 Today we're going to talk about Islamic architecture and I think that the topic of Islamic architecture is really going to be more germane to the general trajectory of material we've been covering because already in our discussion during the last couple of classes we've been talking about different civilizations, different movements of populations, different values and beliefs that are emerging around the rim of the Mediterranean and certainly Islam is a powerful force in all of that. The history of Islam rises up with a history of the life of Muhammad who is a historical figure born in 570 CE and he had various episodes in his life involving exile and return to Mecca and initiating conquests of many many territories surrounding his native lands. He died in 632 CE and already shortly after his death the first caliphate emerges and the first caliphate continues the expansion of territories through jihad or holy war and territories like Jerusalem and Damascus become incorporated into the expanded terrain of Islam. With the Umayyad caliphate of 661 to 750 there's a huge expansion of territory. Damascus is the capital and here you can see the state of the spread of Islam during the Umayyad Caliphate. Here's the Byzantine Empire up here and the Umayyad Empire is almost beginning to circle it or at least to enclose it on several sides. Included among the territories that the Umayyad Empire has taken over are Spain and Portugal and really Spain, Portugal, Northern Africa a lot of these countries had been Christian territories and they had converted to Islam and the architecture bears witness to these new influences. This is Kaba a large rectilinear volume in the middle of the grand mosque of Mecca. It is the sacred center of Islam and the grand mosque of Mecca is a place to which many, many pilgrims pay their homage but rather than look specifically at this mosque we will look at the type of mosque and variations on the theme of the type of mosque. I guess one thing that is important in understanding the ornamental pattern and the love of surface decoration is the tradition of forbidding figural images. There's a strong interest in geometric ornament. The word an iconic simply means not representing the physiognomy of people but rather favoring symbolic ways of representing things like numerology or geometry or pattern making. So this is just a little diagram of what Islamic pattern making might look like and you can see that it derives from a really strong geometric structure that gets overlaid and overlaid and overlaid. The square rotated inside of the square to begin to give you an octagon that might unfold in a flow rate pattern is something you see again and again and again. One of the most important sites in Islamic architecture is the dome of the rock and this is quite early 691 to 692 and it's on a site that is sacred to the Jews to the Christians and to the Muslims. It's the site where at least according to some biblical scholars Isaac was offered for slaughter by his father Abraham and it's you can see the idea of a precinct and inside the precinct there is this domed building that marks a spot domed building marking a spot centralized plan where have we seen that before which architecture that we've looked at before strongly favors the idea of centralized plans any takers on that I think you said Byzantine is that what you said and I think when you said Greek you meant Greek Orthodox churches and not Greek temple that's I'm I believe you were both totally correct I could barely hear what you had to say so yeah it picks up a lot on the on the architecture of the eastern empire and and not surprisingly so there's the interior of the dome of the rock and if you look at the interior of the dome of the rock its correspondence to early Christian and Byzantine models I think comes becomes even clearer where we have this ring of columns with an ambulatory around which you can walk there's a section or a cutaway axonometric of the dome of the rock and really its basic lineaments remind us of buildings we've seen before such as San Vitale in Ravenna or Santa Costanza in in Rome the martyrium for the daughter of Constantine tall centralized space ambulatory around it and beautiful dome if you even look at the kind of dome that's constructed over the dome of the rock it will remind you more of Byzantine examples than of Roman examples I have right next to it the dome of the Hagia Sophia and when we looked at the Hagia Sophia we observed that there was this magical ring of windows that made the dome seem to float above the space but it wasn't really magic it was a structural system that had to do with ribs carrying the load down so a different structural system than than the Romans would have used which would have been horizontal stacking of elements this is the vertical disposition of ribs so there's a lot of borrowing between Byzantine models and the architects of the dome of the rock in Jerusalem the type of the mosque is probably the most significant architectural type that we we get out of Islamic architecture it's a place to gather the faithful it's a place to help orient people toward the direction of Mecca it's a place that becomes symbolic and capable of organizing not only prayer but call to prayer through these tall spindly towers called minarets and there are a couple of things that every mosque should have and it can be quite a humble thing we could turn this room into a mosque if we oriented it correctly and made certain adjustments for example there should be a mirhab or a niche and this is an element that is engaged on this major wall called called the kibla facing east and it organizes the direction of prayer so we already know two things about Islamic architecture one it's very interested in the development of interior space because it has to provide sufficiently capacious spaces so that large crowds of people can come inside and worship and two it's really interested in providing some kind of directionality some kind of graining through the site that emphasizes this this very important direction around which prayers are organized and three the kinds of celebrations that go inside a mosque are different from Christian celebrations they don't involve the same kind of procession they don't involve the same kind of pageantry they really are more about the assembly of crowds the assembly of people coming together to pray together so other elements you have would be the minaret and the minaret is the tall spindly little tower there would be someone call coming up to the top of the minaret and making a call for prayer so that people can observe their daily prayers on schedule so here the blue mosque in Istanbul which is an Ottoman structure from around 1550 has fairly normative minarets little towers the great mosque in Samara Iraq has this minaret which is astonishing it almost looks like a ziggurat or some kind of Dairy Queen experiment gone terribly wrong you need the mirhab the niche and the quibla the wall as we mentioned before and you also need a courtyard for assembly and a fountain for ritual cleansing so as we look at various permutations on the type of mosque we'll begin to see these things played out in various ways probably the origin for the idea of the mosque the and the constituent parts of the mosque comes back to Muhammad's house and Muhammad's house is meant to have some kind of courtyard and a kind of wall that orients and so forth so this very simple enclosure almost a kind of hyper style hall becomes the constituent element to define the mosque form and we can see an elaboration of this simple courtyard here in the grand mosque in Mecca the holiest site and again this is the Kaaba this cube shaped object which dates from pre-islamic times but is considered to be one of the holiest things in Islam variations on the theme grand mosque in Damascus similar to a courtyard with interior space and look at the plan of the grand mosque in Damascus you're used to looking at Christian church plans it's a pretty strange looking plan for example well it's axial Christian church plans are frequently axial it seems to have something that could be an aisle something that could be a nave but they're not really aisles and naves they are striations of space they're bands of space and you don't proceed through the long direction of this series of bands of space but rather you organize yourself against the eastern wall so the people would be disposed in ranges in this fashion moving through the short axis of the building rather than the long axis of the building over various periods in its history the mosque in Damascus has undergone various forms at one point there was a little Christian basilica stuck inside you can see how different the organization of this space is where it's really directional it's really hierarchical there's a really strong difference between the beginning of the procession and the end of the procession as opposed to the space of the mosque this is what it looks like on the inside and I think this is pretty spectacular and what I think is so spectacular about it is that it is so relentlessly iterative about these horizontal striations of space you get band after band after band of these columnar rows and unlike say a roman space that might have a colony the two rows of columns don't conjoin together to make a barrel vault or a groin vault but they are really just lines cutting through the space and organizing the the necessary directionality for the rituals another thing to observe is the degree to which this structure is dematerialized we see columns with arches on top of them and then on top of that colonnade we see more columns with arches on top of them so we have walls striating the space but the walls are incredibly dematerialized the walls are incredibly open to light and plays of shadow and when shadow is cast on these strongly patterned devices you get this virtual dematerialization of the floor as it is cut with different pattern making shadows there's another element and this is still the great mosque in Damascus and that is these domes that appear occasionally and notice the geometry of this dome in part it's one of those ribbed domes the likes of which we saw in Hagia Sophia and again at the dome of the rock but it is not interested in expressing its structure it's not interested in expressing its tectonic value its value as heavy stone rather it's completely covered over with surface ornament and we saw already in Byzantine architecture this preference for surface ornament and the denial of the plasticity of the wall and here I think it gets carried even further because not only is pattern applied to the wall but the wall itself becomes cut into with ornamental geometrical patterns here's the facade of the great mosque in Damascus and in its general disposition of forms it's kind of like a basilica in the way ornament adheres to its surface it is emphatically flat you can see little variations on the pieces that you need to get a mosque this is the plan of the Sheikh Lotfala mosque in Isfahan and here there's a kind of rotation that happens because when we get to the sheltered part of the mosque over here it's got to have the propitious orientation toward the east the Mirab has to organize toward the east but the courtyard is engaged in this dense city which has remnants of a Greek hippodamian gridded town plan so the courtyard locks into this town plan and the mosque rotates off and it's really quite lovely how this vestibule becomes almost like a hinge to favor the rotation of the of the building from one direction to another here's the big courtyard of a different mosque into me we're becoming familiar with the typology this is different from the Damascus mosque in the Damascus mosque we had the worship hall on the long end here we have the worship hall on the short end it can happen wherever it needs to happen great mosque in Isfahan by the time we get here the surface is completely overrun by the relentless iterative pattern making and it's it's pattern not like say the court of Justinian that we had on the walls of the San Vitale in in Ravenna but rather it's pattern that really becomes very dense and very tangled and very not like and really keeps referring to general geometrical figures at smaller and smaller scales so it's it's simultaneously self-similar because you see the same figure again and again and again but also highly differentiated because as the scales shift the quality of the element shifts likewise so these are just iterations of the mosque in Isfahan from an ideal condition to a condition that begins to negotiate with the boundaries of the city and in many ways it's like a fried egg scheme the same kind of fried egg scheme we saw when we were looking at houses in Pompeii yeah well let's move to Moorish Spain because these are buildings I personally visited and love a great deal in 1711 the Umayyad Caliphate invaded Spain and took over Spain and really occupied Spain for hundreds of years eventually they were expelled by Isabel and Ferdinand the same people who financed the expeditions of Christopher Columbus but before then they had really placed their influence on the architecture and culture of most of the Iberian Peninsula in a very very strong way and here's just a map here's Spain and this map shows you the spread of Islamic culture during the Umayyad period probably the most important religious artifact that remains to us from the Islamic culture of Spain is the great mosque in Cordoba and Cordoba is pretty much down here and in fact the area down here Andalusia was the last part of Spain to be overtaken by the the Christians and it remained Muslim for maybe about 300 years more than the rest of Spain this is the great mosque in Cordoba it's an amazing plan and here you see the kind of growth of the plan of the great mosque in Cordoba from an idealized condition and as the needs grew to accommodate a larger population so too did the mosque grow and grow and grow it's kind of like the mosque that we saw in Damascus with these striations of space these bands of space but there there were three bands of space and here there are many many many many bands of space you can get a sense of what that spatial quality is if you look at the roof plan almost like like a train shed or something that you would imagine I don't know lots of little trains being parked under here but instead they're just these rows and rows and rows of transparent screens that allow continuation among the rows but also demarc different zones and here's another aerial view and this aerial view begins to show you the courtyard the court of oranges which is another one of the constituent elements you need to have in a mosque you need to have a courtyard where people can assemble and also where they can have ritual cleansing so you look at this courtyard and you would have to say my but the climate in Cordoba must be very nice because things are growing beautifully there but in fact it's very very hot and you need to irrigate in order to grow and one of the really great things that Islamic architecture does is it has figured out a way to build irrigation into the architectural design of projects in a way that doesn't disrupt the qualities of the space like say a big sprinkler going wah wah wah but rather enhances the qualities of the space so you can't see it from this aerial view but if you get down to ground level you can see that there's this grid of little cuts in the pavement and water is channeled through here so that the entire pavement becomes a kind of fountain with these little narrow troughs maybe six inches easy to step over but also very convenient for having a gravity feed of a very gentle slope that gets water to all the trees and so you get these marvelous oasis like gardens happening in places that you think nothing can grow of its own accord we spoke about an iconic image making this mistrust of the figural representation of people in favor of geometric pattern making and this detail of the great mosque of Cordoba begins to show you how that affects the qualities of the architecture you know every possible color you can imagine is going on the use of a lot of colors in architecture is called polychromy poly meaning many chromi meaning color and Islamic architecture is highly polychromatic we also see the arches the vousoirs of the arches being polychromatic and in the case of the arch over here becoming kind of wildly figural that pattern making the kind of geometrical expansion of a simple motif that gives character to wall ornament now begins to spatially explode the figure of the arch and make it decorative in its shape and not simply in its color and here's just another detail of some wall it is astonishing this kind of quality of pattern begins to make things not look solid here we have a view toward the mere have that niche in the important wall that that organizes the interior space for prayer and this is what it looks like on the inside it's just spectacular you have these red and white polychromatic arches row after row after row after row with the same unidirectional quality that we admired in the Damascus mosque these are also different from Roman arches in an important way they are what we call historiated arches if you want to use a word that you'll never need and what that means is that they don't spring in such a way as to create half circles but they rise up extra high they're sort of like horseshoe arches rather than half circle arches so they have different qualities than the roman arches and the qualities that they have make them more vertical at the same time that the historiated arches are more vertical you might be inclined to say well that's a bad idea they're never going to get the same good structure that you get when you use something as perfect as a half circle but in fact these are structurally better than the round roman arches the round roman arches really don't accommodate the lateral thrust of the arch very well within the geometry of the structure and the historiated islamic arches begin to rise up higher notice how the vooswires are thicker on the top thinner down here and that's letting some of the loads transfer of course the only way you can have this field of columns with arches above them is to allow the arch next door to be the bracing here's the little plan with all these little elements and these are these horseshoe arches and i think on the taller arch you can see how it begins to become a geometry that's more suited to this accommodation of the of the lateral thrust probably this way of making arches this way of conceiving structure this way of making a kind of diaphanous screen that's happening at this early date in islamic architecture is something that inspired gothic architecture toward this condition of dematerialization in later years so something like this looks crazy but in fact something like this is better structurally than a roman arch because it's transferring the loads down and it's getting a higher up so the natural catenary of the arch is accommodated within the structure i will demonstrate this is a cable the cable droops under its own weight and takes a shape this is not drooping very well it's a very wired up cable but it the shape that a cable takes while drooping under its own weight is the natural arch and if you turn it in this direction that would be the most efficient arch that you could have the natural catenary of an arch is accommodated within these crazy looking horseshoe arches much better than within the round arches fabulous and here's a little section through the area toward the mere hob and and suddenly toward the mere have something extraordinary is happening this is the little niche and this is what's happening in the ceiling plane above it you're getting a series of domes and there's strange little domes you can tell already looking at the section the geometry of these domes is quite different than domes we've seen in Byzantine and roman architecture and that's because these domes are ribbed for one thing and they're funny ribs they are these kind of rotated squares the pervers of which are articulated with ribs and it gives you an octagonal star and as is typical with ornament on a wall surface there is this recursive play of geometrical figures so we get the big octagonal star here and in the space left at the center a smaller more dense kind of octagonal star dome piece emerges so this diaphanous wall making that we saw with a rose of horseshoe arches delimiting the space of the mosque is taken three-dimensionally in this diaphanous dome making that we get at the mere hub remember these domes of the great mosque because we're probably going to see them again when we get to the baroque period in the work of the baroque architect guarino guarini where you get exactly the same notion of these octagons that thread together to make a star these are domes but mosques from the ottoman empire and the ottoman empire more or less correspond with the renaissance in terms of dates so it's quite quite recent given the long arc of history of islamic architecture and mosque making and when you look at the plan of this mosque or the cutaway axonometric of this mosque in turkey does it remind you of anything you've ever seen before yes okay it kind of looks like the baths of caracalla in so far as there are lots of dome spaces and a courtyard i think that's that's fair to say anything else yes looks like hagi sofia yeah but i think your comment was good too because if you cut off the domes and you don't see the inner penetration of the space it could be anything but when you put the domes on it it really begins to become very much like the hagi sofia here's a plan of the mosque of suliman the magnificent and when you look at the plan you can begin to see a centralized space that is flanked by half domes clipping into it and surrounded by a habitable perimeter and it's very much like the plan of the hagi sofia maybe idealized a little bit maybe more rational given the love of geometry in islamic culture and during this period i might add and even before this during a period when europe was hunkering down fighting barbarians trying to keep culture alive by copying over greek manuscripts again and again there was a flourishing of arts and sciences in islamic culture so some of the great mathematics and mathematicians come from that period the word algebra for example is a arab word that zero was invented by arab mathematicians and so there's a clarity about the geometry precision of the proportion and eligibility about qualities in something like the mosque of suliman the magnificent while i would say the the hagi sofia tends to to deliberately baffle and overwhelm as per its effect here's just another one of these ottoman mosques and this one is again looking a heck of a lot like agia sofia here it's a greek cross plan where you have a circular center with half circles clipping in on four sides with little domes it'll let's look at a palace let's look at domestic architecture domestic if you happen to be really rich and this is the alhambra in granada spain this is a fortified castle and again it's in andalusia in the southern part of spain and what's so wonderful about it is that it's not simply a building but the boundary between landscape and architecture seems seems very loose so that suddenly you're in a courtyard suddenly you're in a garden suddenly the roof has become a garden and the section that is enforced by being on top of the hill is played off very effectively so that views through the space and movement through the space allow you to experience this landscape on in lots of different ways in fact the whole idea of the garden is something you see again and again in islamic architecture and it's always negotiating between a geometrical definition of the garden and the kind of explosive fecundity of nature to replicate itself and become green this is a chronic description of paradise it's not so different from the paradise garden that we hear about in in the old testament with the rivers running out of the bounded precinct but the image of the paradise garden is more emphatically deployed in islamic architecture than in christian architecture especially in the gardens here's a site plan of the alhambra big hill big palace and the rest of the town stretching out in the lowlands is the palace moving up the hill and a figure ground and i think this figure ground probably helps illustrate the argument i was making about how landscape and architecture move together when you look at the figure ground you can see that really there are a number of courtyards organizing fairly thin bands of program around them and that these volumes are perched at the edge of the precipice so that they can begin to get these kind of dramatic views and capture the surrounding landscape as part of the purview of the building as well as the kind of near landscape of the garden that unfold on top of the plateau here and here's a plan that shows you the integration of water into the courtyards this is the court of the myrtles where there's a long linear pool and this is the lion court where the device we saw at the great mosque in cordoba is used here linear troughs of water and a fountain in the middle and this is really spectacular it's really almost literal building of the model of the paradise garden a bounded precinct with water crossing through it subdividing its world into four quadrants with this little lion here and these fountains penetrate into these chambers on all sides and become fountains there too it's really really great here's the myrtle courtyard and notice also the toughness of the exterior of the alhambra because this building is almost like a geode do you know what a geode is looks like a rock on the outside and you crack it open and it's this kind of sparkling crystal so you look at the exterior of the alhambra and it seems solid it seems tough it seems fortified but when you crack it open you get the same kind of light diaphanous dematerialized collection of screens that we observed in the mosques this is just a drawing showing you how the lion courtyard works with these fountains and the lion fountain in the middle and here is a section through the myrtle court there are a number of sections through the alhambra that are pretty interesting from a psychological point of view here from the myrtle court they're showing you that you get the big view downhill and you could be here in this place of perfect repose in this chamber admiring the garden but you could be surveilling the landscape to see if any kind of intruders are coming so you have these is vantage section that cuts through the hand throughout the building because in Islamic culture there is a division between the space of the women and the space of the men so the women are frequently segregated from the men but have an opportunity to spy on them which i think is great so a lot of these permeable screens that we've seen are deployed there to make it possible to hear and to see what's going on but to be screened from view so from the harem there are these views across the space of the courts of the ambassadors across the gardens and down the hill so from that vantage point you can see almost everything here's a detail of the fountain of the lions and you can see these troughs of water that begin to issue forth and irrigate the garden and bring life to the garden and when you crack through that tough masonry shell you find this dematerialized extremely light architecture we saw in the mosque of cordoba the beginning of a kind of pointed arch work this this horseshoe arch or these various stepped arches and it's becoming even more specifically pointed when we get to some of the courtyard arcades here at the alhambra and the effect is really amazing because you're in the shade you're protected but you have this kind of amazing transparency of view through the whole space one more kind of architecture before we stop to look at your papers late islamic architecture or the mogul gardens when we looked at our map of the spread of islam we noticed that they were not simply moving towards spain but they were also moving toward india into bulgaria into pakistan into afghanistan and some of the most remarkable examples of islamic architecture are now in in those areas on the indian subcontinent mogul if you look at persian miniatures for example you find lots and lots of descriptions of gardens and i think this analogy between paradise and the garden makes the garden such a provocative subject in islamic architecture this is a simple mogul tomb in india garden and tomb tomb in the middle the diagram and it's a diagram that you see again and again and again in islamic architecture it is the diagram of the paradise garden the four square grid with a fountain in the middle it's the diagram of the lion court and the powerful quality that the four square grid has in islamic architecture is its ability to constantly replicate itself at different and denser scales so if you begin to look at this very simple islamic garden plan over here you already see the same strategies that you got in pattern making on the wall where a geometrical device is deployed and then redeployed at a denser smaller scale inside the original figure again and again and again and that happens all the time these are comparative tombs in india where the nesting of recursive geometries happens insistently with great vigor and probably the most famous of all of these these gardens or funerary complexes is the Taj Mahal in Agra and notice the dates are quite late given the dates that we've been looking at before but there is a kind of conservation of type that goes on many of the things we're seeing here like the minarets or the domes or the giant cut out arches with highly patterned surfaces are things that we saw from mosques 800 years before this here's the general layout of the garden plan of the Taj Mahal and oh my goodness it's a paradise garden look at that the plan of the Taj Mahal itself the structure becomes another recursion of the overall plan of the garden and even the plan of the towers of the Taj Mahal become a denser smaller more tightly knit together recursion of the overall plan of the garden itself islamic architecture begins to show you an influence that is reacted to and folded into the developments of architecture as we move forward from the Romanesque into the Gothic in in our discussions and a lot of that had to do with the fact that there were increasing contacts between people in in western Europe and people in the holy lands through things like the crusades for example but also through things like trade the silk route for example had opened up and there were lots and lots of kind of mercantile parties cutting through these territories bringing back spices bringing back silk bringing back goods and observing this kind of architecture and I think you if you see the architecture of these these lacy patterned screens and you see how light and spectacular the qualities are it would be very difficult to to ignore that influence and keep plowing ahead with dark sad little Romanesque buildings