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.
Rules · Façades · Materials · Cities
Timber over masonry, jettied bays over the street
Build the house with a masonry ground storey and timber-framed upper storeys, and jetty the upper rooms out over the street in bays (çıkma) on brackets, squaring them over the irregular plot and turning their many windows to light, air and view.
The Ottoman town house turned its ground floor (service rooms, stable, store) to the street as a nearly blank wall of stone, and put the family’s rooms upstairs, where they could be opened with rows of close-set windows behind lattices. Projecting bays let the upper floor escape the crooked outline of the lot and reach out for the breeze and the view of the water. The whole was framed in timber, which was cheap and survived earthquakes, and covered by a low hipped roof of tiles with wide eaves.
The same timber made Istanbul burn. Again and again after great fires the authorities, the chief architect’s office among them, ordered streets widened, projections limited and houses rebuilt in masonry; the orders were as often ignored, and the timber house with its çıkma remained the house of the Ottoman city until the nineteenth century.
Related rules
Let the exterior show the structure: pile semidomes, exedrae, corner domes and weight towers round the central dome so that the masses rise in steps to the crown.
Give an ordinary mosque one minaret with one balcony; reserve several minarets, and several balconies (şerefe) on each, for the foundations of the sultan and his family.
Where people disagree about the width of a public road, make it seven cubits, and let no one build out into it; lanes that serve only the houses on them may be narrower.
public road ≥ 7 cubits (≈ 3.5 m)
Build as you will on your own land, provided you do your neighbour no harm: open no window, door or roof terrace that looks into his house or court, and do not set your door opposite his across a lane.
Treat a dead-end lane as the joint property of the houses that open on it: no one may open a new door into it, build over it or narrow it without the consent of all of them, and they may close its mouth with a gate.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Timber over masonry, jettied bays over the street”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/cikma-projection. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.