Architectural Geology of Ottoman Istanbul, Part 2: Detail of the Interior | Sultan Ahmed Mosque ("Blue Mosque") (AD 1616)
This certainly isn't the prettiest photo I or anyone else has ever taken of this building's stunning interior. But it does at least remind me that my visit half a century ago took place at a time when some sort of restoration effort was underway. Hence the scaffolding in the foreground.
Though it was constructed well over a millennnium after the nearby Hagia Sophia, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque owes some of its main design features to it—or at least to Byzantine-church architecture in general. Of course, over the centuries this sort of artistic and engineering cross-fertilization between cultures and religions has proved to be a very heavily traveled two-way street.
One can easily rattle off the correspondences between those two great imperial-city structures. Here, for example, architect Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, a pupil of the great Sinan, utilized pendentives and half-domes supported by massive piers that transmit the weight of the main dome and all else down to the foundation and bedrock below.
Pendentives are curved, triangular sections of a sphere. One is is visible in this shot between two half-domes, at top. Lurking behind the scenes, in the walls and piers, are the main structural materials, brick and locally quarried, Miocene-epoch Bakırköy Limestone.
And speaking of stone: the one stout, upper-level column visible behind the scaffoling looks very much like Proconnesian Marble, quarried on Marmara Island in the sea of the same name since Roman times. The Mosque's mihrab is carved from that stone, and I assume it is also the ornamental rock type used in some of the columns. It may even be the marble of the ribbed sections of the famous elephant-foot piers. But so far I lack documentation for that.
The other geologically derived material on display is the ceramic İznik Tile. More on that in the images that follow!
To see the other photos and descriptions in this series, visit my Architectural Geology of Ottoman Istanbul album.
Architectural Geology of Ottoman Istanbul, Part 2: Detail of the Interior | Sultan Ahmed Mosque ("Blue Mosque") (AD 1616)
This certainly isn't the prettiest photo I or anyone else has ever taken of this building's stunning interior. But it does at least remind me that my visit half a century ago took place at a time when some sort of restoration effort was underway. Hence the scaffolding in the foreground.
Though it was constructed well over a millennnium after the nearby Hagia Sophia, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque owes some of its main design features to it—or at least to Byzantine-church architecture in general. Of course, over the centuries this sort of artistic and engineering cross-fertilization between cultures and religions has proved to be a very heavily traveled two-way street.
One can easily rattle off the correspondences between those two great imperial-city structures. Here, for example, architect Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, a pupil of the great Sinan, utilized pendentives and half-domes supported by massive piers that transmit the weight of the main dome and all else down to the foundation and bedrock below.
Pendentives are curved, triangular sections of a sphere. One is is visible in this shot between two half-domes, at top. Lurking behind the scenes, in the walls and piers, are the main structural materials, brick and locally quarried, Miocene-epoch Bakırköy Limestone.
And speaking of stone: the one stout, upper-level column visible behind the scaffoling looks very much like Proconnesian Marble, quarried on Marmara Island in the sea of the same name since Roman times. The Mosque's mihrab is carved from that stone, and I assume it is also the ornamental rock type used in some of the columns. It may even be the marble of the ribbed sections of the famous elephant-foot piers. But so far I lack documentation for that.
The other geologically derived material on display is the ceramic İznik Tile. More on that in the images that follow!
To see the other photos and descriptions in this series, visit my Architectural Geology of Ottoman Istanbul album.