An Architect to challenge them all. Sinan phenomenon in Architectural Historiography

Abstract

Ottoman Architect Sinan poses problems to prevalent strategies of interpretation of creative agency in architectural historiography due to the distinctness of his historical context. On the one hand, Sinan is acclaimed as a national hero by the modern Turkish Republic. On the other hand, he is celebrated as a genius architect along with figures of Renaissance Italy who were his contemporaries. Both approaches shed little light on the actual historical figure and his context; not rigorously supported by historical sources, they mainly rely on constructed biographical stories and formal analyses of Sinan's buildings. In this paper, these two historiographic approaches are contrasted with representations of the architect in his own biographical memoirs. This deconstructs distorted views of Sinan while suggesting that the self awareness exhibited in his memoirs together with the consistent architectural expression manifest in his buildings testify a distinct mode of creative agency that eludes current methods of interpretation.