Sinan as Anti-Classicist

For Sinan the mosque proved to be the built form most suited to realizing his theories about structure and volume, facade and interior, and for working out his attitudes toward them and toward the relationship between a building and its environment. The func-tional necessity of providing a large and uninterrupted space in which a congregation could worship already posed particular structural problems which the demands for symbolic expression by religion and by the amalgamation of state power only made more acute. For that reason the mosques from this time lend themselves best to an analysis of style in sixteenthcentury Ottoman architecture generally and Sinan's work in particular.