Classes

Provides an introduction to working with information, data and visualization in a hands-on studio learning environment. Studies the history and theory of information, followed by a series of projects in which students apply the ideas directly. Progresses though basic data analysis, visual design and presentation, and more sophisticated interaction techniques. Topics include storytelling and narrative, choosing representations, understanding audiences, and the role of designers working with data. 

Graduate students are expected to complete additional assignments.

Seminar examining historical and contemporary uses of earth/reed architecture and water systems in the Islamic world. Given the outsized contribution of industrial building materials to the climate crisis, this course asks students to reconsider the historiography of material aesthetics, hierarchies, and progress. It will also interrogate architectural origin myths, Islamic notion of stewardship, Islamic gardens, the popular rise of “vernacular” as an architectural category, and the unrealized environmental imaginations and design proposals of modernist architects working in the Islamic world e.g., Hassan Fathy, Le Corbusier, and Constantinos A. Doxiadis. Students will be in direct conversation with contemporary scholars, artists, and practitioners in the region who are engaged with designing alternative building materials, heritage conservation, environmental design, and forging new design vocabularies that incorporate natural building materials in India, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. Course is open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students.

Examines the history of Islamic architecture and culture spanning fifteen centuries on three continents - Asia, Africa, Europe. Students study a number of representative examples, from the 7th century House of the Prophet to the current high-rises of Dubai, in conjunction with their urban, social, political, and intellectual environments at the time of their construction.

4.614 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

Examines the history of Islamic architecture and culture spanning fifteen centuries on three continents - Asia, Africa, Europe. Students study a number of representative examples, from the 7th century House of the Prophet to the current high-rises of Dubai, in conjunction with their urban, social, political, and intellectual environments at the time of their construction.

4.614 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

Examines the history of Islamic architecture and culture spanning fifteen centuries on three continents - Asia, Africa, Europe. Students study a number of representative examples, from the 7th century House of the Prophet to the current high-rises of Dubai, in conjunction with their urban, social, political, and intellectual environments at the time of their construction.

Seminar on how culture interacts with architecture. Analyzes architecture as a conveyor of messages that transcend stylistic, formal, and iconographic concerns to include an assessment of disciplinary, political, ideological, social, and cultural factors. Critically reviews methodologies and theoretical premises of studies on culture and meaning. Focuses on examples from Islamic history and establishes historical and theoretical frameworks for investigation.

‘Islam resembles what was later to be called “the Western tradition” in so many ways—the intellectual efforts to fuse Judeo-Christian scripture with the categories of Greek philosophy, the literary emphasis on courtly love, the scientific rationalism, the legalism, puritanical monotheism, missionary impulse, the expansionist mercantile capitalism—even the periodic waves of fascination with “Eastern mysticism”—that only the deepest historical prejudice could have blinded European historians to the conclusion that, in fact, this is the Western tradition.’

David Graeber, “There Never Was a West. Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between,” 2007

شمس العداوة حتى يستقاد لهم ... وأعظم الناس أحلاماً إذا قدروا

الأخطل في قصيدة يمدح بها عبد الملك بن مروان من كتاب الأغاني                               

In Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Garth Fowden says, “There are roads out of Antiquity that do not lead to the Renaissance.”  This statement challenges the dominant historical narrative, which posits the West as the only heir to the classical tradition, and opens the door for the Islamic culture to reclaim it. 

Following Fowden, this seminar offers a revision of the concept of Late-Antiquity through an in-depth study of the early Islamic artistic and architectural culture.  It examines the sequence of well-known Umayyad and early Abbasid monuments and artifacts (7th-8th c), which engaged in a vibrant and dynamic cross-cultural creative process. They treated Late Antiquity as a heritage to synthesize and build upon, or, sometimes, modify, deconstruct, or combine with other cultures with which the Islamic world came into contact.  The patterns of appropriation, modification, and transposition are interpreted as a conscious attempt to chart a new, or, perhaps more accurately, a Post-Post-Classical art and architecture, which ultimately bypassed all ethnic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries within the Islamic world despite its political fragmentation and crossed over to inform and invigorate the emergent European awakening in the late Middle Ages.  In other words, the seminar challenges the exclusive historiography of art history that posits the Western Renaissance as the sole heir of Antiquity and proposes another scenario with a more hybrid genealogy that invites us to rethink the impact of periodization on our conception of art history itself.

4.616 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

Seminar on selected topics from the history of Islamic urbanism. Examines patterns of settlement, urbanization, development, and architectural production in various places and periods, ranging from the formative period in the 7th century to the new cities emerging today. Discusses the leading factors in shaping and transforming urban forms, design imperatives, cultural and economic structures, and social and civic attitudes. Critically analyzes the body of literature on Islamic urbanism.

Research paper required.

"My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions."   
 Khedive Isma'il, 1879

“Dubai….. is the new Cordoba.”
Sheikh Muhammad bin Rashid Al Maktum, 2006

 Today, Islamic architecture is a restive design category that is debated yet applied by scholars and practitioners alike.  Its definition in the last two centuries has undergone profound changes in substance and scope.  Beginning as revivalist trends that mimicked European historicism in the 19th century, Islamic architecture emerged as an identitarian style with the formation of modern nation-states in Asia and Africa.  After an interval in which vocal international modernism dominated, Islamic architecture came back on the wings of vernacular revival, critical regionalism, then postmodernism, which shaped its academic and professional parameters.  Recent critical challenges, including urban and ecological depredations, unprecedented wealth in the Gulf and socioeconomic disparities everywhere, and a radical Islamicist turn, provoked Islamic architecture to explore new sociocultural outlooks, environmentalist and climatic orientations, historic preservation and rehabilitation, as well as branding strategies.  This expanded purview at last ushered it into the global architectural discourse. 

This seminar analyzes how Islamic architecture, traditionally confined to an architecture of the past, became a contemporary design category.  It reconstructs the stages of its evolution and examines how it managed to incorporate diverse architectural, theoretical, political, cultural, technological, and socioeconomic currents within its core historicist foundation.  Finally, the seminar anticipates future directions of Islamic architecture as they can be gleaned in the shifts in the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Gulf experiment with glitzy cutting-edge parametric design flavored with Islamic references.

Research paper required.

Critical review of literature on Islamic art and architecture in the last two centuries. Analyzes the cultural, disciplinary, and theoretical contours of the field and highlights the major figures that have influenced its evolution. Challenges the tacit assumptions and biases of standard studies of Islamic art and architecture and addresses historiographic and critical questions concerning how knowledge of a field is defined, produced, and reproduced.

4.619 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

Critical review of literature on Islamic art and architecture in the last two centuries. Analyzes the cultural, disciplinary, and theoretical contours of the field and highlights the major figures that have influenced its evolution. Challenges the tacit assumptions and biases of standard studies of Islamic art and architecture and addresses historiographic and critical questions concerning how knowledge of a field is defined, produced, and reproduced.

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise.

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise.

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise.