Visiting Associate Professor
(Visiting Faculty Spring 2005)
Spring 2005 courses
| 4.620 Issues in Modern and Contemporary Islamic Architecture and Urbanism Heritage as a Battleground This seminar will look at how Heritage has been constructed in the debates of the architectural cultures in the modern and contemporary Islamic world. Why and how has heritage come to name a cluster of issues and values that galvanizes such strong positions and is invoked in such decisive actions, including the reshaping of cities, the dislocation of populations, and large investments of capital. What is the object of heritage? How does heritage relate to the historical imagination, the visible past, the construction of identity, and modernization? How does heritage intervene in such practices as museum building, archaeology, and preservation? What is its relationship to colonial regimes, nation states, and the global tourism industry? When is it “authentic” and when is it contested? What is its relationship to memory and spectacularization? When and how are aspects of “heritage” erased? The course will combine theoretical readings on the construction and exhibition of heritage with the critical examination of specific case studies of projects, sites and ideas. Required for SMArchS students affiliated with the Aga Khan Program. |
| 4.627 4.628 Special Problems in Islamic and Nonwestern Architecture 19th & 20th Century Architecture in the Eastern Arab World. This course discusses the evolution of architecture in the eastern Arab world (also known as the Arab Mashriq) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its geographic scope emphasizes Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Fertile Crescent. The course examines the production of certain works of architecture in the region as creative undertakings that address specific functional programs and physical givens ranging from technological conditions to climatic factors. It also presents the architecture of the region within the context of prevailing social, cultural, economic, and political forces. It therefore links that architecture to the volatile conditions that have defined the evolution of the region during the period under consideration, and that have given the region considerable (and some would argue disproportionate) weight within the context of international politics. The course consequently connects the architecture of the region to various interrelated issues such as Westernization, modernization, and the relationship between the architect and the state. Although the course is partly thematic in its emphasis, it also is a survey course that provides an overview of the development of architecture in the region during the modern period. A major challenge in putting together such a survey is that the amount of published documentation available regarding this subject is incomplete, sporadic, and very often disseminated only locally. In contrast to more established chronologically and geographically defined fields of architectural history, where taxonomic systems are more or less established, and a corpus of works of architecture representing each field generally is agreed upon, we do not have any common ground from which to begin an inquiry addressing the architecture of the Arab Mashriq during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This course therefore presents points of reference that help develop an autonomous field of study out of the works of architecture it examines. Finally, this course emphasizes on one level bringing together the local knowledge on architecture available for the various geographic components of the Arab Mashriq and developing that knowledge into a regional history. The course also shows that the architecture of the region is more intimately connected to international architectural developments than generally is perceived. Over the past century, various internationally acclaimed architects have carried out designs (both built and un-built) in the region. These include, among others, Auguste Perret, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer, Alvar Aalto, Gordon Bunshaft, Paul Rudolph, Kenzo Tange, Robert Venturi, Ricardo Bofill, Michael Graves, Jean Nouvel, Stephen Holl, and Zaha Hadid. |