Classes

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.

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus

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 spanning fifteen centuries on three continents – Asia, Africa, Europe. Students study representative examples from the 7th century House of the Prophet to the current high-rises of Dubai, in conjunction with their religious, urban, social, political, and intellectual environments. Crosscultural exchanges are highlighted from late Antique Arabia down to the interaction with the West in the age of colonialism and the consequent revival of Islamic architecture today. 

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)

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)

The colonial city represents a nexus of power, culture, and spatial organization, serving as both a tool of imperial expansion and a site of (asymmetrical) exchange.  This seminar examines the historical, theoretical, and critical dimensions of colonial cities, tracing their evolution from the ancient Greek polis to the present day and extending into speculative futures of space colonization. By exploring diverse models and case studies, this seminar highlights how colonial urbanism shaped the political, social, and cultural landscapes of cities across history and geography.

Historically, colonial cities have embodied the ambitions of empires to conquer and settle new territories, from the Roman castrum to Renaissance-era trading hubs and British colonial centers in India. These cities were not only practical mechanisms of governance and control but also symbolic representations of domination and ideology. Theoretical frameworks, such as those underpinning the Hippodamian model of Greek colonies or Haussmannian urban planning in 19th-century France, reveal the deliberate strategies behind spatial design and social organization.  Critically, this seminar engages with the legacies of colonialism, interrogating how colonial urban experiments have perpetuated inequalities and influenced contemporary postcolonial cities.

Looking forward, the concept of colonial urbanism extends beyond Earth, as aspirations for space colonization echo historical practices of conquest and settlement. The exploration of the colonial city invites critical reflection on the enduring impact of colonial ideologies on urban environments, emphasizing the need to reimagine cities as spaces of inclusivity and resistance. Through a cross-cultural, cross-temporal, and interdisciplinary approach, this seminar provides a comprehensive understanding of the colonial city as both a historical phenomenon and a lens for analyzing current and future urban paradigms.

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.

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.

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 Certificated Protected Syllabus

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)

Seminar on the politics of representation with special focus on Orientalist traditions in architecture, art, literature, and scholarship. Critically analyzes pivotal texts, projects, and artworks that reflected the encounters between the West and the Orient from Antiquity to the present. Discusses how political, ideological, and religious attitudes informed the construction and reproduction of Western knowledge about the Islamic world as well as revisionist Eastern self-representations. Research paper required.

4.621 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

Seminar on the politics of representation with special focus on Orientalist traditions in architecture, art, literature, and scholarship. Critically analyzes pivotal texts, projects, and artworks that reflect the encounters between the West and the Orient from Antiquity to the present. Discusses how political, ideological, and religious attitudes inform the construction and reproduction of Western knowledge about the Islamic world. Research paper required. Open to qualified undergraduates. 

This seminar deals with how artists, archivists, architects, and historians have faced the myriad archive fevers and archival turns of the 20th and 21st centuries. This period has seen a marked shift between archives being used as ‘source’ to becoming a ‘subject’ of critical inquiry. However, these questions are not limited to the past few centuries. Rather, the philosophical questions of history and its relationship with the archive spans millennia from Assyrian clay tablets and Shang dynasty oracle bones to later examples of city- or trade-based archives in Florence and the post-revolutionary foundation of the French national archives. Critical scholarship asks which ‘rules of classification, rules of framing and rules of practice’ determine the contents of an archive and enable ‘knowledge’ to be recognized (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). And these questions are motivated by an argument that political power is inextricably linked with who can create, access, participate in, and interpret the archive and by extension, an institutionalized collective memory (Derrida, 1995). In Milan Kundera’s words, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This course thus interrogates how “the architect and the archive are inseparable” and how the archivist and the historian are entangled to attend to the contested memories and denied histories embodied within buildings, cultural institutions, and architectures (Wigley, 1995).

Through visits and hands-on research in archives, students will develop a critical methodology that can be applied to their own research and practice. Students will learn to interpret and triangulate primary sources, such as texts, films, maps, drawings, manuscripts, correspondence, government documents, photographs, illustrations, and archive-based artworks. Weekly readings will cover concepts like the origins of the archive, architectural legacy, archives as spatial structures, projects to expand the canon, restitution, the art of crafting archives, the digital turn, parafictional archives, and the archives of critical theory.

This course examines the contemporary challenges and history of city planning on three continents - Africa, Asia, and South America. Students study a number of city plans, from the ‘informal’ settlements of Delhi and Nairobi, the modernist master plans of Brasilia and Baghdad, to climate action plans in various cities. The objective of the course is to understand the relationship between dwelling and building in the design of cities, in conjunction with the environmental, social, political, and intellectual environments at the time of their planning. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students. MArch students can register for 9 credits.

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus

9/8/23 Note: Final schedule for class is R 11-2 in room 3-133

This course examines the contemporary challenges and history of city planning on three continents - Africa, Asia, and South America. Students study a number of city plans, from the ‘informal’ settlements of Delhi and Nairobi, the modernist master plans of Brasilia and Baghdad, to climate action plans in various cities. The objective of the course is to understand the relationship between dwelling and building in the design of cities, in conjunction with the environmental, social, political, and intellectual environments at the time of their planning. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students. MArch students can register for 9 credits.

4.624 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

Researches the history and culture of an MIT community to contribute to its documentation and preservation. Through the practice of doing original research, students learn about the history of an MIT community. Provides instruction in the methods historians use to document the past, as well as methods from related fields.

Karl Marx is arguably the most influential writer of the modern era. Over the twentieth century, his texts moved millions, defining the course of history itself as states, governments and popular movements oriented themselves to take measure of—for or against—his thinking. His unfinished magnum opus Das Kapital rivals the Bible and the Quran in terms of its sheer ability to move political movements and fields of knowledge alike. In the liberal universe, Marx’s writing has been (not) read as advocating radically opposed political outlooks, as both prescribing pervasive state controls and radical, anti-political anarchism. Within the ex-socialist world, the ardor for “scientific socialism” left most of its adherents with little appreciation of the considerable imaginativeness, wit and intellectual agility with which Marx addressed the pressing issues of his time: the rise of modern industry and the corresponding labor movements, the nascent complexities of electoral democracies, international affairs and state power, international flows of capital and colonialism. In the process, Marx’s thought would leave an imprint on almost every field that he touched, and then some: postKantian philosophy, political economy, sociology, historiography, and the history of science. Marx’s readings of Shakespeare in itself makes up a subfield of literary criticism. This course will comprise a close reading of the principal Marx texts placed in their nineteenth-century context: from his early critique of postKantian philosophy (the neo-Hegelians), to his turn towards political economy (the Political and Economic Manuscripts), to his collaborative studies, with Engels, of English mill towns (Condition of the Working Classes in England), to the political upheavals of his time (Eighteenth Brumaire, the 1871 Communards and the French Civil War), his critiques of other utopian-socialist movements (The German Ideology), to his involvement with workers’ movements (The Communist Manifesto), to the great unfinished masterwork of his career, Capital/Grundrisse. The course will conclude with a study of Marx’s early confrontation with “underdevelopment” on the “Russian road.”

Supporting texts by the Althusser circle, Lucio Colletti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jacques Derrida, David Harvey, Ernesto Laclau, Teodor Shanin, Prabhat Patnaik, etc.

Requirements: attendance, presentations, keeping up with readings, final term paper. Term paper has to be drawn out of subject matter covered in class.

Note: the schedule for this class has changed from M 2-5 in room 5-216 to W 2-5 in room 9-450.

Seminar on a selected topic in critical theory. Requires original research and presentation of oral and written report.

Advanced seminar. 

Looks at architecture and planning doctrines in what has come to be known as the “development decades,” the high period of state intervention into so-called Third World economies under the aegis of the Bretton Woods exchange system (c. 1945-1971), followed by its aftermath in the dismantlement and restructuring of state power to aid so-called “privatization” and austerity doctrines. The course will take up various components that intersected with architectural and urban thinking in this era of development: land and tenure, infrastructure, housing, finance, administration, relating them to influential economic doctrines of the time as well as the ideological tendencies of governments in the Third World. Particular attention will be paid to the circuit of technocratic “experts” and modernization/transitions theory patronized by the Bretton Woods organizations as well as the neocolonial politics of foreign aid. Particular attention will be paid to how architects and related experts on questions of space responded to the bureaucratic and institutional frameworks of international and national development, and the sundry “clubs (Paris, Rome), think-tanks, consultancy mechanisms, as well as elite university-based forms of expertise that were entangled in these circuits. Also of interest is the intersection, in the course of these engagements, of the latter history of architectural modernism with the social sciences, from anthropology, econometrics to systems theory, etc. Comparisons with American and European (“Northern”) examples of space and city planning and mechanisms (instruments such as location theory, zoning, etc.) will be elicited to highlight key structures of comparison, contrast, or influence.  

4.640 Syllabus (MIT certificate protected)

 

Seminar on a selected topic in critical theory. Requires original research and presentation of oral and written report.

Contemporary urban theory and studies of the city generally tend to revolve around the examination of issues: inequality (economic, ethnic, gendered); the role of various “-isms”  (capitalism, liberalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, etc.); Foucauldian ideas of biopolitics and territory; migration of various sorts; environmental factors; data. Very few analyses appear to take stock—and in many cases demonstrate much understanding— of how cities work, i.e. the mechanisms and institutional structures through which all the above issues manifest themselves. This course is designed as a historical and theoretical introduction to the basic mechanisms that govern the making and working of cities, which otherwise, given their large variety and unevenness of types, defy any viable ontological definition (hence the title above). Through a series of case studies showing the evolution of these features across the world, successive weeks are designed to take seminar participants through a step-by-step understanding of the functional elements that make up a city: the idea of economic base (entrepots, industry, services, markets, and so on); interest groups; the making of land markets; legal statutes as to property and jurisdiction; the basis of authority; rent gradients (their invention and spread across the world); the political economy of transportation and logistics; fiscal structure and revenue (including zoning); the provenance of projects; security (police, fire and hygiene risks); and the institutional economics of (biopolitical) provision (housing, utilities, schooling, etc.). Students taking the course can expect themselves to be equipped with a technical, if not entirely neutral, grammar that will enable them to assess their interest in issues with the actual mechanics of urban functioning or dysfunctioning, as the case may be.

UG: 4.641 | G: 4.644

Investigation of visual culture in the nineteenth century with an emphasis on Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. Topics include art and industry, artists and urban experience, empire and its image, and artistic responses to new technologies from the telegraph to the steam engine to the great refractor telescope. Strikes a balance between historical and contemporary critical perspectives to assess art's engagement with the social and political experience of modernity.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.

General study of modern architecture as a response to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic, and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. Focus on the theoretical, historiographic, and design approaches to architectural problems encountered in the age of industrial and post-industrial expansion across the globe, with specific attention to the dominance of European modernism in setting the agenda for the discourse of a global modernity at large. Explores modern architectural history through thematic exposition rather than as simple chronological succession of ideas.

4.645 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

General study of modern architecture as a response to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic, and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. Focus on the theoretical, historiographic, and design approaches to architectural problems encountered in the age of industrial and post-industrial expansion across the globe, with specific attention to the dominance of European modernism in setting the agenda for the discourse of a global modernity at large. Explores modern architectural history through thematic exposition rather than as simple chronological succession of ideas.

General study of modern architecture as a response to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic, and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. Focus on the theoretical, historiographic, and design approaches to architectural problems encountered in the age of industrial and post-industrial expansion across the globe, with specific attention to the dominance of European modernism in setting the agenda for the discourse of a global modernity at large. Explores modern architectural history through thematic exposition rather than as simple chronological succession of ideas.

4.645 Syllabus (MIT certificate protected)