Discuss the three imperial mosques (Suleymaniye, Selimiye, & Sehzade) Essay

Discuss the three imperial mosques (Suleymaniye, Selimiye, & Sehzade) designed by the Ottoman architect Sinan - Essay Example He spent his childhood in Agirnas, a village near Kayseri, until he joined the â€Å"masters of carpenters† (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011). He learned the craft there until 1512 (Matthews 2011), when, at the age of twenty two (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011), he joined the royal army (Matthews 2011) and got recruited into the Corps of Ottoman Standing Troops (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011). As a cavalry officer (Matthews 2011), he traveled far and wide in the empire, to places such as Egypt, Persia, Damascus, and Baghdad (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011). He visited architectural wonders and ruins, and according to his own statement, learned something from every building and every ruin (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011). He was quickly ranked as a construction officer (Matthews 2011). As an army engineer, he constructed bridges and forts (Matthews 2011), which proved to be very successful and architecturally sound. As his reputation built, he was promoted to the rank of the head of royal architects (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011), or the Architect of the Abode of Felicity in 1538 (Matthews 2011), at the age of fifty (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011). As he built, his reputation rose (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011). ... Sinan’s work include an eclectic range of construction projects, from hospitals to mosques and from asylums to bridges (Matthews 2011). However, his most prominent accomplishments remain the great mosques that he designed and constructed (Matthews 2011). Sinan generally designed the larger mosques mostly as complexes with hospitals, schools, libraries, almshouses, and public baths (Matthews 2011). Three of his greatest masterpieces, the Sehzade, Suleymaniye, and Selimiye mosques (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011) are discussed in detail later in the paper. Most of his work is influenced by the Hagia Sophia (Matthews 2011), with a weightless central dome supported by windows (Matthews 2011), an interior that is flooded with light due to those windows (Matthews 2011), pillars, buttresses, and minarets (Matthews 2011). One of his unique projects is the urban mosque complex next to the harbor in the Kadirga Liman quarter (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011), the Sokollu Mehmet Pasha Mosque Complex, started in 1571 and finished in 1572 (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011). The challenge of the fifty six feet dropping landscape (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011) is met with great ingenuity (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011) and expertise by Sinan, which can be viewed as a refreshingly changing landscape view (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011) as the complex is accessed by a number of entries through narrow and winding lanes (Turkish Cultural Foundation 2011). In the Hagia Sophia, Sinan added two large minarets at the Western end (An Architectural Wonder 2008), and to the southeast of the building, the mausoleum of Selim II in 1577 (An Architectural Wonder 2008). Later, he added a dias for sermons (An Architectural Wonder 2008), a minbar in the Sultan’s