Architecture
The courtyard is accessed with five steps going down from street level. It is paved with black and white tiles arranged to form geometric patterns, and has a rectangular fountain at its center, with carved stone panels. Two rooms flank the courtyard to its east, faced by three rooms to the west. To the south, is a ten-bay portico composed of limestone arches topped by seventeen tall, rectangular openings. It leads into the prayer hall and the tomb chamber through two separate doors.
A single stone minaret rises at the northwest corner of the mosque. Its rectangular shaft turns into a narrow octagonal tower above the balcony and is topped by a spear.
Read more about this topic: Al-Shamiyah Al-Kubra Madrasa
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“I don’t think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.”
—Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923)
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)