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Research Faculty Current Endeavors Faculty scholarship is so diverse and changing that the following topics are not to be considered an all inclusive list, but a reflection of ongoing faculty interests and discipline characteristics.
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 Medieval and Renaissance urbanism and architecture. He teaches seminars and courses on topics within these fields. His major publication is the book Florentine New Towns, Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages, which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award in 1989. He is currently working on the impact of mapping and surveying on urban design and is on sabbatical in 2003-4 supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Graham Foundation. His most recent publication is the article: "Fiorenza: Geography and Representation in a Fifteenth Century City View" in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (2001) with forthcoming articles on survey and urban design, on the 14th century palace of the Florentine Mercanzia, on the main square in the new town of San Giovanni, and on the maps and views of cities in the Renaissance for the History of Cartography project. Mark Jarzombek, who published a book on Leon Battista Alberti (Leon Baptista Alberti, His Literary and Aesthetic Theories, The MIT Press, 1989), continues to work on the topic of Renaissance architectural theory. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 2. Baroque and Enlightenment Art and Architecture Henry Millon has retired from his duties as Dean of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies in Washington D.C. but continues to teach periodically in the HTC on Baroque topics. In 2004, he taught a seminar on the history of St. Peters. In 2005, he taught a course on the architecture of Guarino Guarini, which will coincide with an international exhibition he is organizing on that subject. Erika Naginski offered a course on Baroque art. Together with Ph.D. students in the program, she edited a special volume of Thresholds (2004) entitled “Reimagining the Baroque,” which was dedicated to Millon; the roster of contributors includes graduates students in the HTC program as well as Hilary Ballon, Sarah McPhee, Christy Anderson among others. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 3. Islamic Architecture MIT’s Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, which was established in 1979 along with a sister program at Harvard, is recognized around the world as a leading academic center for the study of Islamic architecture and urbanism. Nasser Rabbat, who is the Director of the program, is a scholar of early and medieval Islamic art and architecture [see above], as well as of medieval urban history and historiography. His research focuses on Umayyad, Ayyubid and Mamluk architecture, in addition to post-colonial criticism and its ramifications for the study of architectural history. Rabbat and others teach surveys and graduate seminars on Islamic Architecture, with an emphasis on methodological and theoretical debates. Visiting professors at AKPIA have included, Gulsum Baydar and Jerrilynn Dodds. The Aga Khan Program sponsors a lecture series, a travel grant program, and a post-doctoral program that invites between 2 and 4 scholars a year. It is engaged in regularly organizing conferences on issues related to Islamic architecture and urbanism and in pursuing collaborative projects with institutions around the world. Recent speakers have included Profs. Deborah Howard, Cambridge University; Aisha Jalal, Tufts University; Afsaneh Najmabadi, Harvard; and Thomas Leisten, Princeton University. A recent conference, Exploring The Frontiers of Islamic Art And Architecture, organized by Nasser Rabbat in May 2001, had as general themes the boundaries of cultural territories and cultural claims and the polarity of center and periphery in Islamic art history. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 4. Art and Technology/Science The interdisciplinary nature of HTC connects students and faculty with colleagues throughout the Institute on the subject of art, technology, and science; Professors Caroline Jones and Erika Naginski are directly involved with these exchanges. One of the centerpieces of Jones’ work is the cultural and social connections between art and science. Technology and industry, as the "footprints" of science in daily life, are the focus of her work on Frank Stella, Robert Smithson, Andy Warhol and others in her book Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, (1996/98) which received the Charles Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian Institution. These interests also motivated individual essays on Francis Picabia, studio/laboratory/factory, and the impact of engineering structures on artists, as well as curatorial projects (such as Painting Machines and a forthcoming new media exhibition) and her co-edited volume with Peter Galison, Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998). Naginski has published several articles that look at the intersection of artistic practice and scientific thought. Her essay on Piranesi’s prison etchings, which appeared in Christy Anderson, ed., The Built Surface (2001), takes up the theme of Baroque mathematics in architectural space. Arindam Dutta has taught graduate seminars on the body and the machine in modern and postmodern culture and continues to be interested in theories of the cyborg. Much of Stanford Anderson's thought and work stems from an introduction by Paul Feyerabend to the thought of Karl Popper and Anderson's later associations with Imre Lakatos. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 5. Modern Architecture Stanford Anderson, Arindam Dutta, and Mark Jarzombek have established their careers in this field. Anderson has been identified with research on early modernism ever since his path-breaking dissertation on Peter Behrens from Columbia University in 1968, published by MIT Press in 2000 as Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century. He has worked on a range of modernist topics, including studies on Louis Khan, vernacular architectural forms, and the history of city planning. He has also published a translation and introductory essay to an important early modernist polemical writing by Hermann Muthesius. Recently he published a book on the Uruguayan engineer/architect Eladio Dieste and is now collaborating on a book, Alvar Aalto and America, based on an international conference he organized at MIT in 1999. Dutta is currently preparing a book on the late nineteenth-century English art industry and design and its relationship to informal modes of production in the metropole and the colony. Critical to his research are the ties between industry, political economy, administrative mores, and the emergent modernist aesthetic. Other work in preparation addresses the relationship between the political economic theories of land, aesthetic notions of landscape beginning from the eighteenth century. Jarzombek has worked on projects centering on early modern German architecture and politics, and in particular on the Werkbund. An article on the fin-de-siècle Austrian theorist Joseph August Lux was in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63/1 (June 2004). Both Mark Jarzombek and Erika Naginski have contributed articles to the volume, entitled Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (University Press of New England, 2004). HTC has a visiting appointment that invites scholars who work on modernist architecture to teach for one semester. These have included Beatriz Colomina, John Rajchman, Alice Friedman, Diane Ghirardo, and Hélène Lipstadt. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 6. Post-war and Postmodern Art and Architecture Caroline Jones has written extensively on the subject of postmodern art and studio practices (as in Machine in the Studio, above). Her forthcoming book on art writer Clement Greenberg examines his impact on postwar art, and the generation of postmodern opposition to this controversial figure. She has also has organized several monographic, survey, and/or site-specific exhibitions on Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn, Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, the Bay Area Figurative group and other well-known artists; these have been shown in a range of museums from the US to Japan. Her future research into biennial culture and globalism carries on a project completed for UNESCO on Nationalism and Internationalism in Modern Art. Mark Jarzombek has engaged the question of Postmodernism in his article on Robert Stern and in his book entitled the Psychologizing of Modernity. He has also edited a volume on American corporate architecture after 1945 for the Journal of Architectural Education (54/1 November 2000). He is currently working on topics relating to post-WWII rebuilding in Germany expanding on his previously published work “Urban Heterology: Dresden and the Dialectics of Post-Traumatic History” in Studies in Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics (2001). In Spring 2003, Jones and Jarzombek offered a seminar probing the disciplinary issues between postmodern art and architecture, concluding with the problems posed by the current "post-critical" condition. Stanford Anderson studies post-war architectural modernism, as in the work of Aalto, Kahn, and Dieste. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 7. Aesthetics, Trauma and Memory Erika Naginski and Mark Jarzombek have both worked extensively on this subject and currently preparing articles for Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (University Press of New England, 2004) edited by Eric Rosenberg and Lisa Salzman. Jarzombek has held a seminar entitled “Traumatic Urbanism” that studied the legacies of urban destruction and the politics of memory. Jones has also worked on this topic in her essays for UNESCO addressing the abject body in postwar European painting by Wols, Fautrier, Burri, and others; she has recently extended this research with an essay on the prosthetic body in Matthew Barney's Cremaster series. Stanford Anderson has published on the relation of memory to both the historiographic and professional dimensions of memory and architecture, in acknowledged major works and in vernacular architecture. Hélène Lipstadt, an independent scholar who has taught seminars as a Visiting Professor, is a specialist on questions of memory, space, and social theory with an emphasis on Pierre Bourdieu. She has published widely on the architecture and politics of memorials. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 8. Historiography Historiography is a central theme in the work of the HTC faculty, and sits at the core of the required methods course for graduate students in the program. Stanford Anderson has worked on the topic throughout his career, placing special emphasis on methodology and pedagogy. His first lecture and publication was a critique of the historiography of Reyner Banham. A recent article was “Architectural History in Schools of Architecture," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (1999). Mark Jarzombek has published several papers on the topic of Critical Historiography as well as on the history of the architectural discipline. Caroline Jones has written on the historiographic impact on art history of Clement Greenberg and Thomas Kuhn. Erika Naginski has written on the late-nineteenth century art historian Alois Riegl in Res (2000). Nasser Rabbat has written on the perception of architecture in Mamluk sources (Mamluk Studies Review, 2002), and architects in Mamluk society (JAE, 1998). He is currently working on the fifteenth-century historian al-Maqrizi. His book is tentatively entitled Historicizing the City: The Significance of Maqrizi's Khitat of Cairo. Arindam Dutta is interested in the critical thrust of architectural historiography particularly in the context of theories of change articulated within different architectural manifestoes. He is also interested in comparing different historiographies as a reflection of different institutional arrangements and pedagogy in various contexts. Among the various conferences that have been organized by the faculty, the conference Architecture, Art and Cultural History (1998) dealt directly with the question of historiography from a comparative disciplinary point of view. Among the various conferences that have been organized by the faculty, the conference Architecture, Art and Cultural History (1998) dealt directly with the question of historiography from a comparative disciplinary point of view. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 9. Gender/Feminism Arindam Dutta’s teaching and research routinely incorporate elements of feminist theory; he is particularly interested in the manner in which terminologies of “gender” and “sex” intersect with different modes of production. Caroline Jones's scholarship investigates the construction of sexuality in modernism, and its instabilities. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 10. American Art and Architecture Caroline Jones is recognized as a leading scholar in the field of modern and postmodern American art, and has worked extensively as both a curator and scholar. Her exhibition catalogues include Modern Art at Harvard and Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1955. Mark Jarzombek has written on post-war domestic architecture, on corporate architecture and on the Beaux-Arts tradition in America. He is finishing a book on William Welles Bosworth, a French trained American architect responsible for MIT’s original campus design from 1913. Stanford Anderson has had a longstanding interest in American city planning and has worked in particular on the urban development of Savannah, Georgia. Gail Fenske, Professor of the History of Architecture at Roger Williams whose specialty is the early modern skyscraper, has been a regular visiting faculty member. Her book on the Woolworth Building in New York is forthcoming. AKPIA visiting professor Jerrilynn Dodds’ book, NY Masjid: The Mosques of New York (2002), studies the spaces and identities created by the diverse Muslim communities of New York. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 11. The City David Friedman’s research and teaching focus on Italian city planning from the 13th- through the 15th-centuries and the History of Urban Form. Two forthcoming works are a result of presentations made at events in Italy: "La Piazza di San Giovanni" in Atti del seminario in onore del 700° anniversario della fondazione di San Giovanni Valdarno (ed. D. Friedman and P. Pirillo) and " The Residence of the Mercanzia and the Piazza della Signoria in Florence" of the conference Imago urbis: l'immagine della cittá nella storia d'Italia. Stanford Anderson co-directed a research program on streets at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, under a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One result of the program was his book, On Streets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978). Anderson is now involved in funded research in "micro-urbanism" with special attention to Chinese cities (Shanghai). The concept of "The Islamic City" is one of the main research interests of Nasser Rabbat, who regularly teaches a graduate seminar on the topic. He has several essays on various cities in the Islamic world in his book Thaqafat al Bina’ wa Bina’ al-Thaqafa (The Culture of Building and Building Culture) (Beirut, 2002). Mark Jarzombek has been working on the post-war rebuildings of Dresden. A version of his planned book on the topic was published by the journal Studies in Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics (Spring 2001), titled, “Urban Heterology and the Dialectics of Post-Traumatic History.” 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 12. Orientalism and Postcolonialism Postcolonialism is a principal theme in the work of Arindam Dutta and Nasser Rabbat. Dutta recently contributed a piece on labor and nineteenth century public works in a compilation entitled Constructing Colonial India, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He has also published in the journal Grey Room an account of the 1872 assassination of the Viceroy Mayo by a Pashtun tribal. Rabbat has also worked on this topic especially in connection with his seminar on Orientalism and Representation. He recently published an essay on Hassan Fathy and the identity debate (2003) and another one on the construction of history in contemporary Arabic writing (“Le classicisme, version arabe contemporaine," Qantara, 2002). 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 13. History of Preservation Erika Naginski’s article, “Riegl, Archaeology and the Periodization of Culture” in Res (2000) deals directly with Riegl’s famous essay, “The Modern Cult of Monumentality.” Nasser Rabbat has published three essays critiquing the preservation projects in three Arabic cities: Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. In 1999, he led a group of 15 MIT students on a trip to evaluate and report on various restoration and conservation projects in Cairo. Helene Lipstadt, who has over the years held a visiting appointment at HTC, plays an important role in DOCOMOMO, and is currently organizing a session at next year’s SAH titled Basic Bourdieu: architecture as a field of cultural production. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 14. Contemporary Aesthetic Practices and Cultural Debates Each member of the HTC faculty, in one way or another, addresses issues that are of concern in our contemporary world. Erika Naginski is active as an art critic for The Center for Drawing in London. Stanford Anderson has continued to publish on contemporary topics, with articles on Santiago Calatrava and on the "Quasi-autonomy in Architecture: The search for an ‘in-between’" in Perspecta (2002). Nasser Rabbat has been a prolific contributor to Arabic newspapers and journals such as Wughat Nazar, Akhbar al-Adab, Jaridat al-Funun, al-Hayat and al-Mustaqbal. He deals with issues of cultural politics, architectural history, art and architectural criticism, and occasionally reviews books, art exhibitions, and films. Arindam Dutta is at work on articles addressing the globalization of intellectual property laws and its implications on architectural practice, as well as editing a book on the radical art group Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in India. Caroline Jones has recently organized a conference held at Boston University on and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on “Medium and its Messages," and has contributed to contemporary criticism on artists ranging from Jasper Johns to Matthew Ritchie, in publications ranging from Parkett to the Korean journal Art in Culture. Mark Jarzombek has published in Il Projetto ("Dresden's New Synagogue and the Problematics of Bauen," Spring 2001). And finally, in an attempt to reintroduce the question of pedagogy into debates about contemporary practices, Dutta and Jarzombek are organizing a conference on architectural pedagogy, which is slated for November 2003. Anthony Vidler, Gwendolyn Wright, Mark Wigley, Beatriz Colomina and others will give presentations. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 15. Word and Image The dialectic between pictorial and linguistic signs in the history of culture is a subject or great interest to Nasser Rabbat and Erika Naginski. Rabbat has published extensively on the relationship between language and imagery in medieval Islamic cultures. He has articles on the etymology of several architectural terms and on the dominance of words in articulating medieval Islamic art. He has devoted his lectures at the Institut du monde arabe (IMA) in 2003, which will come out as a book in 2004, to the interplay of word and image in early Islamic art and architecture. As a result of the conference Erika Naginski organized in conjunction with the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Berkeley Art Museum at UC Berkeley, papers were published in a special issue of Representations (2000) entitled "Writing on Drawing." Naginski's contribution, "Drawing at the Crossroads," considers interdisciplinary theories of drawing as well as its relation to textuality and sign theory. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 16. Comparative Global Studies in Art and Architecture HTC Faculty are also interested in exploring comparative scopes between the arts and architectures of different cultures and contexts. The section is ideally suited for such an endeavor; with some exceptions, faculty interests and research cover significant regions of the globe. Mark Jarzombek is at present on work, in collaboration with Vikramaditya Prakash and Francis D. K. Ching at the University of Washington in Seattle, on a textbook of world architecture. Arindam Dutta’s forthcoming book lays out the methodological parameters for such comparative study; he has in the past given seminars and lecture courses on the subject. Research by faculty and doctoral candidates in the Aga Khan program have extended from Venice to India. Caroline Jones has a continuing interest in art and critical practices in Latin America. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16
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