This week The history of Ottoman architecture needs further discussion, says Rory Olcayto

摘要

In her introduction to The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, Giilru Necipoglu complains that the great 16th-century architect has been coloured by '"universalist" and "national" paradigms of orientalism that utterly fail to historicise his work'. Why not try to understand Sinan's architecture on its own terms? Necipoglu achieves this, and The Age of Sinan, a close reading of historical archives and the architect's vivid autobiography, is the best, most interesting book on the subject.