Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East – serie

Even a casual observer can spy traces of Islamic architecture and design on buildings all over the world, a reminder that artistic traditions and visual culture have never been limited to their region or country of origin, but rather are highly diffusible.This book brings together scholars from architectural studies, design, art history and other fields to challenge and expand concepts of Islamic architecture. Ranging from eighteenth-century Ottoman tents to manifestations of Islamic motifs in 1960s Hawaii, this richly illustrated volume raises key questions about Islamic architecture, and, more broadly, about how we can rethink our understanding of material, artistic and cultural mobility in the modern world.

Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World explores how architectural traditions and practices were shared and exchanged across national borders throughout the world, departing from a narrative that casts European actors as the importers and exporters of Islamic designs and skills. Looking to cases that touch on empire building, modernization, statecraft, and diplomacy, this book examines how these processes have been contingent on a web of expertise informed by a rich and varied array of authors and contexts since the 1800s.The chapters in this volume, organized around the leitmotif of expertise, demonstrate the thematic importance and specific utility of in-depth and broad-ranging knowledge in shaping the understanding of architecture in the Islamic world from the nineteenth century to the present. Specific case studies include European gardeners in Ottoman courts, Polish architects in Kuwait, Israeli expertise in Iran, monument archiving in India, religious spaces in Swedish suburbs, and more.This is the latest title in Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East, a series devoted to the most recent scholarship concerning architecture, landscape, and urban design of the Middle East and of regions shaped by diasporic communities more globally.

This volume considers the major trends and developments in Iranian architecture during the 1960s and 70s in order to further our understanding of the underpinnings and intentions of Persian architecture during this period. While narrative explorations of modernism have relied heavily upon classifications based on western experiences and influences, this book provides a more holistic view of the development of Persian architecture by studying both the internal and external forces that influenced it in the late twentieth century. The chapters compiled in Architectural Dynamics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran, accompanied by more than eighty images, shed light on the fascinating — and sometimes controversial — evolution of Iranian architecture and its constant quest for a new paradigm of cultural identity.

This collection discusses the innovative and experimental architecture of Israel during its first three decades following the nation’s establishment in 1948. Written by leading researchers, the volume highlights new perspectives on the topic, discussing the inception, modernization, and habitation of historic and lesser-researched areas alike in its interrogation. Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler and Anat Geva show how Israeli nation building, in its cultural, political, and historical contexts, constituted an exceptional experiment in modern architecture. Examples include modern experiments in mass housing design; public architecture such as exhibition spaces, youth villages, and synagogues; a necessary consideration of climate in modern architectural experiments; and the exportation of Israeli modern architecture to other countries.

The book documents the history and morphology of the Ancient City of Aleppo, outlining first the urbanistic development of the city and then focusing on the architectural heritage with specific focus on the domestic architecture, addressing the initiatives to reconstruct and rehabilitate the urban fabric. The author argues in favour of the safeguarding and rehabilitation of the architectural heritage to protect the cultural memory of the inhabitants of Aleppo, despite of the destruction of architecture due to the recent war.Through a capillary documentation of the palimpsest of Aleppo – the peculiar characteristics of its courtyard houses and the neighbourhoods of Bayyada, Bab Quinnesrin and al-Farafra – this is a theoretical and practical handbook for architects, urban planners and restorers alike. Through this analytical discussion of the city’s urban fabric, it introduces the concept of the cultural urban landscape acting as a 'cohesive territorial organism', nourished by different cultures, in which contrasting scales of land, city and neighbourhood are interconnected in a fractal state. With a focus on retaining the uniqueness and diversity of this residential typology, which bore witness to the rich cultural history of Syria and the Middle East as a whole, Neglia maps a future reconstruction that focuses on cultural continuity, tradition and the re-establishment of a crucial social memory.Of particular interest and relevance to cultural heritage experts, urban planners architects and designers. Also, to researchers, scholars and students interested in studies on urban morphology and building typology, UNESCO and ICOMOS. Scholars and students interested in the Middle East.Will also be of significant interest to professionals dealing with the implementation of rehabilitation measures in other cities inscribed on the Word Cultural Heritage List, or cities with a sound historic fabric which has been destroyed due to war or other events.

Concerned with the relationship between Friday mosque and city in the Islamic context. Focusing particularly on the Friday mosque, the book aims at exploring the concept of liminal(ity) in spatial terms and discuss it in terms of the relationship between the Friday mosque and its surrounding urban context. Transition spaces/zones between the mosque and the urban context are discussed through the case studies from various contexts. In doing so, the manuscript reveals different forms of liminality in spatial sense.Considers widely-studied topics such as the ‘Friday mosque’ or the ‘Islamic city’ through a fresh new lens, critically examining each case study in its own spatial urban and socio-cultural context. While these two well-known themes – concepts that once defined the field – have been widely studied by historians of Islamic architecture and urbanism, this collection specifically addresses the functional and spatial ambiguity or liminality between these spaces. Thus, instead of addressing the Friday mosque as the central signifier of the ‘Islamic city’, the articles in this volume provide evidence that there was (and continues to be) a tremendous variety in the way architectural borders became fluid in and around Friday mosques across the Islamic geography, from Cordoba to Jerusalem and from London to Lahore.By historicizing different cases and contributing to our knowledge of the way human agency through ritual and politics shaped the physical and social fabric of the city, the papers collectively challenge the generalizing and reductionist tendencies in earlier scholarship.  The disciplinary approaches are varied, and include archaeology, art history, history, epigraphy and architecture.  The original approach in the book, addressing of the topic of liminality from different points of view and in different periods, creates a fresh approach that invites students and scholars to think deeply about the imbrication of congregational mosques in the daily life of the cities that host them. Moreover, in considering mosque and city together, the mosque appears as a living space subject to change and history and made with political and social purpose, rather than as a holy space disconnected from the rest of the world.Traditional studies of mosques focus on architecture and aesthetic language and try to establish a lineal development of the building typology connected to the history of Islam across different territories. The present study offers an alternative (though not competing) perspective where locality and politics play a major role in the materialization of the congregational mosque as a religious and communal space. The wide historical frame enables comparison of congregational mosques in different historical periods: it is particularly a strong contrast to see how the liminality of the mosque changes between the early and classical periods of Islam on one side and the more contemporary times on the other. The consideration of diverging cultural, political and sectarian settings is another interesting element of comparison. Primary market will include scholars, academics and students working on or studying Islamic studies, particularly Islamic history, Islamic architecture and Islamic archaeology. Also of relevance to architectural historians, architects, art historians, city planners, city historians, urban designers, architectural critics, historians, sociologists, archeologists, and those interested in religious studies, and in archaeology of religion.

In the aftermath of the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage pursued by Islamist groups like ISIS, many observers have erroneously come to associate Islamic doctrine and practice with such acts. This book explores the diverse ways Muslims have engaged with the material legacies of ancient and pre-Islamic societies, as well as how Islam’s own heritage has been framed and experienced over time.This is a new collection of articles previously available in issues of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.The tragically familiar spectacles of cultural heritage destruction performed by the Islamic State group (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq are frequently presented as barbaric, baffling, and far outside the bounds of what are imagined to be normative, 'civilized' uses of the past. Often superficially explained as an attempt to stamp out idolatry or as a fundamentalist desire to revive and enforce a return to a purified monotheism, analysis of these spectacles of heritage violence posits two things: that there is, fact, an 'Islamic' manner of imagining the past – its architectural manifestations, its traces and localities – and that actions carried out at these localities, whether constructive or destructive, have moral or ethical consequences for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In this reading, the iconoclastic actions of ISIS and similar groups, for example the Taliban or the Wahhabi monarchy in Saudi Arabia, are represented as one, albeit extreme, manifestation of an assumedly pervasive and historically on-going Islamic antipathy toward images and pre-contemporary holy localities in particular, and, more broadly, toward the idea of heritage and the uses to which it has been put by modern nationalism. But long before the emergence of ISIS and other so-called Islamist iconoclasts, and perhaps as early as the rise of Islam itself, Muslims imagined Islamic and pre-Islamic antiquity and its localities in myriad ways: as sites of memory, spaces of healing, or places imbued with didactic, historical, and moral power. Ancient statuary were deployed as talismans, paintings were interpreted to foretell and reify the coming of Islam, and temples of ancient gods and churches devoted to holy saints were converted into mosques in ways that preserved their original meaning and, sometimes, even their architectural ornament and fabric. Often, such localities were valued simply as places that elicited a sense of awe and wonder, or of reflection on the present relevance of history and the greatness of past empires, a theme so prevalent it created distinct genres of Arabic and Persian literature (aja’ib, fada’il). Sites like Ctesiphon, the ancient capital of the Zoroastrian Sasanians, or the Temple Mount, where the Jewish temple had stood, were embraced by early companions of the Prophet Muhammad and incorporated into Islamic notions of the self. Furthermore, various Islamic interpretive communities as well as Jews and Christians often shared holy places and had similar haptic, sensorial, and ritual connections that enabled them to imagine place in similar ways. These engagements were often more dynamic and purposeful than conventional scholarly notions of 'influence' and 'transmission' can account for. And yet, Muslims also sometimes destroyed ancient places or powerfully reimagined them to serve their own purposes, as for example in the aftermath of the Crusader presence in the Holy Land or in the destruction, reuse and rebuilding of ancient Buddhist and Hindu sites in the Eastern Islamic lands and South Asia.This volume presents thirteen essays by leading scholars that address the issue of Islamic interest in the material past of the ancient and Islamic world, with essays examining attitudes about antiquarianism in the Islamic world from medieval times to the present.Main readership will be among scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, researchers, educators and academic libraries working or studying in the fields of the ancient world, antiquities, heritage and the Islamic world.

Through Islamic Architecture Today and Tomorrow, established experts, designers, and newer scholars from the world of ‘Islamic architecture’, broadly conceived, consider the field’s changing nature and continued relevance in our rapidly globalizing context. Reflective essays address the meaning of ‘Islamic’ in built environments, as well as the geographical, chronological, and disciplinary diversity of a dynamic field of study that encompasses far more than mosques and tombs. Essays address the use and interpretation of historic structures and spaces, in addition to contemporary design, conservation, and touristic experience, as well as research, publication, and pedagogical practices.It introduces scholars and practitioners to the state of Islamic architecture as a field of inquiry and provides a snapshot of the issues and challenges facing the field today. Looking forward, it invites readers to consider built environments in Islamic contexts as integral to global systems from an interdisciplinary and inclusive perspective. While this volume offers nuanced perspectives on a host of pressing questions, it ultimately aims to advance a necessarily on-going conversation.The book will have wide appeal among architectural historians, art historians, and other scholars working on material in the traditional Islamic regions of the world (North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia) and beyond, as well as scholars of religion and society. Practicing architects, landscape architects, planners, preservationists, and heritage managers in the regions addressed may also be interested in the volume. Essays have been written with non-specialist and student readers in mind. Undergraduate, graduate, and design students may use selected essays, or the entire collection, in university or graduate school coursework in architecture and Middle Eastern or Islamic studies.

The short lived Tulip Era breathed a new life into Ottoman social life and novel elements of art, architecture and new spaces of leisure and entertainment that both men and women could participate and enjoy emerged during the early 18th century. Later, during the 19th century, triggered by the state policies to establish closer relationship with European states, as well as by the royal urge to be seen and felt by their subjects more intensively and more interactively, these novelties in social life were predominantly adopted and instrumentalized by the ruling elite and found their reflection in major urban centers of the empire. With the emulation of the ruling elite by various classes and due to an increasing social mobility among classes, the new forms of entertainment and recreation gradually permeated into the rest of the society and ended up having a long-term impact on the Ottoman society.Hence, during the 19th century, a modern urban life in Ottoman cities has emerged, shaped by these new forms of recreation and entertainment and by new regimes of visibility. Ripping open of their traditional nuclei in the second half of the 19th century, these urban centers accommodated –along with new trade, financial, industrial and residential facilities– different types of entertainment and recreation, ranging from opera to cinema and from concerts to sports. Thus the late-Ottoman cities witnessed the emergence of new architectural and urban facilities, such as theatres, opera houses, clubs, performance halls, sports fields, and public parks. These spaces of entertainment and spectacle represented the modernizing face of the empire and also embraced by the Republican elite after the foundation of the young Turkish Republic. These public/social spaces were utilized for the making of the modern Turkish nation.This edited volume offers an analysis of the forms and spaces of spectacle, entertainment, and recreation during the late Ottoman and early Republican eras. Each article focuses on different forms on spectacle, entertainment or recreation in varied cities of Ottoman Empire or Republican Turkey. The edited volume aims not only to shed light on how such urban or architectural spaces were developed and shaped, but also to scrutinize their impact on social, cultural, urban life in the modernizing Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey.Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.

This collection seeks to explore alternative definitions of bounded identities, facilitating new approaches to spatial and architectural forms. Taking as its starting point the emergence of a new sense of ‘boundary’ emerged from the post-19th century dissolution of large, heterogeneous empires into a mosaic of nation-states in the Islamic world. This new sense of boundaries has not only determined the ways in which we imagine and construct the idea of modern citizenship, but also redefines relationships between the nation, citizenship, cities and architecture.It brings critical perspectives to our understanding of the interrelation between the accumulated flows and the evolving concepts of boundary in predominantly Muslim societies and within the global Muslim diaspora. Essays in this book seeks to investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness that have been devised to define, enable, obstruct, accumulate and/or control flows able to disrupt bounded territories or identities.More generally, the book explores how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implication of defining modern self. The essays in this volume collectively address how the construction of self is primarily a spatial event and operated within the crucial nexus of power-knowledge-space. Contributors investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness, how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implications for how we define the modern self.  Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.

The presence of the refugee in the contemporary metropolis is marked by precarity, a quality that has become a characteristic feature of the neoliberal urban milieu. Bringing together essays from diverse disciplines, from architectural history to cultural anthropology and urban planning, this collection sheds light on both the specificities of the contemporary urban condition that affects the refugees and the multi-dimensional impact that the refugees have on the city. The authors propose investigating this connection through three interlinked themes: identity (informality, imagination and belonging); place (transnational homemaking practices); and site (the navigation of urban space).In recent years, there has been a significant growth in scholarship on forced migration, particularly on the relationship between displacement and the built environment. Scholars have focused on spatial practices and forms that arise under conditions of displacement, with much attention given to refugee camps and the social and political aspects of temporariness. While these issues are important, the essays in this volume aim to contribute to a less explored aspect of displacement, namely the interaction between refugees and the cities they inhabit. In this respect, the volume underlines the specificity of the urban refugee as well as their spatial agency and investigates the irreversible effect they have on the contemporary urban condition.The authors argue that viewing urban refugees solely as dislocated individuals outside the camp-like spaces of containment fails to understand the agency of the urban refugee and the blurred boundaries of identity that result. The term "refugee crisis" objectifies and denies active agency to refugees, homogenizing dislocated individuals and groups. The neoliberalization of the past four decades has led to the precarization of labour and the displacement of refugees, who frequently blend into the urban environment as hidden populations. Refugees are subjected to constant surveillance and the state's attempts to control them. However, these attempts are not uncontested, and the involvement of activist interventions further politicizes the urban refugee.

This collection explores the dynamic place of Muslim visual and expressive culture in processes of decolonization across the African continent. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in the stories we tell about Islamic art, it likewise contributes to recent widespread efforts to “decolonize” the art historical canon.The contributors to this volume explore the dynamic place of Islamic art, architecture, and creative expression in processes of decolonization across the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together new work by leading specialists in the fields of African, Islamic, and modern arts and visual cultures, the book directs unprecedented attention to the agency and contributions of African and Muslim artists in articulating modernities in local and international arenas. Interdisciplinary and transregional in scope, it enriches the under-told story of Muslim experiences and expression on the African continent, home to nearly half a million Muslims, or a third of the global Muslim population.Furthermore, it elucidates the role of Islam and its expressive cultures in post-colonial articulations of modern identities and heritage, as expressed by a diverse range of actors and communities based in Africa and its diaspora; as such, the book counters notions of Islam as a retrograde or static societal phenomenon in Africa or elsewhere. Contributors propose new methodologies for accentuating human agency and experience over superficial disciplinary boundaries in the stories we tell about art-making and visual expression, thus contributing to widespread efforts to decolonize scholarship on histories of modern expression.

Presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa region from queer artists as well as scholars who work on queer themes. With contributions from both scholars and artists, this volume demonstrates that queer visual culture in the SWANA region is not only extant, but is also entering an era of exciting growth in terms of its versatility and consciousness. The volume focuses on artworks produced in the contemporary era while recognizing historical and contextual connections to Islamic art and culture withinlocalities and regions from the pre-modern and modern eras. By framing this volume as unambiguously located within queer studies, the editors challenge existing literature that merely includes some examples of queer studies or queer representation, but does not necessarily use queer studies as a lens through which to engage with visual culture and/or with the SWANA region. Through four interrelated sections - Gender and Normativity, Trans* Articulations, Intersectional Sexuality, and Queer SWANA - this volume probes several previously unexplored academic areas, namely the intersections of queer studies with other fields.Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.

Architectural expressions resonant with Islamic traditions appear in diverse modes across the Americas, from Andalusian-inspired colonial patios in Peru to the modern and contemporary patronage of immigrant communities in the United States and Canada. This volume examines the multiple manifestations of Islamic architecture that permeate the region’s built environment to invite an expanded framing of this architectural legacy via a hemispheric consideration of aesthetics, narrative, and patronage.Chapters consider a broad range of topics from the migration of aesthetic traditions and construction techniques tied to the architectural forms of the Islamic world in the colonial “New World,” to the direct contributions of modern and contemporary migrants in shaping a collective identity and the built environment.By placing in productive dialogue sites that represent Islamic and Islamicate architecture across North and South America – two areas outside of the traditional conceptions of the Islamic world– this volume bridges transregional and transcultural gaps in the current literature.