Suleymaniye Mosque of Mimar Sinan, in Turkish Architectural Construction History

The most distinguished and the greatest architect of the Ottoman Empire and also of the Turkish Achitecture is Mimar Sinan. He had built lots of mosques, bridges and complexes, mainly in Istanbul and in the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. One of his most famous mosques is Suleymaniye, built for Sultan Suleyman in 16th century. The structural solution of the whole building will be explained in terms of the load transferring structure, starting from the top of the dome to the end of the columns and the perimeter masonry walls, supported with iron bars in between the columns at the end points of the arches, spanning the upper space above the people. The main characteristics of the mosque are the main full dome, supported with two half domes from two sides, while for the other sides there are walls under arches. Also there are small load balancing towers built around the sphere of the bottom layer of the dome. The retaining walls supporting the arches are lowering down by decreasing step by step. And iron bars, connecting the ends of arches can be seen in everywhere, both inside and outside. In this paper, all of these will be defined in a more detailed manner by showing the achievements of the construction technology in the Ottoman Empire Period in the 16th century.