Current Subjects – AKPIA@MIT

Fall 2025

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4.614 Introduction to Islamic Architecture

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Instructor | Nasser Rabbat

Meeting | Tuesdays and Thursdays 11-12:30

in 5-216

T.A. Maitha Almazrooei

Examines the history of Islamic architecture spanning fifteen centuries on three continents – Asia, Africa, Europe. Students study representative examples from the 7th century House of the Prophet to the current high-rises of Dubai, in conjunction with their religious, urban, social, political, and intellectual environments. Crosscultural exchanges are highlighted from late Antique Arabia down to the interaction with the West in the age of colonialism and the consequent revival of Islamic architecture today.

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4.622 Archive Fever: Theory and Method

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Instructor | Huma Gupta

Meeting | Fridays 9-2

in 5-216

T.A. Lea Miranda

This seminar deals with how artists, archivists, architects, and historians have faced the myriad archive fevers and archival turns of the 20th and 21st centuries. This period has seen a marked shift between archives being used as ‘source’ to becoming a ‘subject’ of critical inquiry. However, these questions are not limited to the past few centuries. Rather, the philosophical questions of history and its relationship with the archive spans millennia from Assyrian clay tablets and Shang dynasty oracle bones to later examples of city- or trade-based archives in Florence and the post-revolutionary foundation of the French national archives. Critical scholarship asks which ‘rules of classification, rules of framing and rules of practice’ determine the contents of an archive and enable ‘knowledge’ to be recognized (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). And these questions are motivated by an argument that political power is inextricably linked with who can create, access, participate in, and interpret the archive and by extension, an institutionalized collective memory (Derrida, 1995). In Milan Kundera’s words, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This course thus interrogates how “the architect and the archive are inseparable” and how the archivist and the historian are entangled to attend to the contested memories and denied histories embodied within buildings, cultural institutions, and architectures (Wigley, 1995).

Through visits and hands-on research in archives, students will develop a critical methodology that can be applied to their own research and practice. Students will learn to interpret and triangulate primary sources, such as texts, films, maps, drawings, manuscripts, correspondence, government documents, photographs, illustrations, and archive-based artworks. Weekly readings will cover concepts like the origins of the archive, architectural legacy, archives as spatial structures, projects to expand the canon, restitution, the art of crafting archives, the digital turn, parafictional archives, and the archives of critical theory.

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4.621 Orientalism, Colonialism, and Representation

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Instructor | Nasser Rabbat

Meeting | Wednesdays 2-5

in 5-216

T.A. Catherine McNally

Seminar on the politics of representation with special focus on Orientalist traditions in architecture, art, literature, and scholarship. Critically analyzes pivotal texts, projects, and artworks that reflect the encounters between the West and the Orient from Antiquity to the present. Discusses how political, ideological, and religious attitudes inform the construction and reproduction of Western knowledge about the Islamic world. Research paper required. Open to qualified undergraduates.

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4.s65 Special Subject: Advanced Study in Islamic Architecture – Decolonial Ecologies

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Instructor | Huma Gupta

Meeting |Thursdays 9-12

in 5-231

T.A. Fahad Zuberi

This seminar examines the relationship between political ecology, ecological crises, and the process of (de)colonization. Students will critically analyze historical understandings of decolonization and contemporary proposals for decolonial ecologies. Following Stefanie K. Dunning’s invocation “May our egos die so that the world may live,” this seminar asks, how can we continually transform our praxis on a personal and structural level to create the possibility and space for decolonial ecologies? And whose imaginations are presently shaping our collective futures? Open for cross-registration. And open to undergraduates with instructor’s permission.

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Spring 2025

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4.617 Advanced Study in Islamic Urban History – The Colonial City: Past, Present, and Future

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Instructor | Nasser Rabbat

Meeting |Tuesdays 2-5 pm

in 5-216

T.A.|Maia Simon

The colonial city represents a nexus of power, culture, and spatial organization, serving as both a tool of imperial expansion and a site of (asymmetrical) exchange. This seminar examines the historical, theoretical, and critical dimensions of colonial cities, tracing their evolution from the ancient Greek polis to the present day and extending into speculative futures of space colonization. By exploring diverse models and case studies, this seminar highlights how colonial urbanism shaped the political, social, and cultural landscapes of cities acrosshistory and geography.

Historically, colonial cities have embodied the ambitions of empires to conquer and settle new territories, from the Roman castrum to Renaissance-era trading hubs and British colonial centers in India. These cities were not only practical mechanisms of governance and control but also symbolic representations of domination and ideology. Theoretical frameworks, such as those underpinning the Hippodamian model of Greek colonies or Haussmannian urban planning in 19th-century France, reveal the deliberate strategies behind spatial design and social organization. Critically, this seminar engages with the legacies of colonialism, interrogating how colonial urban experiments have perpetuated inequalities and influenced contemporary postcolonial cities.

Looking forward, the concept of colonial urbanism extends beyond Earth, as aspirations for space colonization echo historical practices of conquest and settlement. The exploration of the colonial city invites critical reflection on the enduring impact of colonial ideologies on urban environments, emphasizing the need to reimagine cities as spaces of inclusivity and resistance. Through a cross-cultural, cross-temporal, and interdisciplinary approach, this seminar provides a comprehensive understanding of the colonial city as both a historical phenomenon and a lens for analyzing current and future urban paradigms.

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4.s60 Undergraduate | 4.s62 Graduate | Special Subject: History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture &

Art (meets with 4.s62) – Environmental Histories of Architecture

Note: for the Spring 2025 term, 4.s60 is a HASS-H subject

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Instructors |Huma Gupta |Caroline Murphy

Meeting | Mondays and Wednesdays 11-12:30pm

in 5-233

T.A.|Krista Mileva-Frank

How does architecture impact the environment? How does the environment impact architecture? Drawing on case studies from the ancient world to the present day, and from geographies across the globe, this class will explore the myriad ways in which the creation of architecture has involved the modification of natural environments and climates and the exploitation of resources. Rather than examining architecture’s history as a succession of monuments, this course investigates the metabolic processes of raw material extraction, transportation, and manipulation that made the creation of buildings, infrastructures, and designed landscapes possible in the first place. Students will explore how material and climatic considerations played into the design and aesthetic of buildings at various points in time, while gaining an awareness of the largely-invisible, increasingly far-flung networks of environmental management and labor that underpin our built environment.

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4.s69 Special Subject: Advanced Study in the History of Urban Form — Alternative Futures from the

Sahara: Design Strategies for Reclaiming Commons

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Instructor |Safouan Azouzi

Meeting | Mondays 9:30 -12:30

in 26-142

This course examines the challenges faced by the oasis agro-ecosystems, focusing on Tunisia’s Nefzawa region as a case study and delves into the historical, environmental, and socio-economic factors at play in the region. By reviewing the literature, analyzing climate projections, and utilizing Earth observation data, students will learn about the unsustainable use of natural resources, worsened by climate change and land/water dispossession processes.

The course will highlight pathways to resilience and alternative economic models centered on “commons” and “oasis connectivity.” We will identify ways to integrate/combine traditional low-tech commoning practices with modern technology to enhance community resilience and promote biodiversity, while seeking innovative approaches that go beyond simply preserving environmental and agricultural heritage.

Students will participate in scenario-building exercises for the Nefzawa oases, drawing insights applicable to broader urban areas across the Arab world, many of which are projected to become uninhabitable by the end of the century. The course will emphasize social and climate justice as essential components of sustainable futures, positioning design as a tool for societal transformation and collective action.

In this interdisciplinary setting, that bridges humanities and STEM fields, students will critically assess the balance between innovation and remembrance in design. They will explore how these unique eco-social landscapes can inform broader decolonial frameworks in architecture, urban planning, and design, addressing urgent challenges like climate change, resource scarcity, and socio-economic inequality. In this studio, we will delve into the dual narratives of the heavenly aspects and imaginaries of oases while confronting the harsh realities of plunder, drought, and ecological destruction.

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Fall 2024

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4.614 Building Islam

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Instructor | Nasser Rabbat

(nasser@mit.edu)

Meeting | Tuesdays and Thursdays 11 -12:30

in 5-216

T.A. Catherine McNally

Examines the history of Islamic architecture and culture spanning fifteen centuries on three continents – Asia, Africa, Europe. Students study a number of representative examples, from the 7th century House of the Prophet to the current high-rises of Dubai, in conjunction with their urban, social, political, and intellectual environments at the time of their construction.

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Spring 2024

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4.616 Culture and Architecture: Through The Lens of Late Antiquity

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Instructor: Nasser Rabbat

(nasser@mit.edu)

Meeting| Wednesdays 3-6

in 5-216

T.A. Antonio Pacheco

Seminar on how culture interacts with architecture. Analyzes architecture as a conveyor of messages that transcend stylistic, formal, and iconographic concerns to include an assessment of disciplinary, political, ideological, social, and cultural factors. Critically reviews methodologies and theoretical premises of studies on culture and meaning. Focuses on examples from Islamic history and establishes historical and theoretical frameworks for investigation.

‘Islam resembles what was later to be called “the Western tradition” in so many ways—the intellectual efforts to fuse Judeo-Christian scripture with the categories of Greek philosophy, the literary emphasis on courtly love, the scientific rationalism, the legalism, puritanical monotheism, missionary impulse, the expansionist mercantile capitalism—even the periodic waves of fascination with “Eastern mysticism”—that only the deepest historical prejudice could have blinded European historians to the conclusion that, in fact, this is the Western tradition.’

David Graeber, “There Never Was a West. Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between,” 2007

شمس العداوة حتى يستقاد لهم … وأعظم الناس أحلاماً إذا قدروا

الأخطل في قصيدة يمدح بها عبد الملك بن مروان من كتاب الأغاني

In Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Garth Fowden says, “There are roads out of Antiquity that do not lead to the Renaissance.” This statement challenges the dominant historical narrative, which posits the West as the only heir to the classical tradition, and opens the door for the Islamic culture to reclaim it.

Following Fowden, this seminar offers a revision of the concept of Late-Antiquity through an in-depth study of the early Islamic artistic and architectural culture. It examines the sequence of well-known Umayyad and early Abbasid monuments and artifacts (7th-8th c), which engaged in a vibrant and dynamic cross-cultural creative process. They treated Late Antiquity as a heritage to synthesize and build upon, or, sometimes, modify, deconstruct, or combine with other cultures with which the Islamic world came into contact. The patterns of appropriation, modification, and transposition are interpreted as a conscious attempt to chart a new, or, perhaps more accurately, a Post-Post-Classical art and architecture, which ultimately bypassed all ethnic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries within the Islamic world despite its political fragmentation and crossed over to inform and invigorate the emergent European awakening in the late Middle Ages. In other words, the seminar challenges the exclusive historiography of art history that posits the Western Renaissance as the sole heir of Antiquity and proposes another scenario with a more hybrid genealogy that invites us to rethink the impact of periodization on our conception of art history itself.

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Fall 2023

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4.624 Dwellings & Building: Cities in the Global South

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Instructor: Hum Gupta

(Guptah@mit.edu)

Meeting |Thursdays 11-2

3-133

T.A. Hampton Smith

This course examines the contemporary challenges and history of city planning on three continents – Africa, Asia, and South America. Students study a number of city plans, from the ‘informal’ settlements of Delhi and Nairobi, the modernist master plans of Brasilia and Baghdad, to climate action plans in various cities. The objective of the course is to understand the relationship between dwelling and building in the design of cities, in conjunction with the environmental, social, political, and intellectual environments at the time of their planning. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students. MArch students can register for 9 credits.

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4.621 Orientalism, Colonialism, and Representation

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Instructor | Nasser Rabbat

(nasser@mit.edu)

Meeting | Wednesdays 2-5

in 5-216

T.A. Diane Ahn

Seminar on the politics of representation with special focus on Orientalist traditions in architecture, art, literature, and scholarship. Critically analyzes pivotal texts, projects, and artworks that reflected the encounters between the West and the Orient from Antiquity to the present. Discusses how political, ideological, and religious attitudes informed the construction and reproduction of Western knowledge about the Islamic world as well as revisionist Eastern self-representations. Research paper required.

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4.614 Building Islam

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Instructor |Nasser Rabbat

(nasser@mit.edu)

Meeting| Tuesdays and Thursdays 11 -12:30

in 5-216

T.A.| Muhammad Feteha

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Spring 2023

4.617 Climate Futures, Cities Past

“Moving images move us: they project our imagination across the territory of the world they produce, drawing viewers into the movement of the storyline, the actions and reactions unfolding in and through and around the places and characters portrayed.” – Adrian J. Ivakhiv

Do moving images, indeed, move us? If so, who would like to move us, how, to where, and why? Cinematic meditations on the environment have grown and proliferated in the past century, ranging from experimental video art, indie favorites, agitprop, activist docs, to blockbuster productions. This course critically explores the narrative structures, aesthetic norms, environmental imaginations, and “biofictions” embedded in these film-worlds. The Senegalese novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène believed that cinema was a form of cours du soir (evening classes) that despite its high economic cost, was a powerful tool of pedagogy and persuasion due to its accessibility and mass appeal

Perhaps these very claims of film’s impact and ability to move people intellectually, creatively, and emotionally explains why it remains an attractive medium for artists, activists, and architects who are explicitly or implicitly engaged with environmental concerns. These concerns include indigenous struggles for territory, disasters, displacement, mining, energy, extinction, waste, water, toxicity, degradation, deforestation, symbionts, seed sovereignty, refugee housing, ecological collapse, climate trauma, policy paralysis, and resurgent presents and futures. Whether the promise that these films will lead to collective, desired change is fully realized or not, film-worlds create “an atlas of emotion” which connect sight, site, motion, and emotion. This course asks how can such connections help conjure other ways of living through feeling?

Climate Futures, Cities Past thus, engages with eco-philosophy, film theory, and architectural approaches to environmental crises through a seminar-workshop model. Students will examine material, perceptual, and social dimensions of visual storytelling as they pertain to our unstable conceptions of both ‘climate futures’ and ‘cities past.’ This inquiry is important given that the historic rise of industrialized urbanity with its insatiable demand for fuel, food, forced labor, along with formal and spatial hierarchies stands accused of causing or accelerating the climate crisis. Moreover, the politics of constructing climate as a matter of urgency through an elite imagination of an apocalyptic dystopia yet to come disregards that “the majority of the world already lives ‘within the collapse of civilization’,” one which is unevenly distributed across time and space.

In addition to completing readings and video reflections, students will produce a 7-to-10-minute essay film through an iterative process spanning thirteen weeks. This essay film can take several forms, such as a short documentary, animation, narrative short, interactive film, poetic meditation, moving image drawing, video art, LIDAR film, or data visualization-driven reportage à la Forensic Architecture. Students will be asked to work on a site or topic that is either the subject of their primary thesis research or part of an existing, long-term research project. Moreover, students will have access to extra-class instruction on Adobe Premiere Pro with a professional Film Editor, who will also help them finalize their projects.

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