The architecture of the Iranian world: the four-iwan court, the monumental pishtaq, the double dome on a tall drum, muqarnas, and whole buildings clothed in glazed tile.
Iran brought to Islam an ancient tradition of building in brick and of vaulting (the iwan, the squinch, the dome over a square chamber), and from the eleventh century it became the source of the most influential forms of Islamic architecture from Anatolia to India. Under the Seljuk Turks, who ruled Iran from the mid-eleventh century, the Friday Mosque of Isfahan was rebuilt with a great domed chamber before the mihrab (1086–87), a second dome opposite, and then, in the early twelfth century, four iwans in the middle of the sides of its court. The four-iwan plan became the standard for mosques, madrasas and caravanserais.
Brick is the medium, and Iranian builders made it do everything: structure, vault and ornament at once. Tomb towers such as the Gunbad-i Qabus (1006–07) and the minarets of Central Asia are decorated only by patterns of laid brick. Domes were raised over square rooms by squinches that grew into tiers of little niches, the muqarnas, and were doubled into an inner and an outer shell. The Mausoleum of Oljeitu at Soltaniyeh (1302–1312), with a dome some 25 metres across, and the Timurid tombs of Samarkand, with their ribbed melon domes on tall drums, show the double dome becoming the dominant image of the skyline.
The Timurids (1370–1507) covered their buildings in colour: first glazed bricks, then tile mosaic in which every piece of a pattern is cut from a single-coloured tile and fitted together, turquoise, cobalt, white and yellow. Timur’s capital Samarkand, with the Bibi Khanum mosque and the Gur-i Amir, and the Registan square framed by madrasas with gigantic pishtaqs, set the scale; architects such as Qavam al-Din of Shiraz worked with a mastery of proportion and geometry that the Topkapı Scroll, a pattern book of this world, allows us to glimpse.
The Safavid shahs (1501–1722) made Isfahan their capital and gave it, around the vast Maydan-i Naqsh-i Jahan (begun 1598), the Masjid-i Shah, the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque, the Ali Qapu palace and the bazaar portal. The Masjid-i Shah (1611–c. 1630) is the four-iwan mosque in its final form: every surface in glazed tile, pishtaqs flanked by minarets, and a turquoise outer dome rising far above its inner shell. The same vocabulary passed to the Mughals in India and to the Ottomans, and still shapes the religious architecture of Iran and Central Asia.