“Simultaneous Perplexity”: The Paradise Garden as the Quintessential Visual Paradigm of Islamic Architecture and Beyond

The request of the editors to discuss what the fundamental concepts of Islamic architecture might be brought back memories of many such searches related to the architecture of various world cultures in which it has been my privilege to work over the past thirty-five years of architectural practice. Without hesitation, I considered that the answers had to deal with the themes of how we think about architecture; the important role that alchemy ¹ has played in Islamic architecture and the visual paradigm of the paradise garden. ²