Monthly Archives: May 2019

Call for submissions: Pedagogical Materials for Teaching about Architecture in Muslim Societies

As the academic year draws to a close, the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT invites you to share your best course materials in Archnet’s Pedagogy Collection. This collection contains open access materials for teaching about the built environment of Muslim societies. Materials may be geared toward any level from kindergarten to graduate school, and they may approach the topic from the perspective of any discipline. We are interested in syllabi, lesson plans, reading lists, presentations, recorded lectures, course materials, scholarly articles, etc. All material received will be evaluated by experts before inclusion. Please note, all material will be […]

New in Pedagogy: Monuments of Islamic Architecture

The Archnet Pedagogy Collection now includes course materials from Monuments of Islamic Architecture presented by Professors Gulru Necipoglu and David Roxburgh of Harvard University. The course presents an introduction to ten iconic monuments of the Islamic world from the beginning of Islam to the early modern period. It introduces various types of building-mosques, palaces, multifunctional complexes-and city types and the factors that shaped them, artistic, patronal, socio-political, religio-cultural, and economic. Each case study is divided into two lectures. The first presents the monument or city by “walking” through it; the second is devoted to themes elicited from the example, developed […]

AKDC’s Visual Resources Librarian to present on marble decorations of Samarra

On May 9, AKDC’s Visual Resources Librarian Matt Saba delivers the weekly research seminar at the Khalili Research Centre For the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East, University of Oxford. Matt will speak about the architectural decorations made from marble excavated at the early Islamic palace-city of Samarra, located in Iraq. While Samarra is famous for its carved stucco revetments, its architectural marble is rarely discussed. One reason for its neglect is that much was lost, first in antiquity and also after the site’s initial excavation in 1911-14. An overdue survey of the way this and other semi-precious […]

AKDC@MIT seeks a video assistant

The Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT), is seeking a video assistant to edit video to be posted on Archnet.org, an open access, scholarly resource focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues, with a particular focus on the Muslim world. Duties: Create video for two projects: • The Music of Morocco Project – Creation of video slideshows for uploading digitized versions of audio recordings made in Morocco, 1959-1962. Examples can be seen in the collection on Archnet, but videos still need to be created for more than 1/2 the recordings. • The Architect’s […]

April by the numbers

Archnet has just published lists of the most popular publications, search terms, and videos for the period of April 1-30. During that period, more than 52,000 users accessed more than 265,000 pages in the site. Visitors came from 186 countries or territories Google recognized countries or territories, with the larges group, nearly 1 in 5, coming from India. They are attracted by the rich library of materials accessible anywhere there is an internet connection. 7,564 publications were downloaded between April 1st and 30th, the most popular of which was a 1985 article on “Contemporary Kuwaiti Houses,” originally published in the […]