Found the mosque together with the institutions that serve it and its neighbourhood (colleges, a hospital, a public kitchen, a guest-house, a caravanserai, a bath, a school and the founder’s tomb), endowed as one charitable trust and grouped round the mosque’s outer court.
An Ottoman foundation was an institution as much as a building. The founder endowed it with land, shops and rents in perpetuity (waqf), and its deed laid down the salaries of the imams, teachers and doctors, the number of students and patients, and the bread and soup to be given out each day. Sinan’s memoirs list his works by type (mosques, colleges, tombs, kitchens, hospitals, caravanserais, baths), but in the capital most of them belonged to such complexes.
At the Süleymaniye the mosque stands in a walled court with the tombs behind its qibla wall; four colleges and schools of medicine and of Tradition line the streets on either side; the kitchen, guest-house, hospital and caravanserai close the side towards the Golden Horn; the bath stands at a corner; and a row of shops pays towards the whole.
To turn a domed square into a long church, open two of its great arches into semidomes of the same radius, and open the semidomes in turn into smaller exedrae, so that the space expands by stages from the central dome.
Hagia Sophia: central square 31 m; two semidomes of radius ≈ 15.5 m; four exedrae; interior ≈ 31 × 70 m
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
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.
Cover the prayer hall with a single central dome on four piers and extend the unified space by semidomes on two or all four sides, with smaller half-domes (exedrae) in their corners.
To make the domed space as nearly one room as possible, set the dome on eight piers inscribed in a square, and fill the four corners with semidomes on the diagonals.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The külliye: a mosque with its charities”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/kulliye-complex. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.