Search results for ""Author Patricia Blessing""

This book is a study of Islamic architecture in Anatolia following the Mongol conquest in 1243. Complex shifts in rule, movements of population, and cultural transformations took place that affected architecture on multiple levels. Beginning with the Mongol conquest of Anatolia, and ending with the demise of the Ilkhanid Empire, centered in Iran, in the 1330s, this book considers how the integration of Anatolia into the Mongol world system transformed architecture and patronage in the region. Traditionally, this period has been studied within the larger narrative of a progression from Seljuk to Ottoman rule and architecture, in a historiography that privileges Turkish national identity. Once Anatolia is studied within the framework of the Mongol Empire, however, the region no longer appears as an isolated case; rather it is integrated into a broader context beyond the modern borders of Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus republics. The monuments built during this period served a number of purposes: mosques were places of prayer and congregation, madrasas were used to teach Islamic law and theology, and caravanserais secured trade routes for merchants and travelers. This study analyzes architecture on multiple, overlapping levels, based on a detailed observation of the monuments. The layers of information extracted from the monuments themselves, from written sources in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and from historical photographs, shape an image of Islamic architecture in medieval Anatolia that reflects the complexities of this frontier region. New patrons emerged, craftsmen migrated between neighboring regions, and the use of locally available materials fostered the transformation of designs in ways that are closely tied to specific places. Starting from these sources, this book untangles the intertwined narratives of architecture, history, and religion to provide a broader understanding of frontier culture in the medieval Middle East, with its complex interaction of local, regional, and trans-regional identities.

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In this book, Patricia Blessing explores the emergence of Ottoman architecture in the fifteenth century and its connection with broader geographical contexts. Analyzing how transregional exchange shaped building practices, she examines how workers from Anatolia, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Iran and Central Asia participated in key construction projects. She also demonstrates how drawn, scalable models on paper served as templates for architectural decorations and supplemented collaborations that involved the mobility of workers. Blessing reveals how the creation of centralized workshops led to the emergence of a clearly defined imperial Ottoman style by 1500, when the flexibility and experimentation of the preceding century was levelled. Her book radically transforms our understanding of Ottoman architecture by exposing the diverse and fluid nature of its formative period. It also provides the reader with an understanding of design, planning, and construction processes of a major empire of the Islamic world.

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Assesses and analyses medieval Anatolia from the perspectives of architecture, landscape and urban space.

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Anatolia was home to a large number of polities in the medieval period. Given its location at the geographical and chronological juncture between Byzantines and the Ottomans, its story tends to be read through the Seljuk experience. This obscures the multiple experiences and spaces of Anatolia under the Byzantine empire, Turko-Muslim dynasties contemporary to the Seljuks, the Mongol llkhanids, and the various beyliks of eastern and western Anatolia. This book looks beyond political structures and towards a reconsideration of the interactions between the rural and the urban; an analysis of the relationships between architecture, culture and power; and an examination of the region's multiple geographies. In order to expand historiographical perspectives it draws on a wide variety of sources (architectural, artistic, documentary and literary), including texts composed in several languages (Arabic, Armenian, Byzantine Greek, Persian and Turkish).

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This collection seeks to explore alternative definitions of bounded identities, facilitating new approaches to spatial and architectural forms. Taking as its starting point the emergence of a new sense of ‘boundary’ emerged from the post-19th century dissolution of large, heterogeneous empires into a mosaic of nation-states in the Islamic world. This new sense of boundaries has not only determined the ways in which we imagine and construct the idea of modern citizenship, but also redefines relationships between the nation, citizenship, cities and architecture. It brings critical perspectives to our understanding of the interrelation between the accumulated flows and the evolving concepts of boundary in predominantly Muslim societies and within the global Muslim diaspora. Essays in this book seeks to investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness that have been devised to define, enable, obstruct, accumulate and/or control flows able to disrupt bounded territories or identities. More generally, the book explores how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implication of defining modern self. The essays in this volume collectively address how the construction of self is primarily a spatial event and operated within the crucial nexus of power-knowledge-space. Contributors investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness, how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implications for how we define the modern self. Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.

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