The "Sinan Collection" on ArchNet features 226 photographs and 95 architectural drawings from Professor Gülru Necipoglu's 2005 tome entitled The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, 1539-1588 [London: Reaktion Books].

Mimar Koca Sinan (d. 1588), the 'Great Architect Sinan', was appointed chief royal architect to the Ottoman court by Sultan Süleyman I in 1539. During his fifty-year career he designed and constructed hundreds of buildings, including mosques, palaces, tombs, schools, madrasas, hospitals, hospices, caravanserais, aqueducts and bridges. The most celebrated of all Ottoman architects, Sinan is renowned in particular for his mosques, where his inventive experimentation with centralized domed spaces -- often compared with parallel developments in Renaissance Italy -- produced monuments in which the central dome appears weightless and the interior surfaces are bathed in light. His distinctive architectural idiom left its imprint on the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, and across the vast empire that extended from the Danube to the Tigris.

To view all available materials on Sinan in the ArchNet Digital Library, including scholarly articles, CAD files and images of monuments not listed below, visit the architects' page at http://archnet.org/library/parties/one-party.jsp?party_id=630.

Clicking on "thumbnails" below will show all 351 photographs and plans from the Necipoglu book, while users can also choose to browse all materials available on monuments listed in Necipoglu's book by clicking on any site name below.