The mosque maker

Meet one of history’s most capable construction managers: Mimar Sinan. So great was his reputation and so prolific his output that soon after his death he passed into legend as a superhero who could fly from one construction site to another.

Sinan is Islam’s most celebrated architect, famed for transforming Istanbul’s skyline with a succession of monumental domes and slender, pencil-like minarets. Unlike today’s ‘starchitects’, however, heading up the Corps of Royal Architects involved considerably more than concept sketching on lunch napkins. He was not only a ‘mechanicus’ – an architect-engineer – but also a site supervisor and construction manager.

His most famous creation was the Süleymaniye mosque in Istanbul, built in honour of the all-conquering Süleyman the Magnificent between 1550 and 1557. It wasn’t a project without problems, however: Sinan faced more than liquidated damages if the build overran. One of his predecessors was executed because he shortened a mosque’s red granite columns without the sultan’s consent.

Sinan nearly fell foul of his boss who found him dragging his heels over the construction of the Süleymaniye dome, preferring to dwell in his marble workshop on less important aspects of the scheme. Typical architect, you might think, twiddling away with meaningless details.

In his autobiography Sinan remembers: “Our sultan said ‘Why don’t you restrict your attention to my mosque and not waste time with unimportant things? Isn’t the example of my ancestor Sultan Mehmed Khan’s architect enough for you? When will this building reach completion? Tell me at once or you know what the consequences will be!’”

Facing the chop, in more ways than one, he had to think and act quickly. So, using his superior management skills he turned to, wait for it... design and build!

“This humble servant instructed all available builders, unemployed stone-cutters, and the workless rabble, and appointed capable foremen, and corner by corner delegated piece work that could be subcontracted on a lump sum basis to capable masters for a flat rate,” he wrote.

“To supervise each of them I appointed teams of trustworthy and hard-working men. Holding an iron staff in my hand, I continually kept rotating around the centre and circumference of the dome like a compass, day and night, without resting for a single moment.”

Working overtime

Site conditions were pretty tough though. The daily account books of the mosque build show that men worked overtime and at weekends with no breaks. Now there’s an idea...

Records also show that, on many key projects, management staff delayed progress because they were busy building their own houses with materials embezzled from site. Central to this practice was the custom of pre-ordering three times the required quantity of building materials, resulting in a rampant black market of stolen supplies.

Before he was appointed as the Ottoman Empire’s Chief Royal Architect, aged 50, Sinan was a soldier. Construction’s most prominent non-cognate alumnus, Sinan, as “master of catapults”, learned his skills on the battlefield. On victorious campaigns, from Hungary to Rhodes, to Iraq and Iran, he designed and supervised the construction of siege engines, bridges and even ships, before turning his hand to mosques, hammams and civil engineering systems for the Ottoman sultan.

Sinan’s design and build strategy for the Süleymaniye mosque paid off. It took seven years to build, a fraction of the time needed to complete comparable works such as St Peters Basilica in Rome (120 years) or London’s St Paul’s cathedral (35 years).

During the opening ceremony, the Sultan honoured the architect by presenting him with the gilded key to the door. Sinan’s long life, he lived to be 100, is filled with such moments, coinciding, as it did, with the golden age of Ottoman culture.

His friend and biographical collaborator Mustafa Sai puts it best when he says: “Art’s soldier is he, ready to give up his life for it, Whenever with a challenging task he finds himself enlisted.”