Architecture · a Light

Honeycomb vaults were drawn as flat plans before they were built

Muqarnas is the tiered cluster of small niches that fills the corner where a square room becomes a round dome. It looks improvised and is not. A scroll now in Topkapi, made in Iran or Central Asia around the fifteenth or sixteenth century, contains sheet after sheet of geometric drawings including muqarnas designs set out as flat plans, the view from directly below, which a mason could scale up and build from. In the same period the mathematician al-Kashi in Samarkand devoted a section of his arithmetic textbook to muqarnas, classifying the types and giving a method for measuring their surfaces so that a builder could estimate materials. The ornament was a calculation before it was a ceiling.

Topkapi Scroll and al-Kashi · 15th century