In Istanbul, the Süleymaniye built by the architect Sinan for Süleyman the Magnificent re-solves, in an Ottoman language, the problem inherited from Hagia Sophia's pendentive dome — carrying a great central dome — and adds to it an urban scale.

The structural scheme supports the great central dome with two half-domes on the east-west axis; the load is carried to four great elephant-foot piers and to the projecting buttresses that reinforce them. Sinan's original contribution is to conceal these buttresses skilfully within the building's mass and integrate them with the side spaces — the supports that look added-on from outside at Hagia Sophia become here a natural part of the space. The interior thus stays both airy and luminous.

Hollow ceramic vessels set into the fabric of the dome (acoustic cavities behaving like Helmholtz resonators) both reduce the building's weight and tune the interior acoustics. But the Süleymaniye is not only a mosque; it is a külliye: madrasas, a hospital, a soup kitchen, baths, and a market terrace down the sloping site. Sinan designs the work not as separate buildings but as a piece of the city seated on the topography, organising water and view. The Süleymaniye thus unites structural balance, environmental intelligence, and urban scale in a single composition.