"Global Approaches to Sacred Space" Workshop: Patricia Blessing, "Ottoman Water Architectures"

Arches Like Rainbows and Floating Palaces: Ottoman Water Architectures

Focusing on Ottoman architecture from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this talk analyses how buildings were designed in relationship to nature and climate, with an emphasis on water. Water features such as fountains and basin, both indoors and in liminal courtyard spaces, supplied by aqueducts, cisterns, and open domes were deployed to create a complex connection between the built and natural environment. This talk will integrate the study of architecture, poetry and inscriptions, and approaches in eco-critical art history to provide new insights into these relationships.

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Patricia Blessing is Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Blessing’s current book project, Spaces of Artifice: Interiors and the Environment in Islamic Architecture, engages with eco-critical art history in exploring built environments. Blessing is the author of Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014) and Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With Elizabeth Dospel Williams and Eiren Shea, she co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400, for the Cambridge Elements series Global Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Blessing’s work has been supported by the ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Cultures, the Barakat Trust, the British Academy, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the International Center of Medieval Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Society of Architectural Historians. Previously, Blessing taught at Pomona College and Princeton University. She is Managing Editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. 

“Global Approaches to Sacred Space” is generously funded by the SGS Global Research Workshop series with further support from the Departments of Religious Studies, Classics, History, Art & Art History, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Co-organized by Prof. Bissera V. Pentcheva and Andrei Dumitrescu.

VISITOR INFORMATION: Room 370 is located in the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is available in designated areas and payment is managed through ParkMobile (free after 4pm, except by the Oval). Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne Garcia at juggarci [at] stanford.edu (juggarci[at]stanford[dot]edu).