International Journal of Islamic Architecture - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016

This article presents a series of ideas, a mosaic if you will, about the ways in which cultural tourism design conceives and presents places and how these are received and experienced. Starting with how individuals confront culture, where forms of tourism combine religious and social aspects, it considers the impact of those great contemporary equalizers – television and the internet – on the mechanisms through which we interpret the places we visit. Part of this mix entails the experience of place and the narratives presented by the native cultures to the visitor through the expression of (authentic?) places and architectures. These are illustrated by the manifestation of different types of hotels and resorts within four main rubrics: the vernacular resort evoking a sense of place; efficient place of business within the construct of modernism; the supra-real images of twenty-first century globalization; and the reference to the past through historic built environments. This essay outlines a chain of events in touristic architecture: from that of the design and production, its transmission and impact, to the interpretation of the object by architects and writers; and its impact on the receivers – the tourist being amongst them. Aided (or confused) by the new media, tourist architecture at its worst can be an excuse for the indulgence in neo-vernacular kitsch and the formulaic, but at its best may be viewed as aiding a process of self-definition – an exploration of cultural identity.

This article documents the Parisian education of two Armenian-Ottoman architects in Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century. Following Nigog˘os and Serkis Balyan to the Collège Sainte-Barbe, the École Centrale and the École des Beaux-Arts, it traces aspects of the education they were exposed to there. The article then moves on to investigate where the impact of this education can be seen in the specific architectural works of these individuals. Showing how the architects manipulated their Parisian education to express an Ottoman renaissance, the article stresses how these Ottoman subjects were not creating imitative works but were creative actors in their own right, engaging in an original way with what they had learned, and pragmatically refashioning it for their particular setting.

The Jordan Gate Towers of Amman, a luxury development, provide a case study of forms of planning practice undertaken as part of neoliberal processes in a city aspiring for regional relevance, well timed with the receipt of transnational capital investment. Deregulated planning practice in Amman became a vehicle for the inversion of the process of eminent domain and the subsequent appropriation of public property for private profit. The result is a compromise of public interest in favor of government collaboration with private developers, a conundrum examined in this article through the case of the Jordan Gate Towers. Findings are based upon data and documents collected from the municipality, and interviews with city officials.

After the September 1962 earthquake in the Qazvin region of Iran, Israel sent planning experts to assist Iranian relief efforts. A small project, the reconstruction of one village, led to a larger project initiated by the United Nations, in which a team of experts from Israel were sent to survey and plan the region devastated by the quake. This resulted in a comprehensive regional plan, and detailed plans for several villages. Israeli assistance to Iran was also intended to reinforce bilateral relations between the countries. The disaster offered an opportunity for demonstrating Israeli expertise in a range of fields including architecture, and to consolidate Israel’s international image as an agent for development. This article examines transnational exchange via professional expertise, using the participation of Israeli architects in the rebuilding of Qazvin as a case study, in order to demonstrate that architects were agents of Israel’s diplomatic goals. The architects had professional objectives, namely the creation of a modern plan for the region and its villages. At the same time, these objectives were intertwined with the Shah of Iran’s national modernization plan, and with Israel’s desire to become Iran’s ally in this drive for change and modernization, in the hope of promoting a different, more modern, Middle East.

In the two decades following the creation of Pakistan,1 its government embarked on a lofty project to establish Muslim nationalism as both a binding factor for the country’s culturally different east and west halves, and as a liberating force for the emerging Third World. A major focus of this project was to build democratic institutions including parliament buildings, universities, education training centres and polytechnic institutes. However, Pakistan’s shortage of architects and the government’s Cold War bent toward the United States eventually led to requests for technical assistance from the US Agency for International Development and the Ford Foundation. Through these partnerships Pakistan secured consultancy services from leading European and American architects. This article focuses on the work of Constantinos A. Doxiadis, whose projects included education reform, a university campus, a master plan of Pakistan’s new capital, Islamabad and a controversial refugee settlement project. This article asserts that the treatment of architecture as a flexible armature that could blend regional symbolism, Islamic iconography and technological modernism was the common theme underpinning Doxiadis Associates’s work in Pakistan. The result can be considered a strategy to transform Pakistan’s overarching Muslim nationalism into a hybrid of postcolonial selfhood and newly anointed citizenship that was infused with the United States’s post-war reformation spirit.

The shrine of Thag Baba was constructed in the seventeenth century by the Mughals in their frontier province of Kashmir. Built for a Sufi saint whose history is lost in legends, this lone surviving Mughal tomb in Kashmir, divorced from local building traditions, represents the imperial decorative techniques of the Mughal court and served as a symbol of royal authority. Examining the history of the shrine and its possible patronage, this article traces its evolution and the reasons behind its decay following completion. It examines how issues of conservation and consolidation of the building were addressed with an aim to promote renewed community involvement and development. Highlighting the project as an exemplar, the article reflects on contemporary issues and challenges adversely affecting Kashmir’s built heritage and on how these might be addressed.

PERSIAN ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE: ARCHITECTURE, MEHRDAD HEJAZI AND FATEMEH MEHDIZADEH SARADJ (EDS) (2014) Boston: WIT Press, 171 pp., ISBN 9781845644123, $198.00 (hardback)

PERSIAN ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE: STRUCTURE, MEHRDAD HEJAZI AND FATEMEH MEHDIZADEH SARADJ (EDS) (2014) Boston: WIT Press, 264 pp., ISBN: 9781845648824, $198.00 (hardback)

PERSIAN ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE: CONSERVATION, MEHRDAD HEJAZI AND FATEMEH MEHDIZADEH SARADJ (EDS) (2014) Boston: WIT Press, 184 pp., ISBN: 9781845648848, $198.00 (hardback)

S¸EHRENGIZ: URBAN RITUALS AND DEVIANT SUFI MYSTICISM IN OTTOMAN ISTANBUL, B. DENIZ ÇALIS¸-KURAL (2014) Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 290 pp., 29 b/w illus., ISBN 9781472432261, $109.95 (hardback)

MIMESIS ACROSS EMPIRES: ARTWORKS AND NETWORKS IN INDIA, 1765–1860, NATASHA EATON (2014) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 331 pp., 41 colour and 3 b/w illus., bibliography, ISBN 9780822354666, $75 (hardback), ISBN 9780822354802, $25 (paperback)

MAKING SPACE: SUFIS AND SETTLERS IN EARLY MODERN INDIA, NILE GREEN (2012) New York: Oxford University Press, xvii + 339 pp., 20 b/w illus., ISBN 9780198077961, $60.00 (hardback)

MECHANISMS OF EXCHANGE: TRANSMISSION IN MEDIEVAL ART AND ARCHITECTURE CA. 1000–1500, ALICIA WALKER AND HEATHER GROSSMAN (EDS) (2013) Leiden: Brill, 320 pp., ISBN: 9789004249776, $82.00 (paperback)

BEYOND ANITKABI.R: THE FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE OF ATATÜRK (THE CONSTRUCTION AND MAINTENANCE OF NATIONAL MEMORY), CHRISTOPHER S. WILSON (2013) Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 162pp. 27 illus., ISBN 9781409429777, $114.95 (hardback)

‘THE FASCINATION OF PERSIA: THE PERSIAN-EUROPEAN DIALOGUE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ART & CONTEMPORARY ART FROM TEHRAN’, MUSEUM RIETBERG, ZÜRICH, SWITZERLAND, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013–JANUARY 12, 2014

‘DATUMM: DOCUMENTING AND ARCHIVING TURKISH MODERN FURNITURE’, AHMED ADNAN SAYGUN ARTS CENTRE, İZMİR, TURKEY, FEBRUARY 6–24, 2015

‘FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURES OF LEARNING IN ISLAMIC ART’, FOURTH BIENNIAL SYMPOSIUM, HISTORIANS OF ISLAMIC ART ASSOCIATION, Aga Khan Museum , Toronto , Canada , OCTOBER 16–18, 2014

‘THE LEVANTINES: COMMERCE & DIPLOMACY’, FIRST INTERNATIONAL LEVANTINE CONFERENCE, THE LEVANTINE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, BRITISH CONSULATE-GENERAL, ISTANBUL AND ITALIAN INSTITUTE OF CULTURE, ISTANBUL, TURKEY, NOVEMBER 3–5, 2014