Sinan's Mosque

The fifteenth-century architect Sinan (1489-1588) was a master mosque builder who employed perfect proportions to create astonishing lightness in architecture--especially in his gravity-defying cupolas. Sinan is renowned for having borrowed Roman and Byzantine techniques in order to create something new in mosque design--centralized organisms of absolute space, unhindered by pillars or columns. This beautifully illustrated volume, which features stunning reconstructed architectural renderings and diagrams, is the first to fully analyze Sinan's method--presumably derived from early projection techniques. It focuses in specific on four mosques in Istanbul and Edirne and studies them in depth, citing these four prototypical structures as the origins for more than 100 other notable mosques that were built after their completion. Exquisitely rendered illustrations convey the fundamental purity of Sinan's structures and dimensions, neatly illustrating the importance of proportion in his work and revealing how he achieved such feather-light height and space in his large cupolas.