Daylight, View-Out, and Windows: The Sensorial-Based Design of Ottoman-Era Mosques

Daylighting and outside view, as window design parameters, are often the main ambience-generating design factors that connect the users' sensorial relationship to their external environment. These relationships and their resulting ambiences vary by building type and carry a heightened value in some specific typologies of which, religious buildings hold a paramount place. Indeed, the sophistication of openings' design strategies applied throughout centuries in religious buildings, are good learning grounds on the use of daylighting and its resulting sensorial impact on users. In addition to a literature review related to Ottoman religious architecture, this paper reports on an in-situ field investigation that explored these relationships in a corpus of forty-five (45) mosques in Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul, dating back to the Ottoman era (1299-1923). Breaking with past schemes, the new design paradigm introduced drastic changes in plans, openings, windows, views, and daylight, which resulted in unique ambiences. The variables investigated in this study include: i) the window location within the mosque envelope (zenithal and/or lateral), ii) the window location concerning the conventional prayer direction referred to as "Qibla" wall, and iii) the window transparency that permits or stops/blocks the outside view. In addition, the view content encompasses the identification and categorization of the objects, as seen by the worshipers while performing their prayers, through the ground-level windows. The collected information was converted into a database for statistical analysis. By focusing on the human sensorial-based design in the Ottoman mosques, the results revealed the daylighting design specificities of the building envelope and the windows as well as the nature of the view out content Both of them attested to the human-centered design by Ottoman builders offering worshipers a strong connection to the external environment, thus creating ambiences conducive to spiritual fervor and beatitude.