VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

The sublime of Islamic architecture is most legible in small-scale structures, where texture, shade, shadow, and spatial proportion become primary design qualities. Non-religious building types, residential courtyards, civic squares, bathhouses, markets, and public spaces are the most socially embedded carriers of Islamic design principles, yet their architectural lineage has remained largely unread. Southern Spain offers an exceptional laboratory for tracing this DNA, where centuries of urban development have gradually reduced rich design principles to superficial features, their deeper meanings lost in translation. This paper quantifies the identified features and motifs of Islamic Andalusian architecture, conceptualised here as “Chromosomes”, a diagnostic ontology capable of being expressed, suppressed, mutated, or transmitted across generations of buildings, independent of political or religious change. Focusing on commercial street facades across three intact historic cities, Córdoba, Granada, and Seville, the paper analyses hybrid facades ranging from the 14th century to the contemporary, examining where references to Islamic heritage are explicit, conspicuous, or residual. Through this chromosomal framework, the paper lays the groundwork for a diagnostic toolkit capable of revealing which design principles have persisted, which have mutated, and which have been reduced to ornamental accessories. By bridging qualitative cultural heritage analysis with quantitative spatial methods, it reintroduces Islamic architecture as a core genetic influence rather than a stylistic imitation. The outcomes will benefit architects, urban designers, and heritage practitioners engaged in questions of identity, continuity, and the future of culturally embedded urban fabric. The study aims to recover an architectural lineage that has always been present throughout history in Spain and the Islamic world but has remained unread.