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Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World

A Critical Anthology

Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World explores how architectural traditions and practices were shared and exchanged across national borders throughout the world, departing from a narrative that casts European actors as the importers and exporters of Islamic designs and skills. Looking to cases that touch on empire building, modernization, statecraft, and diplomacy, this book examines how these processes have been contingent on a web of expertise informed by a rich and varied array of authors and contexts since the 1800s.
The chapters in this volume, organized around the leitmotif of expertise, demonstrate the thematic importance and specific utility of in-depth and broad-ranging knowledge in shaping the understanding of architecture in the Islamic world from the nineteenth century to the present. Specific case studies include European gardeners in Ottoman courts, Polish architects in Kuwait, Israeli expertise in Iran, monument archiving in India, religious spaces in Swedish suburbs, and more.
This is the latest title in Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East, a series devoted to the most recent scholarship concerning architecture, landscape, and urban design of the Middle East and of regions shaped by diasporic communities more globally.
 

304 pages | illustrated in halftones throughout | 7 x 9 | © 2018

Architecture: Architecture--Criticism

Culture Studies

Middle Eastern Studies


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Reviews

"The volume includes some incredibly rich meditations on architecture, history and modern Islam. . . . This is a well-produced and well-illustrated text that should be a welcome addition to any good University library."
 

Dr. Chris Moffat, Reviews in History

"The importance of Christensen’s volume is that it shifts attention from form to process and provides a scholarly and historical basis through which to re-interpret and situate the Islamic architecture of both the post-colonial Muslim world and of Muslim diasporas in the West. Thereby the volume connects contemporary Islamic architecture with its historical past, not by trying to draw parallels between architectural form from here to there, but more substantively by articulating the types of knowledge and expertise that have been bound up in their making since the 1800s. The collection is a varied, insightful and much needed body of work that will enable a broader and better understanding of Islamic architecture."

Shahed Saleem | Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society

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