Jeffrey Sipprell

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November 16, 2005

Istanbul - Day 1, Part 1

Our studio trip to Istanbul, Turkey is complete and today begins the first in a series of blog posts detailing our collective exploits from the past week's research. After a 10 hour flight to London, a 4 hour layover in Heathrow and another 4 hour flight to Istanbul, we arrived quite weary to our hotel a week prior to yesterday (Tuesday). After crashing out in a pretty decent hotel we were all awoken to Islamic prayer chanting played on the loudspeakers from the minerets of all the big mosques at 5 am. They do this 5 times a day, but I don't need to tell you which one the most unwelcome is.

After a fine breakfast of cheese, tomatoes, bread and honey - we headed for a short walk over to the Hagia Sophia. 15 turkish lira to get in (or about 12 american bucks), but well worth the cost of admission. The structure is nothing short of breathtaking, though I wish they had finished the renovations on the dome. Dome Image The central space is mammoth, though it doesn't come close to the feeling of vastness of St. Peter's in London. But there is a much richer treatment of space and surface in this mosque than there is in any christian church that exists in western Europe.

The biggest distinction to this mosque, having to do with the fact that it was a christian church for its first 50 years, is that there is a clear directionality to it from entrance to nave Central Space Image. The ends are quite volumetric with large secondary and tertiary half domes carving projecting up into the main dome Volume. The sides are much tauter, more skin like in their surface treatment Tautness. This is reinforced by the way in which the skin along the side is layered as it moved from the central space to the exterior wall Layers, oscillating between tight and open spaces. This is reinforced by the way in which surfaces are treated (edge highlight v. color wash) Color Wash, the way in which they appear to push up and pull down (heights and proportions of columns) Columns, and the way in which there are dicontinuities in the cadence of the layers as they move from inside to out (they differing proportions creating offsets between layers as you look across the space) Cadence.

Issues of sidedness and hierarchy were well executed throughout the mosque creating a sensibility that alternated between lightness and heaviness as you occupied different moments of the structure. The moments that occured between the elements that were more skinlike and those that were more volumetric were particularly interesting as you could clearly see how they were pushing up against each other Dome Pressure, as if various pressure were being exerted on the system that created these localized anamolies.

Diagrams of all of these features are being developed right now, but in the meantime, enjoy a few more pics outside of the ones illustrated above.

Exterior
Central Space 1
Central Space 2
Detail 1
Side Dome 1
Side Dome 2

Posted by jsipprell at November 16, 2005 4:13 PM

Comments

Posted by: Mom at November 19, 2005 6:03 PM