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:
“They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)