Measuring Form, Ornament and Materiality in Sinan’s Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque: an Analysis Using Fractal Dimensions

The Kılıc¸ Ali Pas¸a Mosque in Istanbul was completed in the late sixteenth century and it is today regarded as one of architect Sinan’s most important
works. Like many of Sinan’s designs it has been the subject of detailed analysis in
the past, with historians offering theories to explain its visual properties and how
they differ from those of his previous works. However, such theories have remained
largely untested because of the difficulty of quantitatively analysing the building’s
intricate formal, ornamental and material properties. The present paper uses computational fractal analysis to overcome this problem. This method, as it is applied in
the paper, derives a non-integer measure of the characteristic complexity of three
hierarchical layers in visual information in the facades of the Kılıc¸ Ali Pas¸a Mosque. Through this process the paper not only provides important quantitative results
which can be used to test past theories about the building, but these new measures
are then compared with those that have previously been developed, using the same
method, for Sinan’s Su¨leymaniye Mosque.