İstanbul Pendik Mosque — Twin Minarets with Fluted Shafts

This mosque in Pendik sits inside a dense residential fabric. In such a setting a minaret is not only a functional element but a silhouette: a vertical accent that has to read from a distance. The proportion of the shaft and the level of the şerefe were therefore set against the height of the surrounding blocks.

The shaft was fluted. Fluting is the detail most often asked for on a minaret and most often done wrong; cut into render, it separates at the arrises within a few years. Here the channel profiles were worked into the fibreglass face of the formwork modules, and the flutes emerged in the same concrete as the shaft.

Two technical constraints on a fluted shaft

Formwork for a fluted minaret has to solve two things at once:

• The flute width must narrow proportionally as the shaft rises — a channel of constant width looks coarse at the top of a tapering shaft.
• Enough draft has to be left so the arrises of the channel are not damaged when the mould is struck.

Şerefe and cap

The şerefe ring carries courses of pendant muqarnas with a pierced balustrade above. Because the balustrade openings were left as negatives in the mould, nothing had to be drilled or cut afterwards. The cap was finished in dark metal covering, and the finial was fitted before the scaffold came down.

Rising with the mosque

The minaret rose in step with the shell of the mosque. That means two crews sharing the same crane and scaffolding arrangement on site; get the planning wrong and one waits for the other. The stages were sequenced so that erecting the dome formwork and pouring the minaret modules never blocked one another.