|
|
|
Research Faculty Current Endeavors
1. Medieval and Renaissance Architecture Nasser Rabbat is an authority on medieval Islamic Architecture with particular emphasis on the relationship between urban culture and architectural form. His most recent book on the subject was The Citadel of Cairo: A New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture. He also published several essays on Umayyad architecture (7th-8th century) and Mamluk architecture and urbanism (13th-15th century), the last of which is "The Dialogic Dimension in Umayyad Art," RES 43 (Spring 2003). In 2003, he was invited to give a series of lectures at the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris on the subject of word and image as the dual impulse in early Islamic architecture. He is currently completing a project on the fifteenth-century historian Taqqi al-Din al-Maqrizi who, in his prodigious book al-Khitat (1415-40), was the first to produce a true urban history of a city, Cairo in this case. He has already published three scholarly articles on the subject in Annales Islamologiques, Mamluk Studies Review, and the Cairo Heritage, and a book is slated for publication in late 2004. David Friedman is an historian of early modern urbanism and architecture. He teaches seminars and courses on European cities and Renaissance architecture. His major publication is the book Florentine New Towns, Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages, which won the Hitchcock prize of the Society of Architectural History. He is currently working on the impact of mapping and survey on urban design. In 2003-2004 he was the resident in Medieval Studies at the American Academy in Rome and in 2006 he was a fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. A first synthesis of his research on survey was published in the Renaissance volume of the History of Cartography (2008). Other articles on the subject include "Fiorenza: Geography and Representation in a Fifteenth Century City View" in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (2001) and "Urban Design Without Drawing" in the acts of the conference Arnolfo's Moment , i Tatti, Florence, in press. Mark Jarzombek, who published a book on Leon Battista Alberti (1989), continues to work on the topic of Renaissance architectural theory (A Global History of Architecture, 2006).
|