Architect Sinan Quotes

Page 158: 'Architecture is team work,' said Sinan. 'Apprenticeship is not.' 'Why don't you want us to look at each other's drawings? ' Jahan once asked. 'Because you'll compare. If you think you are better than the others, you'll be poisoned by hubris. If you think another's better, poisoned by envy. Either way, it is poison.

It was after this incident that Jahan understood his master’s secret resided not in his toughness, for he was not tough, nor in his indestructibility, for he was not indestructible, but in his ability to adapt to change and calamity, and to rebuild himself, again and again, out of the ruins. While Jahan was made of wood, and Davud of metal, and Nikola of stone, and Yusuf of glass, Sinan was made of flowing water. When anything blocked his course, he would flow under, around, above it, however he could; he found his way through the cracks, and kept flowing forward

It’s one thing building a cloister to reflect the 768 of the numerological Bismillah, it’s another planning a giant alphabet out of an entire city before you’ve even built your first mosque.’ ‘It is, but remember, Sinan was chief architect and city planner at the time of the conquest of Cairo. He practised on that city; demolishing and building where he liked. I have no doubt that he was already forming the idea of a sacred geometry. His first building as Architect of the Abode of Felicity was the Haseki Hürrem Mosque for the Kadin Roxelana. Not his greatest work by any means, and he was working from existing designs, but it was identifiable as his first mature work. There’s a story in his autobiography Tezkiretül Bünyan that while he was surveying the site he noticed that children were pulling live fish from a grating in the street. When he went to investigate he discovered an entire Roman cistern down there. Perhaps it was this that inspired him to realize his vision. Hidden water. The never-ceasing stream of Hurufism.

When the great sixteenth-century Ottoman architect Sinan would start building a new mosque, he would make sure both the design and the project were in harmony with the city's history and the city's spirit [Jehane Noujaim, "Tahrir Square, Cairo: Lost and Found in the Square"].