Ottoman Architecture: Buildings and Construction

From the empire’s emergence around 1300 until its end in 1922, Ottoman builders shaped mosques, markets, bridges, palaces, waterworks and houses for patrons across three continents. Their methods changed with a building’s purpose, site and materials. Bursa’s early multi-domed mosque, Sinan’s great imperial complexes, timber-framed neighborhoods and nineteenth-century palaces show a tradition that developed through both shared expertise and regional practice.

On this page5 sections

Patrons, plans and building crews

Sultans, members of the ruling family, governors and other wealthy founders commissioned religious, civic and domestic buildings. A külliye was a group of buildings organized around a principal institution, often a mosque, and managed together. Schools, a soup kitchen, a bath, shops, a library or a tomb might serve people using the site. A charitable endowment could fund staff and upkeep after construction, so a patron’s plan joined a building’s form to the services it housed.

After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, later called Istanbul, in 1453, the state established an Imperial Architects’ Office to organize major building works. Its chief architect, or mimarbaşı, led a team that included trainee architects, a scribe, stonecutters, plasterers, decorators and makers of mosque towers called minarets. Mimar Sinan, chief imperial architect from 1538 to 1588, became the best-known leader of this office, but large projects depended on this network of specialist workers and administrators.

For a major project commissioned by the sultan, architects and other officials surveyed the site, prepared a model for the ruler and made drawings to estimate the materials required. A building official controlled spending, material purchases and transport. The first estimate set an advance payment; after construction, a second estimate allowed officials to settle the accounts. The chief architect supervised major works and delegated parts of them to assistants. This process tied the design to the site, available supplies and the sequence of work.

The work itself was divided among makers. For the Süleymaniye Mosque, Sinan contracted brickmakers in Hasköy, a district of Istanbul, at a fixed price to supply bricks for the central dome. Stonecutters also received contracts to cut pieces to order. Masons used mortar, a binding mix, to join stones and bricks into walls and supports. Carpenters prepared roof timbers, temporary work platforms and centering, wooden forms that held a curved masonry arch in place until it could support itself. Plasterers and decorators followed as walls and domes were completed. Planning purchases and deliveries helped keep these crafts working in sequence.

From Bursa’s domed bays to Sinan’s central domes

Bursa, in northwestern Anatolia, was an early Ottoman capital. Its Great Mosque, commissioned by Sultan Bayezid I in 1396 and completed in 1399, covers its rectangular prayer hall with twenty domes resting on twelve large supports, or piers. Instead of one dome dominating the room, repeated bays create a broad roof over the congregation. The Great Mosque preserves this early solution in stone and masonry.

The capture of Constantinople brought Ottoman builders into sustained contact with monuments of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. Sultan Mehmed II converted Hagia Sophia, the city’s great church, into an imperial mosque and began rebuilding the capital with palaces and a mosque complex that included religious, educational, social and commercial buildings. Ottoman architecture incorporated Byzantine traditions, Mamluk traditions from Egypt and Syria, and Persian traditions from Iran while developing plans for the empire’s own institutions.

In the sixteenth century, Sinan explored how a central dome could cover and organize a large prayer hall. The Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, built for Sultan Süleyman I between 1550 and 1557, rests its main dome on arches carried by four massive piers. Half-domes, smaller domed spaces opening into the central hall, extend the prayer space, while buttresses, thick projecting supports, help resist the dome’s outward push. The dome’s weight passes through arches into the piers and down to the ground.

Builders also had to move from a square room to the circular base of a dome. Pendentives, curved triangular surfaces set above the room’s corners, bridge that gap; squinches use small arches or niches across the corners to make a many-sided base. Sinan used different support arrangements in different mosques, so the number and position of piers shaped both the dome and the space below it.

At Edirne in Thrace, northwestern Turkey, Selimiye Mosque was commissioned by Sultan Selim II and built by Sinan in the late 1560s and 1570s. Its 31.5-metre central dome rests on eight pillars over a prayer hall about 45 by 36 metres. The eight-part support system leaves much of the interior open, and numerous windows brighten the space. The surrounding külliye includes Islamic schools, a covered market, a library and courtyards, managed as one complex with the mosque.

Bridges and water for a growing city

A road bridge had to carry people, animals and goods across an obstacle while resisting the force of moving water. Sinan’s Kanuni Sultan Süleyman Bridge at Büyükçekmece was begun in 1566 and completed in 1567. Four bridge sections joined by artificial islands cross the inlet in a structure 636 metres long and seven metres wide. Its limestone blocks were joined with molten lead, and the wide roadway let two trading caravans, groups of travelers and pack animals, pass side by side.

Urban waterworks joined distant sources to streets and buildings. Istanbul’s Kırkçeşme system, commissioned by Süleyman and built under Sinan, drew from springs about 25 kilometres northwest of the city. Two branches met near Kemerburgaz, northwest of Istanbul, and then carried water toward the city through covered channels and 33 aqueducts. The covered galleries extended for about 55 kilometres. An aqueduct carried water across a valley on arches, keeping the channel high enough to continue its gradual downhill course.

This gradual slope, or gradient, mattered: gravity moved the water along the channels, while collection and distribution chambers directed it onward to fountains and buildings. The system used some earlier Roman and Byzantine waterworks as well as new construction. Water officials and maintenance workers surveyed routes, guarded lines and repaired pipes, tanks and aqueducts. Measuring tanks divided supplies among branches, and fountains received specified amounts. Waterway maintenance workers could also be called out for emergencies after ordinary hours.

Timber frames, fire rules and local materials

Stone, brick and timber worked together in Ottoman construction. Timber served in roofs, floors, doors and window frames, and some houses used a timber frame filled with brick, mud brick or stone. This method, called hımış, often formed upper stories above heavier masonry below. Studies of Ottoman house building describe regional variations shaped by available materials, including timber-frame and timber-reinforced masonry systems from the Balkans to Syria, with distinct examples in Thrace and the eastern Black Sea region.

In Istanbul, the risk of fire affected building rules. An order in 1696 said that new buildings should use stone, lime and mud according to the owner’s means. After fires, an order in 1718 called for stone rebuilding and restricted timber construction near the city walls; decrees in 1726 and 1743 also prohibited wooden roof terraces, which could help flames spread across narrow streets. Officials repeated such measures after later fires. In 1843 Sultan Abdülmecid replaced the wooden Beşiktaş Waterfront Palace with Dolmabahçe Palace, a large complex whose walls used stone and brick, with timber floors.

New forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

In the eighteenth century, Ottoman builders incorporated new architectural forms while continuing to build mosques and public complexes. Nuruosmaniye, begun under Sultan Mahmud I in 1749 and completed under Osman III in 1755, is a major example of Ottoman Baroque design, an Ottoman adaptation of European curved forms and ornament. Its mosque combines a domed prayer hall with a shallow, half-oval courtyard; curved façades, round arches and projecting roofline mouldings give the complex a different outline from the rectangular courts of earlier imperial mosques. The surrounding madrasa, or Islamic school, soup kitchen, library, tomb, fountain and shops connected the building to study, charity, commerce and worship. Baroque details also appeared in provincial buildings as builders and artisans carried these forms beyond Istanbul.

Dolmabahçe Palace, constructed for Abdülmecid between 1843 and 1856 by the Ottoman architects Karabet and Nikoğos Balyan, shows another nineteenth-century adaptation. It had three main sections: state apartments, a ceremonial hall and the imperial household. European decorative fashions shaped the palace; its plan still separated state functions from the dynasty’s private rooms. Its ceremonial hall has a 36-metre-high dome; in cold weather, a basement system blew hot air from the bases of its columns to warm the space.