Jameh Mosque of Isfahan
— — a thousand years of brick worked into light.
Not only on a wall.
“The Masjed-e Jāmé, the Friday mosque of Isfahan, the longest continuously built building in the Islamic world. Twelve centuries of brickwork around a single great courtyard, the four-iwan plan that became the template for mosque architecture from the Levant to South Asia. Two Seljuk domes from the 1080s, one north and one south, hold the room across the court from each other and read like two arguments about the same idea. UNESCO World Heritage since 2012. The light through the muqarnas at the end of the afternoon does what no photograph carries.
Jameh Mosque of Isfahan, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
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The place, in three passes.
The Jameh Mosque of Isfahan, Masjed-e Jāmé, sits at the historic centre of Isfahan in central Iran, north of the later Naqsh-e Jahan square. Building work began in the eighth century on the site of an earlier fire temple and continued in waves through the Seljuk, Mongol Il-Khanid, Muzaffarid, Timurid, and Safavid periods, making it the oldest Friday mosque in Iran and one of the longest construction histories of any standing building in the world. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 2012, citing the four-iwan plan as the prototype for mosque architecture across the Islamic world.
The two great Seljuk domes are the architectural heart of the complex. The south dome, the Nizam al-Mulk dome of 1086-1087, sits over the qibla iwan and was the largest masonry dome in the Islamic world at completion. The smaller north dome of 1088-1089, attributed to the vizier Taj al-Mulk, is held by historians of architecture, including Eric Schroeder and Oleg Grabar, as one of the most mathematically resolved brick domes ever built. Each is raised on a transition zone of nested squinches that translates a square chamber into an octagon and then a circle, executed entirely in fired brick.
The mosque is open to visitors outside prayer times, in the old quarter about a kilometre north of Naqsh-e Jahan square along Hatef Street. A small entry fee applies for non-Muslim visitors; modest dress is required and women are given a chador at the door. The courtyard measures roughly 60 by 70 metres with four iwans on its axes and an ablution pool at the centre. The hypostyle prayer halls behind the iwans run for hundreds of pillars on shifting plans accumulated across the centuries. Late afternoon light through the brick screens carries best for photographs.