Orient the prayer hall so that its principal wall, the qibla wall, stands square to the direction of Mecca, and mark the middle of that wall with a niche, the mihrab.
qibla wall ⟂ direction of the Kaaba; mihrab on the axis
Rules · Cities · Plans · Vaults · Use
The bazaar as the spine of the city
Build the bazaar as one continuous covered street, roofed by a dome over every bay, linking the city’s squares, and open caravanserais, colleges, baths and mosques off it along its length.
The Persian bazaar is not a market square but a street, vaulted bay by bay in brick, each dome with an opening at its crown for light and air. Shops of the same trade are grouped together; behind them, reached through gateways, are the caravanserais that served as warehouses, workshops and lodgings for merchants, and the mosques, colleges and baths endowed by rich patrons, whose rents often came from the shops themselves.
At Isfahan Shah Abbas’s royal bazaar, the Qaisariyya, begins at the north end of the Maidan and joins the older bazaar that runs on for some two kilometres to the old square and the Friday Mosque, so that the new royal centre and the old city are threaded on one covered way.
Related rules
Build the tower for the call to prayer in the form of the regional tradition: square and stepped in the Maghreb and Spain, cylindrical and tapering in Iran and Central Asia, needle-like and polygonal in the Ottoman lands.
Fill a half-dome, squinch or cornice with tiers of small concave cells, each tier corbelled forward from the one below and each cell set over the junction of two cells beneath.
height = tiers × module; each tier projects inward
Draw the muqarnas as its plan (the projection of every tier on the floor) and build it up from the plan tier by tier with a fixed height to each tier.
Place an iwan (a vaulted hall walled on three sides and open on the fourth) at the middle of each side of the courtyard, the one on the qibla side leading to a domed chamber before the mihrab.
Lay out the garden as a walled square divided into four by raised walks with water channels on the two axes, and divide each quarter again.
1 → 4 → 16 beds; water on the axes
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The bazaar as the spine of the city”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/bazaar-spine. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.