said, are much less drastic in the mosque than in the airport, and in the end the sinuous arboreal construction carries the day. It is beautifully built, and bravely and intelligently conceived. It works best in the atrium, where it layers the process of entry from street to prayer hall, and where columns and vault cohere best with the patterns of floor and walls. You could say that its very virtuosity contributes to the lack of connection with other parts of the project – it’s a common feature of hi-tech architecture that an impressive structural performance has this effect – but mostly you should just stand back and appreciate it.

The simple fact of making the introductory garden open and accessible, of presenting this fragile element to a harsher world outside, is also a strong one. Neither it nor the tree-columns entirely answer the question of what a British mosque might be – and it would be absurd to expect one building do this – but they give it an exceptionally good go.