International Journal of Islamic Architecture

Special Issue: Boundaries, Flows, and the Construction of Muslim Selves through Architecture
Thematic volume planned for June 2019

This special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture takes as its starting point how a new sense of ‘boundary’ emerged from the post-nineteenth-century dissolution of large, heterogeneous empires into a mosaic of nation-states in the Islamic world. This new sense of ‘boundary’ has not only determined the ways in which we imagine and construct the idea of modern citizenship, but also redefines relationships between the nation, citizenship, cities and architecture. Whereas political debates today question the compatibility of Islam with the concept of the nation-state, the construction of the twentieth-century Islamic world was embroiled in debates around the nature of the modern state itself. Such debates oscillated between Islam as a political ideology and Islam as a personal belief system. These debates were often troubled by novel uses of ‘boundary’ in both physical and conceptual forms linked to the phenomenon of the nation-state. These boundaries were further challenged by flows of persons, materials, and ideas that destabilized the political configuration of the nation-state itself.

Hence, in this special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture we invite papers that bring critical perspectives to our understanding of the interrelation between the accumulated flows and the evolving concepts of boundary in predominantly Muslim societies, and within the global Muslim diaspora. This special issue seeks to investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness that have been devised to define, enable, obstruct, accumulate and/or control flows able to disrupt bounded territories or identities. More generally, it proposes to explore how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries.

Questions of nationhood and boundary-making critically define the modern era. This is particularly true for global Muslim communities. Nation-building efforts have gone through phases of creativity and disillusionment ranging from the Israel-Palestine question, the creation and fragmentation of Pakistan as a spatiotemporal utopia, the Islamic revolution in Iran, to the post-oil prosperity in the Gulf countries, the repercussions of 9/11, the disenchantment of the Arab Spring, and the rise of South East Asian countries as global powerhouses. The plausible image of an ideal Islamic society vis-à-vis the nation-state has shifted along with these major transformations, and an incongruity between ideals and realities has informed resulting spatial expressions as well.

This special issue seeks to explore alternative definitions of bounded identities, facilitating new approaches to spatial and architectural forms. ‘Boundary’ can be ‘hard’, such as the geopolitical boundaries regulated by states. These boundaries often result in conflicts over the ownership of territory and geological resources or even over history, authenticity, and the nature of the past. Yet boundaries can also be ‘soft’ such as those demarcated by religious, cultural, and linguistic differences among different Muslim factions, or associations of a Muslim population within a predominantly non-Muslim society or vice-versa. Through the transition from empires to nation-states, ‘boundary’ has acquired new ideological meanings in response to questions about Muslim selves and citizenship.

The concept of boundary is further intricately entangled with the concept of flows. In the era of global flows of information, commodities, resources and people, boundaries work together with flows as two corresponding factors in constructing the spatial experience of Islamic societies. Several issues nevertheless complicate the relationship between boundaries and flows. For instance, Muslim diasporic movements, through voluntary migration seeking a better life elsewhere or forced displacement due to war, genocide or climate change, challenge our normative view of Islamic architecture outside of the normative Islamic world. The Muslim diaspora creates its own niches that confront and conform to complex global flows of socio-cultural dynamics, ranging from hate crimes and political resentments to a global awareness of diversity and minority.

Against this context of global flows, several phenomena prompt us to rethink the relationship between architecture, urban planning and boundaries. For instance, the transnational flows of heterogeneous Islamic groups as radical as the Taliban and as moderate as Tablighi Jamaat problematize notions of national ‘hard’ boundaries. Or, while the contemporary media presents the international networks of madrasas and mosques as nothing more than a breeding ground of Islamic radicalism, other roles that these spaces play in serving as transnational nodes in an expanding spatial network remain largely unexplored. This special issue seeks to explore how architecture and urban discourses can shed light on these new forms of identity politics and resulting internal dissonances within Muslim and global communities. How, for example, could an architectural imagination bring a critical perspective to the idea of jihad, notions of the umma, and potentials for a pan-Muslim society?

These questions also disrupt typical approaches to architectural history. The architectural forms of twentieth- and twenty-first-century nation building is often narrated through the pivotal forces of the Cold War, Bretton Woods financial policy, the emergence of development studies, and contested theories of modernization, Islamization, and postcoloniality. Within such a context, the global flows of ideas, money and technical expertise took place through intergovernmental agencies such as the United Nations, the European Union, Commonwealth and Muslim League, and the economic and political interest of funding agencies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Development Fund and USAID. These contested groups of international stakeholders aimed at creating local technical experts and cultivated architects as development agents. The constituent forces of boundaries and flows eventually materialized to disrupt these forces, as architectural and urban projects ranging from small-scale community development schemes such as low-cost housing and rural development programs to large-scale modernization efforts such as the establishment of nuclear research centers.

Gradually, the flows of architectural philosophies regarding the meaning of Islamic architecture in contemporary time created their own sphere of intellectual debate within Islamic societies. Views were exchanged through symposia, professional meetings, architectural magazines and manifestoes. In addition to Euro-American pedagogical and professional establishments, a parallel educational infrastructure – the madrasa – also enabled formidable transnational flows of knowledge and people across the Islamic world.

Themes

The focus of the contributions to this special issue of IJIA should follow these variant forms of disruptive flows and address the question of how architecture – defined broadly – creates nuanced definitions of Muslim selves. With an objective to better understand how, in the age of global capital, architecture mediates the forces that constitute flows and boundaries, the contributions should address architecture not only as the byproduct of socio-political forces, but also as the active promulgator of those forces. 

Themes that might be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. How might architecture be used to explore the ways in which the diverse formation of nationalism within Islamicate worlds cater to trans-local exchanges of ideas, ideologies, and human migration across geopolitical borders? Historically, how were different experiences of partition (i.e. in the Indian subcontinent or the Middle East) and nation-building efforts informed by architectural developments and urban planning?

2. Who are the agents of the exchanges of architectural knowledge and expertise? How are the international flows of ideas, money and expertise defined in competition and collaboration between local and international professionals? In the global context, how do practicing architects tackle the challenges of boundaries? Questions to address include refugee housing or strategies for negotiating cultural identities of immigrant populations in a ‘foreign’ land.

3. How could the architecture of the Muslim diaspora be used as a means to better understand Islamicate societies in the contemporary world? How is architecture located at the junction of the experience of war, genocide, migration, and partition? What might the architectural expression of a migrant Muslim community tell us about the politics of construction and destruction of the Muslim self? 

4. How do flows of discourse and expert knowledge navigate between institutions (universities, NGOs, intergovernmental agencies etc.) within and beyond Islamic countries? What is the role of architecture in that process? How do these flows work at the intersection of the training of ‘local’ experts in international institutions and thus contribute to the discourse on ‘modern Islamic architecture’?

Guidelines for Authors:

Essays that focus on historical and theoretical analysis (DiT papers) should be a minimum of 6,000 words but no more than 8,000 words, and essays on design and practice (DiP papers) can range from 3,000 to 4,000 words. Contributions from practitioners are welcome and should bear in mind the critical framework of the journal. Contributions from practitioners and scholars of art history, anthropology, diaspora studies, sociology, and geography and building construction are particularly welcome.

Please send a 400-word abstract with essay title to the guest editor, Farhan Karim, University of Kansas (fskarim@ku.edu), by October 30, 2017. Those whose proposals are accepted will be contacted soon thereafter and requested to submit full papers to the journal by May 15, 2018. All papers will undergo full peer review.

For author instructions regarding paper guidelines, please consult: www.intellectbooks.com/ijia or https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=204/view,page=2/

Call for papers deadline: 30 October 2017

Activism at Home: Architects’ own houses as sites of resistance

15-16 January 2018
Convenors: Isabelle Doucet & Janina Gosseye

'Architects are, on the whole, idealistic people. Many of them believe that better buildings will make better lives for the people who live and work in them. Architects’ own homes embody their real passions, on a scale which is comprehensible.'

With this statement Miranda H. Newton challenges, in her 1992 book Architects’ London Houses. The Home of Thirty Architects since the 1930s (p. viii), the mockery by certain critics, including architect Léon Krier, of architects’ distinction between their experimental creations for others, and their own homes. A long tradition indeed exists of architects designing experimental houses for themselves. Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin homes and Frank Gehry's exploded bungalow in Santa Monica, are well known examples from the US and find British counterparts in Walter Segal’s double house, Neave Brown’s terrace of five houses at Winscombe Street, and Michael and Patty Hopkins ‘high-tech’ house. All these examples demonstrate how architects challenged (or resisted) accepted forms and practices within the discipline of architecture through the design of their own home.

With this symposium, we are looking for examples of architects’ own houses that not only aimed to challenge the status quo within the discipline, but also articulated broader social, political and cultural critiques. We seek to explore how the unique set of conditions typical of an architect’s own home, allows for different, perhaps more radical, forms of experiment in living than is possible through commissioned work. The architect’s own home is hereto instructive because it intensifies several tensions that are present in the practice of architecture in general. In their own house, where the architect operates as designer and user, aesthetic objectives, ideology, and the promotion of the architect’s business become inseparably entwined with the personal. Acknowledging that many architects see themselves as social engineers, the architect’s own home invites to unpack the complex entanglement between resistance, experimentation, aesthetics, marketing, and living.

This symposium follows on from the “Private Virtues or Vices? Architects in Search of an Aesthetics of Resistance” symposium, which took place at the University of Queensland (Australia), in July 2017. In the forthcoming symposium in Manchester we seek to focus on two tensions in particular: The tensions that the desire for (radical) experimentation versus the quest for commissions generates, and, secondly, the tension that is produced by the architect assuming a double role, as both the designer and client / inhabitant of the house. We welcome papers that explore such tensions through case studies, preferably but not solely architects’ houses that have not yet been ‘canonised’ and clearly demonstrate how a socio-political statement is expressed through the design of the (personal) home.

GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

This symposium will take place at the University of Manchester on 15-16 January 2018.
Please submit a 300-word abstract and a one-page CV to the conference organisers:
Isabelle Doucet: isabelle.doucet@manchester.ac.uk
Janina Gosseye: j.gosseye@uq.edu.au

Keynote Speakers: to be announced.
This symposium is possible thanks to generous financial support from the University of Manchester’s Social Responsibility in the Curriculum Fund, the Manchester Architecture Research Group at the Manchester Urban Institute (http://www.mui.manchester.ac.uk/marg/about/), and the Centre for Architecture Theory Criticism History at the University of Queensland (http://atch.architecture.uq.edu.au/).
The possibility exists for speakers to receive financial support for travelling to Manchester. The allocation of funds will be discussed on a case-by-case basis upon acceptance of the abstract. The conference organisers intend to develop a proposal for a themed journal issue on the basis of the papers that are submitted for this symposium in Manchester and the papers that were presented at the symposium at the University of Queensland.

CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 16 OCTOBER 2017

Notification of acceptance: 27 October 2017
Symposium: 15-16 January 2018

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Comprador Networks and Regional Modernism Panel

The comprador classes of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries were critical agents of global capitalism. As “middle men” in the colonial enterprise, they enabled the development of imperial trade networks, negotiated the supply of labor that extracted profit from the local landscape, established new patterns of consumption and taste, and facilitated cultural as well as economic exchanges that were critical to the growth of Asian cities. In diverse treaty ports and colonial entrepôts like Batavia, Tianjin, Calcutta, and Hong Kong, compradors drew on a diverse vocabulary of intra- and trans-regional architectural forms, labor, materials, and construction techniques to build homes, offices, godowns, factories, and infrastructural networks that were legible to both European corporations and local populations. The diplomat and entrepreneur Cheong Fatt-tze, for example, deployed ironworks from the Scottish Macfarlanes factory as well as Teochew ceramic ornamentation from the southern China coast to articulate a mansion in British-colonial Penang that could be identified as the home of both a mandarin official and a modern capitalist.

His neighbor, Khaw Sim Bee (Phraya Ratsadanupradit Mahitsaraphakdi to the Siamese crown), meanwhile, built nearby Asdang House in a neo-Palladian idiom that marked him as a member of a cosmopolitan class that circulated freely across national and imperial borders. The travelling, sojourning perspective of the comprador allows historians to critically examine the fractured, multi-scaled geographies at play across global networks as well as what Raymond Williams has described as “the metropolitan interpretation of its own processes as universals.” This panel invites papers that examine the role of comprador patrons and architects as active participants in the production of the global modern built environment in the 19th and 20th centuries. The panel aims to create an understanding of treaty ports, colonial cities, and free trade zones not only as sites of local and foreign interactions but as incubators of new ideas about architecture in a global capitalist economy.

Call for Papers Deadline: September 30, 2017

Papers should identify the ways that compradors actively shaped a conversation between formative iterations of European and Asian architecture as translators of regional, national, and universal idioms and approaches to architectural and urban space. Some questions that papers might explore are: Did comprador architecture preserve local “traditions” or accelerate the development of modern approaches to building? How did comprador tastes shape the circulation of regional idioms? How did comprador agents cultivate or weaken building expertise? How did comprador patronage support the growth of the architectural profession? How did comprador building projects intervene on the growth of new cities? How were compradors able to translate across diverse social circumstances, building communities, and cultural tastes? How did comprador tastes appeal to both regionalist and nationalist tendencies?

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CfP // EAHN Tallinn 2018 // A Woman’s Situation: Transnational Mobility and Gendered Practice

As a factor of globalization that accompanied the modern colonial and postcolonial period, transnationalism and an emerging landscape of cosmopolitan sites offered women new proving ground outside established social, cultural, and commercial spheres of architecture and planning. In this session, we investigate the significance of transnational mobility, over an open time period, for women as architects, planners, patrons, builders, curators, historians, or other users of the built environment.

Whether their movement was based on privileged access to international networks or resulted from forced migration, we find repeated instances of an engagement in debates on regionalism, the vernacular, the everyday, the folkloric, and the anonymous, as expressions in architecture and planning. Seeing these debates as deeply contingent on the subject’s position, this session seeks precision on a problem that has inhabited the fringes of architectural and planning history: the gendered connections between an extreme mobility (understood as conditioned by specific historical contexts) and a theory of the situated.

Thinking with Donna Haraway—in particular, her concern with ‘situated knowledge’ as that which is informed by the subject’s position and does not attempt the abstraction of universalism—this session attempts to map mobility and gender onto one another within a set of practices and visions that focused on structuring, building, historicizing, or thinking the undesigned, the unplanned. We see this in part as stemming from the vision of a stranger, a function of vision from a periphery or a territorially interior margin. As Hilde Heynen has discussed in relation to Sybil Moholy-Nagy, the turn to architecture without architects also shifted claims upon expertise, opening the position of expert to a wider pool. This session takes the epistemological question of what knowledge is produced by transnational mobility, and attempts to move beyond the frequent challenges of the archive and historiography, to suggest certain sites of resistance to a ‘canon’ from which many women have been excluded, as well as to the various borders which define architectural expression, authors, and publics.

Bringing the work of women architects and non-architects alike into conversation, we invite papers that consider understudied professional figures such as Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Charlotte Perriand, Erica Mann, Jane Drew, Lina Bo Bardi, Minnette de Silva, Hannah Schreckenbach, Dorothy Hughes, Gillian Hopwood, Ursula Olsner, and Denise Scott Brown, or a variety of named and unnamed groups of women—clients, laborers, refugees—whose transnational travels affected the built environment or its history.

Co-chairs: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Rachel Lee

GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

Please submit max. 300 word abstracts to iyersiddiqi@gmail.com or rachel.lee@gmx.net

For additional information, please visit http://eahn2018conference.ee/

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS DEADLINE: 30 SEPTEMBER 2017

Fabrications: JSAHANZ vol.28 no.2 - Architecture/Heritage/Politics

The spaces of normative cultures dominate the heritage arena suppressing or marginalising other competing forms of heritage. Architecture is uniquely positioned to resist these hegemonic processes through substantive material presence, the resilience of which is best realised in conservation praxis. But too often heritage conservation assumes an apolitical stance by neglecting to acknowledge its own unsettling agendas. This issue of Fabrications seeks to understand the nature of the relationship between major and minor cultural practices where architecture, heritage and politics intersect. Its particular focus is the Asia-Pacific region, where tensions caused by colonisation, decolonisation, territorial conflicts, the cold war, migration, nation building and economic liberalisation have produced diverse or dissident built expressions.

What are the implications of the politics of patrimony for architectural history? We are interested in how both normative and marginal cultures reinvent the past; how relationships of geopolitical dominance or dependence are expressed; and how majority and minority cultures operate within sovereign frameworks. Do the politics of these processes have legible architectural outcomes? Do their material expressions cross geopolitical borders? Do they suggest new methodologies for researching and writing architectural history? Could they raise questions about the place of architectural history amid the interdisciplinary practices of conservation?  What are their implications for the architecture of heritage framed internationally, nationally and regionally that has to negotiate diversity, dissent and accumulation? The issue anticipates papers that rethink the multifarious relationships between the discourses of heritage and architecture in ways that are self-reflexive, inclusive, dynamic and mindful of the co-habitation of different cultural positions.

Guidelines for Authors

Papers should be submitted online at  www.edmgr.com/rfab  by 25 September 2017.

The Editors consider essays of 6000 to 9000 words (including footnotes). Papers should be submitted as Word documents. Authors should use the footnote function of Word, but no automatic footing programs such as Endnote. Papers should be submitted with an abstract (200 words) at the beginning of the paper and a brief author biography (80 words), images and image captions. Abstracts are published at the beginning of papers. All papers published in Fabrications are blind peer-refereed by two readers.

Instructions for authors can be found on the Taylor & Francis website here: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rfab20/current

Proposals for reports or for reviews of books, exhibitions and other events of interest to the membership of SAHANZ can be made to the Editors, Stuart King [stuart.king@utas.edu.au] and Anoma Pieris [apieris@unimelb.edu.au].

Image Specifications

For the refereeing process, please submit low-resolution images of illustrations as separate files (or embedded in a separate pdf file with captions).  Once a paper is accepted for publication, high-resolution images should be submitted as 300 dpi tiff files, at a minimum of 100mm wide with a separate list of captions indicating permissions.

Authors are responsible for securing all permissions and paying all fees to reproduce images in Fabrications. Authors must meet UK copyright regulations. For information, see: More

Co-Editors: Stuart King and Anoma Pieris

CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 25 September 2017