Muqarnas, Fold, and the Parametric Transition from Body to Soul

More than eight hundred years ago, before the invention of digital tools, Muslim builders had achieved the creative vision and aesthetic complexity required for the production of Muqarnas: an architectural device that connects surface ornament to divine concepts. This research adopts a qualitative, comparative, and critical use of architectural source material to construct an alternative understanding of Muqarnas within a documented history of architectural allegories and theories. The paper follows the argument that in the absence of figurative depiction in Islamic art, geometry assumes greater symbolic power, which manifests itself in ornament, structure, and space. In this system, Muqarnas uses complex geometry to connect wall surfaces to spacious volumes. In the metamorphosis of two-dimensional planes to three-dimensional space, Muqarnas occupies the in-between space that connects the two worlds in a smooth and parametric process of transition. Thus, Muqarnas operates similarly to the folds of Baroque architecture and expresses, in a mannerist, yet geometric manner, the connection between the two realms of body and soul. However, unlike the Deleuzian model of Baroque sacristy, light does not enter from below; from the realm of the body and the senses, but rather it shines from above; from the realm of the soul and divine concepts. From this point of view, Muqarnas becomes a significant phenomenon in architecture being a symbolic, ornamental, and parametric architectural device that simultaneously alludes to the allegories of the Platonic tradition, the Deleuzian concept of fold/unfold, and to recent theories of Parametricism