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Architecture

Architecture in Istanbul

Istanbul has been rebuilding on the same seven hills for fifteen centuries, and its major buildings answer each other directly. The dome is the argument running through all of them.

• Istanbul Modern

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  Completed 2023

  Renzo Piano

  A museum of modern art on the Karaköy waterfront, replacing the warehouse the institution had used. Renzo Piano raised the galleries on a colonnade so the ground stays open to the Bosphorus, and clad the volume in aluminium panels that ripple like water. A shallow pool on the roof holds the sky and the skyline behind it. The building returns a quayside the port had held for a century.

• Sancaklar Mosque

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  Completed 2013

  Emre Arolat

  A mosque in a suburb west of the city, built almost entirely below ground. Emre Arolat cut the prayer hall into a slope and lit it with a slot along the qibla wall, so the room is defined by daylight rather than by ornament. Stone retaining walls step down above it as an open courtyard. It sets aside dome, minaret and calligraphy to test what remains of a mosque without them.

• Sokollu Mehmet Pasha Mosque

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  Completed 1572

  Mimar Sinan

  A small mosque built into a steep slope at Kadırga. Mimar Sinan raised the prayer hall over a courtyard reached by stairs beneath the entrance, which fits a full complex onto a site that could not hold one. The dome rests on six supports so the interior stays a single undivided room. Iznik tiles are used sparingly, and the light through the drum does the rest.

• Süleymaniye Mosque

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  Completed 1557

  Mimar Sinan

  The mosque complex on the third hill, built for Sultan Suleiman. Mimar Sinan sized the dome and its half domes so the interior reads as one clear volume, and hid the buttressing inside the outer walls where it would not be seen. The complex around it held schools, a hospital, kitchens and baths under one endowment. Sinan called it the work of his journeyman years, and the city's silhouette is still measured by it.

• Hagia Sophia

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  Completed 537

  Isidore of Miletus · Anthemius of Tralles

  A church, then a mosque, then a museum, then a mosque again, on the first hill. Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles carried the dome on pendentives, the device that lets a round dome sit on a square plan and changed what was structurally possible after it. A ring of windows at the dome's base makes it appear detached from the walls below. Every large domed building in the city since has been answering it.