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_________________________________________________________
4.612
Islamic Architecture and the Environment
Instructor: Nasser Rabbat
This course proposes to study how Islamic architecture and urban planning coped with environmental constraints in various areas and different climates and turned them into constructive design tools. It examines the environmental strategies behind the design of selected examples ranging in scale from the region, to the city, the house, the garden, and the single architectural element. It explores the social, cultural, symbolic, and psychological dimensions of environmental design as they developed over time to enrich, modify, or even obscure their functional origins.
Topics Covered:
- The Image of Paradise and its models: Koranic gardens, Dome of Heaven, Celestial Dome; Muqarnas
- Movable Architecture: tents, yurts, and camps.
- Shadow and Shading devices; Trees; Tiles; Colors
- Wind catchers and other cooling techniques
- Orientation and the city scape: streets, openings, houses.
- Water Architecture: fountains, sabils, qanat, shadirwan, waterwheel, aqueducts, Hammams
- Andalusian Examples: Madinat al-Zahra, Alhambra, Generalife
- Chahar Bagh symbolism: Representation of garden in painting
- Timurid, Mughal, Ottoman, and Persian Gardens
- Representation of garden in painting (Nasuh, Persian, Mughal, Qajar)
- Architecture and Travel: Caravanserai (Ottoman chimneys), Grand Hotels
- The Courtyard House: Hasan Fathy's notion on Courtyard houses.
- Contemporary indulgences: Diplomats' section in Riyadh, Hollywood's representations, Summer villas in the Mediterranean.
- The city scape: streets, openings, houses
The course is open to graduates and undergraduates. It is structured as a pro-seminar. One session each week will be devoted to a lecture on a specific topic. The second session will be a class discussion on the same topic with designated students' presentations on various aspects of the topic. The course will have a mid-term open-book exam, and a final take-home exam.
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4.611 and 4.613 (Back to top)
Civil Architecture in Islamic History
Instructor: Nasser Rabbat
Not only a major monotheistic religion professed by one-sixth of the human race, Islam is also an active historical force that produced a multitude of cultures and empires with a distinct civilizational flavor that permeated even the most mundane functions in every Islamic society. In this course we will focus on the architecture that embodies these societal functions: the palatial, commercial, military, industrial, residential and landscape architecture, in addition to a number of little-understood monuments that stand midway between the religious and the profane realms. We will use the chronological survey format to examine distinctive types of civil Islamic architecture from the seventh to the twentieth century and analyze the urban, social, and political factors that shaped their particular contexts. In our investigations, we will not only consult modern studies on the buildings and their histories, but we will try to see them through the experiences of their contemporaries and actual users. We will also assess the formation and developments of architectural traditions, their regional transformations, and the various external and interregional influences that affected them at different historical junctions.
The class is open to both graduates and undergraduates. The class format is an alternation between lectures and discussion sessions at the rate of 2 or 3 lectures to 1 discussion. The class requirements are three short papers (7 pp) and two class presentations for undergraduates; the short papers may be substituted by a research paper for graduate students on a topic to be discussed with the instructor and to be presented in the class.
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4.614 (Back to top)
Religious Architecture and Islamic Cultures
Instructor: Nasser Rabbat
Description
This course introduces the history of Islamic cultures through its architecture. Religious, commemorative, and educational structures are surveyed from the beginning of Islam in 7th-century Arabia to its developing into a world religion professed by one-sixth of humanity today. The survey is chronological with emphasis on distinguished patrons, influential thinkers, and outstanding designers. Representative examples of mosques, madrasas, mausolea, etc. are analyzed and their architectural, urban, and stylistic characteristics are examined in conjunction with their historical, political, and intellectual settings.
Visual media are used to elucidate the artistic/cultural varieties and historical developments of this architectural heritage. Students are encouraged to raise questions and generate debates during the lectures as well as the discussion sessions. The aim is to explore all possible venues of interpretation to better locate Islamic religious architecture within its regional, pan-Islamic, and universal and cross-cultural contexts.
Required Texts
Richard Ettinghausen, Oleg Grabar, and Marilyn Jenkins-Madina. The Art and Architecture of Islam: 650-1250. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.
Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, The art and architecture of Islam 1250-1800. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Recommended Texts
George Michell, ed. Architecture of the Islamic World: Its History and Social Meaning, London: Thames and Hudson, 1978 [reprint 1984].
Robert Irwin, Islamic Art in Context: Art, Architecture and the Literary World. New York, 1997.
Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.
Richard Ettinghausen and Oleg Grabar. The Art and Architecture of Islam: 650-1250. London and N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1987.
Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic architecture: form, function and meaning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994.
John D. Hoag, Islamic Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977.
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4.615 (Back to top)
Architecture of Cairo
Instructor: Nasser Rabbat
Cairo is the quintessential Islamic city. Founded in 634 at the strategic head of the Nile Delta, the city evolved from a military outpost to the seat of the ambitious Fatimid caliphate, which flourished between the 10th and 12th century. Its most spectacular age, however, was the Mamluk period (1250-1517), when it became the uncontested center of a resurgent Islam and acquired an architectural character that symbolized the image of the Islamic city for centuries to come. Between the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century, Cairo was reduced to an Ottoman provincial capital. Then, it witnessed a short yet ebullient renaissance under the reformist Muhammad 'Ali Pasha (1805-48) followed by an extended stretch of oscillation between neglect and modernization projects that is still with us today. The resulting urban and architectural chaos was exacerbated in the twentieth century by acute problems of rapid expansion, population explosion, and underdevelopment.
Cairo, however, still shines as a cultural and political center in its three spheres of influence: the Arab world, Africa, and the Islamic world. Moreover, many of its monuments (456 registered by the 1951 Survey of the Islamic Monuments of Cairo) still stand, although they remain largely unknown to the world's architectural community and their numbers are dwindling at an exceedingly alarming pace.
In this course we will recount the history of Cairo. We will review its urban and architectural developments and interpret them in light of the cultural, political, and social history of the country, the region, and the world. We will also examine its architectural types and urban patterns to see how they relate to their wider Islamic and Mediterranean contexts. The course is open to graduate students. A number of discussions are scheduled to further address critical architectural and urban issues. Students are encouraged to contribute to these sessions as part of their requirements. Three short essays (7-10 pages each) will be assigned. Graduate students may substitute a research paper for one or more of the essays.
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4.616 (Back to top)
Cultural Signification in Architecture
Instructor: Nasser Rabbat
The issue of meaning in architecture has occupied many architects, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and philosophers and has produced a whole range of opinions from architecture as a meaning-free enterprise to architecture as both the arena and product of the interplay of cultural, social, and historical constraints.
This course is an exercise in evaluating the historical and sociocultural roles of architecture as the carrier of meanings: intentional and contrived, individual and multi-layered, conscious and unconscious, as well as contested and even contradictory meanings. It uses a number of important examples from the repertoire of architecture past and present (with a focus on Islamic architecture) to explore traditions, transformations, and inventions in architecture as a conveyer of messages that transcend the stylistic, formal, and iconographic domains. The examples range from architectural or iconographic motifs to single monuments to types of buildings to entire cities. They also cover single architects (like Sinan and Hassan Fathy) and conservation debates and projects. Students will be encouraged to suggest examples of interest to them for class presentations and discussions.
The seminar is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students with some knowledge of Islamic architecture. Each session will be divided into two parts: a short lecture followed by a discussion period. The range of themes considered will depend on the class dynamics and students interests. The course includes weekly reading and writing assignments and requires active participation in discussions. Students' weekly responses will form the basis of class discussions. A research paper is to be first presented in class and then submitted at the end of the term. Topics should be decided in consultation with the instructors.
_________________________________________________________
4.617 (Back to top)
Issues in Islamic Urbanism:
The Islamic City:
From an Orientalist Concept to a Contemporary Aspiration
Instructor: Nasser Rabbat
4.617
Issues in Islamic Urbanism: The Islamic City:
From an Orientalist Concept to a Contemporary Aspiration
Instructor: Nasser Rabbat
As a subject of inquiry, "the "image of the city" is understood differently by different students of urban history. Theologians, moralists, and philosophers propose an abstract paradigm reflecting either a divine or utopian sociopolitical order. Architects, planners, historians, social scientists, and policy-makers put together various models based on combinations of morphological, demographic, environmental, social, cultural, and legal factors. And poets, novelists, artists, and film-makers, depend more on imagined or mythical constructs in the service of their art.
The Orientalists, i.e., those who studied or represented the "Orient" in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, used all the above approaches in representing "The Islamic City," resulting in a sizeable body of literature and art on the subject. Their images of the "Islamic City" range from the garrison-town and ordered imperial center, to the chaotic, unplanned, and confessionally or ethnically segregated metropolis, to the imaginary mirage city of the Arabian Nights with its gilded bulbous domes and pencil-sharp minarets. Yet, the notion of an ideal-type Islamic City never lost its paradigmatic appeal, even among designers of contemporary urban projects in the Islamic world.
This seminar seeks to establish a framework for the study of the image of the Orientalist City and its reverberations in contemporary design. It will first review the shaping of that image from the first remarks and sketches of nineteenth-century savants and artists to the contemporary academic and policy formulations. Then, it will consider the impact of that image on the design of new cities in the Islamic world today.
The focus of our investigation will be Dubai, the most phenomenal example of the urban boom that the Gulf region is currently undergoing. Oil wealth, rapid globalization, a deeply religious and conservative outlook, and a fervent quest for identity have all come together to create a demand for a sleek and contemporary yet culturally identifiable city. This has turned Dubai, and to a lesser extent neighboring cities, into a true visual laboratory where the only limits to architectural and urban flights of fancy seem to be the creativity of the designers and their ability to understand and communicate with their clients. In this milieu, the image of the Orientalist City seems to have emerged as a tacit design icon shared by the designers and the patrons.
The seminar is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students with some knowledge of Islamic history and/or contemporary architecture in the Gulf region. The course includes weekly reading and writing assignments and requires active participation in discussions. Students' written weekly responses will form the basis of class discussions.
The class will take a trip to Dubai for a week either during Spring Break (March 24-April 1) or the week after (March 30-April 7). During our visit we will tour major projects in the city, visit top agencies responsible for its urban expansion, and attend presentations given by officials in those agencies. All enrolled students are required to take part in the trip. The Aga Khan Program will cover airfare and lodging. The final project, which may be pursued individually or collaboratively, will take the lessons learned from our historical and theoretical investigations and check them against specific examples from Dubai. Final presentations will take place during the last two or three meetings of the seminar.
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4.619 (Back to top)
Historiography of Islamic Architecture
Instructor: Nasser Rabbat
This seminar presents a critical review of literature on Islamic architecture in the last two centuries and analyzes its historical and theoretical frameworks. It challenges the tacit assumptions and biases of standard studies of Islamic architecture and addresses historiographic and critical questions concerning how knowledge of a field is defined, produced, and reproduced.
The seminar focuses on two critical issues that have emerged recently both in academe and in the architectural profession. First is the relationship between architecture and culture, a crucial query that has become one of the most debated issues in architectural and art historical circles. Second is the definition of Islamic architecture, a discursive category embraced by a devout audience but skeptically accepted by academics, which has never had a forum where it can be scholarly and critically examined without proscribed historical or ideological limits. This is especially true in the case of its presumed temporal boundaries: the polemical discontinuity from late antique to Islamic architecture, and the forced rupture between modern architecture in the Islamic world and its historical genealogy. The course aims to include both moments. But it definitely does not aim to essentialize Islamic architecture. Instead it emphasizes the cultural diversity within the Islamic context, which produced the various architectural traditions that dot the historical and geographic map of the Islamic world.
The course includes weekly reading and writing assignments and requires active participation in discussions. During the second half of the term, we will have a number of visiting scholars presenting their research and engaging in discussions with the class. A research paper is to be first presented in class and then submitted at the end of the term. Topics are limited to in-depth studies of texts, representations, and scholarly traditions. They can either be chosen from the enclosed list or should be decided in consultation with the instructor by the end of the third week of the semester. A short abstract and preliminary bibliography should be submitted by the fourth week. Required texts are available at the Coop and area bookshops. All articles and book sections required will be available on a Stellar Site.
Required Texts: Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973, 1987 2d ed.); Yasser Tabbaa, The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival (Seattle: University of Washington Press: 2001); George Michell, ed. Architecture of the Islamic World: Its History and Social Meaning, London: Thames and Hudson, 1978 [reprint 1984].
Background Text: Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization 3 vols. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974) Robert Irwin, Islamic Art in Context: Art, Architecture and the Literary World. (Upper Saddle River, NJ; New York: Prentice-Hall; H.N. Abrams, 1997).
Reference Tools in Islamic Architecture: http://hcl.harvard.edu/research/guides/iaa/
_________________________________________________________
4.621 (Back to top)
Orientalism and Representation
Instructor: Nasser Rabbat
With a specific focus on Orientalism, this seminar explores how ideology shapes representation. It highlights key moments of the encounter between Europe and the "Orient" from Antiquity to the present. It analyzes historical events, texts, architectural projects, and images that have informed Western representations of the "Orient." It also examines how modern nationalists similarly enlisted culture and history in constructing their identities. In the end, the seminar considers contemporary issues, such as the clash of civilizations, identity, exile, multiculturalism, and hybridity that are impacting the ways we see and interpret the world around us today. The aim is to gain a historically grounded awareness of the complexities of cultural identities, which are always contesting and sometimes subverting the representations that claim to depict and define them.
Requirements include weekly reading and writing assignments and active participation in discussions. A research paper is to be first presented in class and then submitted at the end of the term. Topics are limited to in-depth studies of texts and/or art or architectural examples. They can either be chosen from the enclosed list or should be decided in consultation with the instructor by the end of the third week of the semester. A short abstract and preliminary bibliography should be submitted by the fourth week. The required texts are available on web-based booksellers, at the Coop and area bookshops. All other readings will be available on reserve in Rotch.
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4.681
Paris/Cairo: The East-West Tale of the Modern Metropolis
4.628
Special Problems in Islamic and Nonwestern Architecture—
Islamic Calligraphy and Architecture
4.629
Special Problems in Islamic and Nonwestern Architecture—
City as Palimpsest: The Islamic City from the Pre-modern to
Post-modern.
4.620
Heritage as a Battleground
4.627/4.628
Special Problems in Islamic and Nonwestern Architecture—
Contemporary Art in the Middle East.
