Mosque - Softcover

Macaulay, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 054701547X ISBN 13: 9780547015477

Verlag: HMH Books for Young Readers, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

An author and artist who has continually stripped away the mystique of architectural structures that have long fascinated modern people, David Macaulay here reveals the methods and materials used to design and construct a mosque in late-sixteenth- century Turkey. Through the fictional story and Macaulay’s distinctive full-color illustrations, readers will learn not only how such monumental structures were built but also how they functioned in relation to the society they served.
As always, Macaulay has given a great deal of attention to the relationship between pictures and text, creating another brilliant celebration of an architectural wonder.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Macaulay is an award-winning author and illustrator whose books have sold millions of copies in the United States alone, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. Macaulay has garnered numerous awards including the Caldecott Medal and Honor Awards, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, the Christopher Award, an American Institute of Architects Medal, and the Washington Post–Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award. In 2006, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, given “to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations.” Superb design, magnificent illustrations, and clearly presented information distinguish all of his books. David Macaulay lives with his family in Vermont.

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Mosque

By David Macaulay

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Copyright © 2003 David Macaulay
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-547-01547-7

Contents

Title Page, 
Contents, 
Copyright, 
Dedication, 
Preface, 
Frontispiece, 
Introduction, 
Mosque, 
Glossary, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

Admiral Suha Mehmet Pasa had done well by war. For more than thirty years his successful naval campaigns had made him a highly respected member of the Ottoman aristocracy, a favorite of two sultans, and a very rich man. For most of his life his eyes were firmly fixed on the borders of the empire he worked so valiantly to protect. But as another decade slipped away, he found himself confronting less familiar boundaries — those of his own mortality. As a devout Muslim, the admiral understood that all the blessings and riches that had been showered upon him were not due to his own efforts as much as to the will of God. As he plucked fruit from the trees of his beloved garden and listened to the laughter and shouts of his youngest children, he decided that the time had come to demonstrate both his faith and his gratitude in the way that had become traditional for a man of his standing. His last campaign would be undertaken on dry land and its goal would be the creation of a charitable foundation.

So it was that one October day in the year 1595, a senior member of Sultan Mehmet III's Corps of Court Architects named Akif Agha was summoned to the admiral's home. The two men met in the garden and over glasses of sweet tea talked about old battles — Agha too had been a soldier in his younger days — favorite trees, and eventually architecture. When Agha left that afternoon, he carried with him a list of the buildings that would house the activities of the admiral's proposed foundation. In addition to a mosque, with its nearby turbe or tomb, the complex would include a medrese, a college for religious education; an imaret, a soup kitchen for the preparation and serving of food; a hamam for public bathing; and a cesme, a public fountain providing fresh drinking water.

The spiritual centerpiece of the entire complex was the mosque, and the heart of the mosque was its prayer hall. It was with the design of this space in which the faithful would gather that Akif Agha began. There were a number of absolute requirements, the most important of which was that the front wall, or kibla wall, of this room must face Mecca. When praying, the congregation would assemble in rows parallel to and facing the kibla wall and in turn the holy city and its most important shrine, the Kaaba. At floor level in the center of the kibla wall was the mihrab — a niche symbolizing the entrance to paradise. It was from in front of the mihrab that the imam would lead the congregation in prayer. The kibla itself is an imaginary line that points toward and radiates from Mecca. The kibla wall was placed perpendicular to the kibla, and the mihrab stood right on top of it.

Directly opposite the mihrab was the portal — the main entrance to the prayer hall. Protecting the portal outside and providing covered space for latecomers to Friday services was a high portico, and beyond it an arcaded courtyard. In the center of the courtyard stood the sadirvan — the fountain at which the faithful would wash their hands and feet before entering the prayer hall. Like the mihrab, the main portal and the sadirvan also stood on the kibla.

The last and, next to the dome, the most recognizable element of the mosque was the tall minaret, from which the faithful would be called to prayer five times a day. It would rise from behind the portico at the northwest corner of the prayer hall.

For Akif Agha and his fellow architects and builders, there was no separation between architecture and engineering. He often reminded his young apprentices that when designing a mosque it was necessary to think from the ground up and from the top down at the same time. There were two basic problems, both of which involved the use of the dome. The first was one of geometry. How does one support a circular roof over a square room without filling the space with walls or columns? The solution that had evolved over the years was a system of piers and arches. The piers were placed either in the corners or around the perimeter of the square, and the arches tied them together. Not only did this arrangement create a suitable base for the dome above, but the space below the arches remained open and unobstructed.

The second problem was one of structure. Because of the dome's hemispherical shape, there are hidden forces within it trying to push the sides outward. While piers and arches could easily be designed to support the great weight of a masonry dome, they could not, on their own, counteract its self-destructive tendencies.

Architects reduced some of these forces by strengthening the sides of the dome, where it was most vulnerable. Then, to channel the remaining forces safely down through the piers and walls to the foundations below, they added extra weight to the tops of the piers and buttressed the arches with a symmetrical arrangement of semidomes.

Much of the design of the admiral's mosque was based on tradition, and all of it was heavily influenced by the work of the late Sinan — once Agha's teacher as well as the former head of the Corps of Court Architects. No matter what shape the perimeter of the prayer hall ultimately took, the space at its center would remain an open square defined by the eight piers supporting the dome. To draw more attention to the mihrab, Agha set it into its own bay, which he pushed out from the central space. Then, to give as many worshipers as possible access to the kibla wall, he extended it beyond both sides of the central square. He provided raised galleries along both sidewalls — one of them for women — and a third at the rear of the prayer hall for the muezzins who would chant the words of the Koran. This mosque was to be large enough to accommodate Friday services, certainly the most important religious gathering of the week and probably the most important secular one too. The sermons at these services would be delivered from the second to last step of a high pulpit called a minber. The traditional placement of the minber was to one side of the mihrab or, in this case, the mihrab bay.

The design Agha finally presented to the admiral in January of 1596 called for a prayer hall seventy feet wide and fifty-six feet deep. The dome would be forty-two feet in diameter and its crest would stand sixty-three feet above the floor. The open courtyard space within the colonnade was roughly equal to the area of the prayer hall, and the minaret would rise to a height of one hundred ten feet. With their patron's enthusiastic approval and encouragement, Agha and his staff immediately began the detailed planning.

By early spring, negotiations had been concluded for a site that fulfilled all of the admiral's wishes. In addition to being obtained for a good price, it was blessed with an excellent view of the harbor and benefited from the steady breezes on which his ships had so often set sail. Not everyone shared His Excellency's nostalgia for breezes, however. All too often, these very same winds would fan small fires into raging infernos such as the one that less than ten years earlier had reduced this entire neighborhood to rubble and left its population in despair.

To oversee the day-in, day-out activities at the site, Agha hired a man named Huseyin Bey to serve as the superintendent of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: HMH Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 054701547X
• ISBN 13: 9780547015477
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 96
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland