International Journal of Islamic Architecture - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017

The establishment of British colonialism in nineteenth-century India cannot be separated from European projects that surveyed and classified the objects, peoples and practices of the subcontinent. Indian and European curiosity about the architectural monument took on a special significance at this time as historic buildings were seen as purveyors of ‘factual’ historical information. European agents, however, saw themselves as the sole authors and interlocutors of such modern and objective histories, marginalizing Indian knowledge as unscientific and fanciful. Yet Indians as well as Europeans mutually constituted the production of knowledge during this time, relying heavily on material culture to interpret the past. This article is based on the Aṣar-us-Ṣanādīd (Traces of Noblemen, 1st ed. 1847), a 600-page comprehensive survey of Delhi’s monuments written in Urdu by the Indian intellectual Syed Ahmad Khan. By examining the visual, chronological and comparative methodologies used in the Aṣar-us-Ṣanādīd, this article argues that Syed Ahmad created a thoroughly modern archive of Delhi’s historic architecture. In doing so, he both shaped the conceptual category of an architectural monument and heavily influenced later European articulations of the same.

Arguably Tunis’s premier public space, the iconic Avenue Bourguiba is today the product of over 150 years of manipulation, regulation and interpretation. Its development can be seen as an early example of thematic place branding, thereby complicating the notion that the widespread phenomenon is an exclusively postmodern and western one. In identifying three potential place-brand labels, this article considers the establishment of the ‘Parisian Colonial’ Avenue by French colonial authorities, its ‘Tunisian Modern’ modification at independence, and its more recent historicist ‘Parisian Global’ refurbishment within the contexts of colonialism, authoritarian governance and globalization. On the eve of the January 2011 revolution, the space reinforced the Ben Ali regime’s maintenance of control and capitalized on the long-since entrenched image of a dual – eastern and western, traditional and modern – postcolonial city. In the revolution’s wake the Avenue has become a reinvigorated public forum with a more complex character. Indeed, while the Avenue’s existing form and function remain emblematic of Tunis’s hybrid postcolonial identity, the thoroughfare now exemplifies the ongoing ‘Arab Spring’. Its cultural brandscape and heritage content, though enhanced with new aspects of democratic empowerment, are likely to endure as the transitioning country continues to participate in the process of globalization.

In March 2012, the West African nation of Mali experienced a military coup that paved the way for a regional Islamic coalition known as Ansar Dine to seize control of the northern parts of the country. After imposing a highly conservative form of Islamic governance on the region, Ansar Dine went on to perpetrate numerous violent and devastating acts upon the architectural landscape in and around Timbuktu in the name of that doctrine. Yet the nature of the architectural sites selected for destruction, and the performative, almost ritualistic quality of these processes of erasure, suggest that perhaps the impetus behind Ansar Dine’s actions were less straightforward. This article explores the motivations behind Ansar Dine’s iconoclastic programme in Timbuktu through the lens of the city’s identity as both a historical intersection of global currents and a contemporary site of international heritage. Viewed through the lens of these identities, Ansar Dine’s destructive campaign extends beyond an exercise in religious orthodoxy to become a mode of self-fashioning a globally extremist identity.

The scholarly discourse on modern architecture in the Middle East focuses in large part on the interactions and contradictions between the past and the future, and identifies the ways in which tradition and local history have become the source of inspiration for modern designs. While this discourse has addressed the political associations of this architecture rather well, detailed examinations of its design qualities are lacking. As a case study investigating this interesting relationship, this article examines the Group Apartments in Isfahan (GAI), designed by noted American architect Philip Johnson, in order to explore some of these design qualities. The article investigates the formation of GAI, including its design features and the architect’s design thinking and practice, within the local context of the historical city of Isfahan, Iran. By scrutinizing the story behind the formation of GAI, the case study presented here will look into the ways in which traditional buildings may inspire modern design, thereby providing a rich context to draw lessons for analysing other modern architectures of the Middle East.

This article presents a recent design exercise in which architecture students from the American University of Sharjah were asked to design a sustainable scientific research facility with associated housing in the desert oasis city of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates. The studio investigated vernacular habitation patterns and crafts of ancient desert dwellers in order to develop techniques for inhabiting this harsh environment. The vernacular techniques examined have allowed people to exist in the region for tens of thousands of years and include courtyard house typologies, ‘arish (palm-leaf) construction, nomadic Bedouin weaving, mashrabiya (latticework) screens, dhow boat-making, sand baffles, sewn lateen (triangular) sails, wind towers and qanat (irrigation) channels, to name a few. The students examined and reinterpreted these techniques to align them with modern construction requirements and contemporary ways of living. Using ‘hybrid’ models, the students made small-scale fabrications partly determined by the site, and in so doing created proposals that were extremely site-specific and therefore inherently sustainable. In contrast to the highly incongruous development patterns of such contemporary urban environments as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the architectural approach that emerged from this exercise aspires to be environmentally sensitive while maintaining cultural authenticity.

Studying contemporary mosque architecture necessitates dealing concurrently with both the past and the present. Burdens of the past cause a crisis at a point when architects attempt to design prayer spaces that avoid historicist references while attending to the religion’s liturgical requirements. This crisis indicates the moment at which architects are forced to become critical of what is preceding, and thus creates a challenging situation in the evolution of mosque architecture. This article takes the Sancaklar Mosque, designed by Emre Arolat Architecture (EAA), as its main object of research in order to assess this challenge. The Sancaklar Mosque presents a significant attempt to free mosque design from the prevailing formal practices observed in the majority of current mosques, by rejecting any clear reference to the historical mosque type and the use of any conventional mosque elements. However, I argue that while Sancaklar Mosque displays a clear break with the past, it is not ahistorical. The mosque suggests both a suspension of discussions on mosque architecture reduced to formal significations and historical prototypes, but also a different way of dealing with the past, which is, in this article, conceptualized as ‘defamiliarization’. The Sancaklar Mosque provides a significant example for a project in which familiar codified formal elements are displaced as a particular response to the challenge that architects face when designing religious buildings.

ISLAMIC GEOMETRIC DESIGN, ERIC BROUG (2013) New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 256 pp., 800 illus., ISBN: 9780500516959, $49.40 (hardback)

ARCHITECTURE AND THE LATE OTTOMAN HISTORICAL IMAGINARY: RECONFIGURING THE ARCHITECTURAL PAST IN A MODERNIZING EMPIRE, AHMET A. ERSOY (2015) Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 313 pp., 72 b&w illus., ISBN: 9781472431394, $112.46 (hardback)

THE SUPERLATIVE CITY: DUBAI AND THE URBAN CONDITION IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, AHMED KANNA (ED.) (2013) Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 169 pp., ISBN: 9780977122431, $24.95 (paperback)

BALOCHISTAN: ARCHITECTURE, CRAFT, AND RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM, MOHSEN KEIANY (2015) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 370 pp., 370 illus., ISBN: 9780199067848, $70.00 (hardback)

THE ARCHITECTS OF OTTOMAN CONSTANTINOPLE: THE BALYAN FAMILY AND THE HISTORY OF OTTOMAN ARCHITECTURE, Alyson Wharton (2015) London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 336 pp., 40 b&w illus. and 2 maps., ISBN: 9781780768526, $99.00 (hardback)

‘A COSMOPOLITAN CITY: MUSLIMS, CHRISTIANS, AND JEWS IN OLD CAIRO’, THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE, CHICAGO, FEBRUARY 17–SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

‘MEDIEVAL TOMBS AND THEIR SPATIAL CONTEXT: STRATEGIES OF COMMEMORATION IN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM’, UNIVERSITY OF TÜBINGEN, KUNSTHISTORISCHES INSTITUT, GERMANY, FEBRUARY 18–20, 2016