The Natural World in Early Islamic Architecture

This paper examines abstract vegetal forms in early Islamic architecture cross-culturally through the lens of the ancient Near East – a perspective that is rarely considered. In the ancient Near East (approximately 3,500-600 BCE), architectural ornament’s main iconography is the natural world, especially as it exists in conversation with supernatural beings. Framing and border elements are composed of running bands of repeated vegetal and faunal elements, and other divine motifs facilitate a further pairing of the ideological relationship between the king, as a cosmological figure, and the divine sphere. Of course, in Islamic art many of those same motifs and organizational structures appear, and then become linked to paradisial imagery. But as we look at contemporary architects and their uses of nature, we might begin to see the abstraction in ancient Near Eastern and early Islamic ornament as less about symbolism and more about generating bodily experiences, or extensions of the physical self, that connected the viewer with the very land on which he lives and derives his sustenance. In this tension between a present moment and an allover ornamental pattern, there is what we might call a break in the real, and a visceral movement of the viewer through space and time. Ornament captures the depth, the layers of history that constitute the sublime and spiritual transcendence. Such a “spatial history,” we might call it, does not define simple semiotic relationships, but contains forms of nature that imply the possibility of new viewpoints, directions, and awarenesses.