Reading a building: its form and its time

This lesson asks you to deconstruct the visual content of an art work and its use of the elements and principles of design, and to explain how knowing its cultural and historical context clarified your understanding of its intent. The curriculum's examples are mostly Western works. The museum offers only buildings of the Islamic world, as particular authors describe them; your class adds the other works. ¹

Start with what can be counted: forms, surfaces, doors, materials. Then ask who described the building, and when; the description is itself part of the context.

Compare your reading of the building before you know who ordered it and when, and after. What changed? What stayed the same?

Read what a ruler's needs did to a plan. At the Great Mosque of Cordoba, Muhammad I closed off with a wooden screen the maqsura reserved for the amir and the court in front of the mihrab, and built a covered passage, a sabat, from the Alcazar so that the ruler could enter the maqsura directly and privately for the daily prayers ². The last great extension was made by al-Mansur, who added seven colonnades along the whole length of the building on its eastern side, raising the number of naves from eleven to nineteen ³. The Encyclopaedia of Islam notes that this moved the mihrab away from the end of the central axis of the prayer hall, and that the steep slope down to the Guadalquivir made it impossible to extend the building further south ³.

Who conceived the Dome of the Rock? The Encyclopaedia of Islam names Abd al-Malik as its builder ⁴. The author of its article on al-Kuds offers a view of his own: he thinks the plan was probably drawn up under Mu'awiya, whose long rule allowed the immense preparations, and doubts that the turbulent early years of Abd al-Malik could have both conceived and finished it ⁵. The record gives both and decides neither.

Even a date is a source question. The book on Bayt al-Maqdis says the Dome was begun in 66 AH (685 CE) and finished in 72 AH (691 CE) ⁶; the article on the Dome says its inscription dates the building to 72/691–2 ⁷; the al-Kuds article says it was completed in 71/691 ⁸. For Cordoba, the Encyclopaedia has no article on the building alone, only a passage inside its article on the city ². Al-Maqqari reports a chandelier of a thousand lamps and three columns, then comments that he did not find this among the careful historians of al-Andalus and that it seems far-fetched to him ⁹.

The curriculum asks how context clarifies intent. Give a reason, and answer the objection that a design should be judged by what you see, not by why it happened: does knowing that al-Mansur's seven colonnades moved the mihrab off the central axis change how you judge the prayer hall's design, or does it only explain it?

• Dome of the Rock: its descriptions, its inscription and the debate about its purpose.
• Construction of the Dome of the Rock: the dates and the cost the Bayt al-Maqdis book reports.
• Great Mosque of Cordoba: the enlargements, ruler by ruler.
• al-Mansur: the vizier whose extension reshaped the hall.

Read the records for the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Write three lines on each building: its forms and surfaces as its describer gives them, and how one description differs from the other.