"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 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.

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.