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Isfahan's selection as the capital of Persia's Safavid Empire (1501-1736) at the turn of the seventeenth century set off multiple phases of growth in the city. This included the development of Shah Abbas II's (r. 1642-66) palatial complex of Sa'ādat-ābād, which encouraged Isfahan's engagement with the nearby river Zāyandehrud. This article expands the discourse examining the river beyond the domain of nature by exploring the Zāyandehrud as a designed environment and a site of architectural imagination and action. As shown in this study, the river and the complex interconnections between natural and cultural systems played a central role in shaping the scheme of this royal complex. While a lack of visual and archaeological evidence has kept rivers and lakes on the sidelines in most studies of premodern Islamic water architecture, this article provides a new perspective on the roles of such bodies of water through a close reading of Safavid poetry, contemporary prose, spatial analysis, and architectural reconstructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about Modern Islamic architecture in architect Robert Venturi's book titled "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture". Topics discussed include Venturi presenting a critique of modernism in his book, the complexity of architectural form, and his assertion that study of architecture requires close analysis and historical breadth.

This article discusses the architecture of mosques designed by Muslim communities engaged in international trade in China during the Song and Yuan dynasties. The distinctiveness of foreign architectural styles such as Islamic architecture in Chinese cities is described. Architectural features of mosques including minarets and mihrab are noted. The floor plans of specific buildings including Huaisheng Mosque and Shengyousi, both of which date to the 1300s in their current form, are described. While the former incorporated many features of Chinese architecture, the latter shows more similarities to Abassid Mosques around the world. The design of minarets in China is described in terms of its relationship to similar religious architectural forms developed for Buddhist Pagodas.

The article focuses on the Qur'an recitations at Islamic building sites, particularly mosques, during the 16th Century. The article discusses how over 100 reciters were employed under Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent's direction. The author suggests that historians of Islamic architecture do not pay enough attention to the significance of sound and acoustics in the built environment. Particular attention is given to an endowment deed that detailed the duties and tasks of employees of Süleyman's mosque complex in Istanbul, Turkey.

The article offers information on the architectural implications of the Rudra-Mahalaya mosque of Siddhpur, Gujarat in India. It states that the mosque was dedicated to Shiva. Since its consecration during the mid-12th century, the structure has also undergone much more than the effects of the passage of time. Relative to this, the complex was destroyed during the first quarter of the 15th century by the forces of Sultan Ahmad Shah I of the Muzaffarid dynasty. Moreover, due to the references to both Sanskrit and Persian histories from Gujarat, the complex is essential to both Indic as well as Islamic scholarship.

This study presents five little-known bathing chambers from the region of Amalfi in southern Italy. Dating from the thirteenth century, the baths define with remarkable consistency a type of structure that has not previously been identified or considered in histories of medieval architecture in the West. The study begins with an analysis of the five bathing chambers and their specific architectural features, technological remains, and domestic contexts. The diverse antecedents of the buildings, which appear in ancient Roman, medieval Italian, Byzantine, and Islamic architecture, are explored, along with the implications of this eclecticism for the history of southern Italy. Utilizing the rich array of surviving medieval documents for the region, including episcopal charters, royal decrees, and medical treatises, the study then reconstructs the economic, social, and scientific significance of the baths within medieval Amalfi. As monuments outside the traditional contexts of art production in southern Italy, the baths challenge long-standing characterizations of southern Italy's art and architecture, and point to the existence of a Mediterranean-wide balneal culture in which Byzantine, Islamic, and southern Italian communities participated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this article is to substantiate the proposition that mathematicians and architect-artisans had collaborated through special meetings, called conversazioni in the text, for the application of geometry to architecture in the Islamic world. A meeting reportedly attended by Omar Khayyam furnishes convincing evidence for this proposition. The study expands on the untitled treatise written by Omar Khayyam as a response to a question raised at this meeting. The treatise is about a problem that concerns an ornamental pattern, the story of which can be traced in two other works on geometry: Abu 'l-Wafa' al-Buzajani's book, "What the Artisan Requires of Geometric Constructions," and an anonymous Persian treatise on ornamental geometry, "On Interlocking Similar or Corresponding Figures." While these three works are analyzed in the article, the wider implications of the collaboration between mathematicians and artisans concerning the field of architecture are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Santa María de Melque has been dated variously from 650 to 930, a broad span of time encompassing periods of both Visigothic and Muslim rule. The earlier date would make Melque a prototype for churches built late in the Visigothic period. The later date would have it be a unique, surviving, freestanding church built under the Muslim emirate of Spain. It is argued here that Melque is an eighth-century church built during the reign of the first Umayyad emir of Spain, Abd al-Rahman I (756-788). This is indicated by structural and decorative features at Melque that evince Syro-Umayyad influence, the closest analogies being with the Umayyad palace of Khirbet al-Mafjar (739-743). In terms of both style and atelier tradition, Melque represents close affiliation with the Visigothic past in conjunction with receptivity to ideas that must have been introduced with the Syrians in the court of Abd al-Rahman. Thus, Santa María de Melque indicates an accommodating attitude on the part of the recently conquered Christian populace. It also bears witness to a circumstance that, contrary to some recent supposition, was uncommon in Spain: legal church construction under Muslim rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper is presented that examines the use of domes in architecture. The author examines the use of domes throughout architectural history and discusses some of the similarities that exist among domes along with various innovations that have been made to the dome. The author examines the dome as representing an idea of heaven and explores the use of the dome in Roman Emperor Nero's palace and in other religious structures throughout history in both Christian and Islamic architecture.

Lacking many of the documentary and archival sources available to scholars of the medieval Western world, historians of Islamic architecture are forced to turn to another feature of architectural decoration to reconstruct the building tradition: the written word. A builder's signature on a set of luster tiles in the Metropolitan Museum of Art allows us to connect the set to an early-14th-century shrine complex in central Iran. Reading of another inscription on the tiles, hitherto unnoticed and containing a signature and date, allows us to reconstruct the building campaign at the site and to evaluate the position of builders and potters in Mongol society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five minarets in Upper Egypt traditionally have been attributed to the patronage of the Fatimid vizier Badr al-Jamali. They were thought to symbolize his reassertion of Fatimid power in the late 11th century. A re-examination of their formal, functional, and physical contexts suggests instead that these structures were the products of local patrons who found their models not in Lower Egypt, but in the Hijaz region of Arabia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traveling exhibition "Living under the Crescent Moon: Domestic Culture in the Arab World," held in Germany and Spain in 2004 and 2005, and Thailand, Singapore, and Morocco in 2007 and 2008, is reviewed.

Abstracts of the articles "China's Earliest Mosques" by Nancy Shatzman Steinhart, "H. H. Richardson: Lessons From Paris" by Elizabeth Greenwell Grossman, and "The Virgin Chapel at Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais: Embellishment and Devotion in Late Gothic Paris" by Abby McGehee.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by James G. Cooper on two sketches by Michelangelo and another by Nina Ergin on Islamic architectural history.