A Practical Interpretation of the Prevalence of the Octagonal Plans in the Seljuk Tombs and a Critique of the Traditionalists’ Opinion

Traditionalists have expressed their views on art and architecture in recent decades, and their views have become the dominant one in the interpretation of Islamic architecture. The followers of the school of traditionalism considered art as a cryptic thing and considered it a sacred field.Accordingly, numbers, whose use in architecture is geometrically embodied, took on a mystical and metaphysical nature, and the forms expressed a special meaning. The octagons, which are specifically considered as octagonal planes in this article, are no exception to this rule and have been criticized only from a traditionalist point of view. In the last decade, however, traditionalist thinking has faced challenges and its dominance over the subject of architectural interpretation has diminished. The present article has interpreted and studied the prevalence of octagonal plan use in Seljuk tomb buildings with a practical approach (without considering the mystical point of view) and according to the necessity of using a variety of brick designs. Brick working, which is an art related to architecture, flourished in the Seljuk period with the use of experience and the development of skills, and bricklayers, due to their ability to decorate, faced a limited space due to their desire to provide various and unlimited decorations. Therefore, they used segmentation and framing to present decorations, and finally abandoned the principle of symmetry as a limiting subject to present more decorations. In such cases, having a plan with more sides, such as an octagon, would give more precedence to a quadrilateral plan. Therefore, the expansion of the octagonal plan in the tombs of the Seljuk period, based on the widespread use of brick motifs, is more reasonable than presenting a transcendental nature according to the views of the traditionalists, without any logical argument. The information of this research is collected based on library resources and with a inferential approach and is presented in a descriptive-analytical method.