News & Events
News + Events
Symposium: Grassroots Initiatives in Cultural Heritage Preservation
Saturday October 18 9am-5pm MIT Building 2-190 and online The Aga Khan Documentation Center and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT present an international symposium on Grassroots Initiatives in Cultural Heritage Preservation at MIT on October 18. The event, organized by Rami Alafandi, AKDC Collections Curator, will also be streamed live. Communities around the world have demonstrated extraordinary resilience in safeguarding their cultural heritage amid armed conflict and natural disasters. This symposium seeks to examine the vital contributions of individuals and non-governmental organizations in preserving cultural heritage under such conditions. Through the exploration of cross-regional case studies...
Exhibit: Ink, Stone, and Silver Light
A Century of Cultural Heritage Preservation in Aleppo October 1, 2025 – December 11, 2025 Maihaugen Gallery, MIT Ink, Stone, and Silver Light, an exhibition curated by Rami Alafandi, is now on open to the public in the Maihaugen Gallery of the MIT Libraries. Drawing on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fi Tarikh Halab (The River of Gold in the History of...
Exhibition: Refracted Histories through Stained Glass
The exhibition “Refracted Histories through Stained Glass: 19th c. Islamic Windows as a Prism into MIT’s Past, Present, and Future,” curated by Rami Alafandi and Gwendolyn Collaço, is now on display in the Distinctive Collections’ Maihaugen Gallery. The exhibit features a set of striking gypsum and stained glass windows dating to the late 18th- to 19th century Ottoman Empire, which the curators discovered among numerous architectural artifacts from the earliest days of the Institute’s architecture program in the Rotch Art Collection, Department of Distinctive Collections. This discovery led to extensive research on the craft and the commissioning of contemporary works...
Caroline Williams, authority on the Islamic architecture of Cairo has passed
AKDC at MIT is saddened to convey the news that Caroline Williams, a well-known authority on the Islamic architecture of Cairo, passed away last week. Among her publications was The Islamic Monuments of Cairo: The Practical Guide. Currently in its 7th edition, the text is a classic educational guide to the history of Islamic architecture in the city. Caroline and her husband John Alden Williams (d. 2022), himself a distinguished scholar of Islamic history, took thousands of photos in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East as part of their research on art and architecture. A sample of their...
His Highness Aga Khan IV, Founder of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT and Harvard, has died
His Highness Prince Karim Al-Hussaini, Aga Khan IV, 49th hereditary Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims and direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), passed away peacefully in Lisbon on 4 February 2025, aged 88, surrounded by his family. Prince Karim Aga Khan was the founder and chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network, including the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and its signature programs, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme. His Highness founded the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at MIT and Harvard through an endowment in...
Data and images documenting 20 historically significant Islamic monuments now available on Archnet
The Aga Khan Documentation Center is thrilled to announce our collaboration with the Research and Information Center for Asian Studies (RICAS) at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (University of Tokyo) and Five Cross Architects (Mumbai, India) (FCA) to safeguard an endangered archival collection documenting 750 Indian Islamic monuments from the Delhi Sultanate era (1191–1526 CE). This treasure trove of 40,000+ photographs, drawings, field notes, and inscriptions has been digitized, preserved, and is now being made available to both scholars and the general public on Archnet.org. Data on and images of 20 monuments was published this morning. Additional monuments...
Books and Bites on Wednesday, November 20
Join us in the Department of Distinctive Collections Reading Room (14N-118) to engage with recent acquisitions and highlights from Distinctive Collections and Rotch Library, including artist books, rare books, and materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center. Enjoy refreshments while you explore!
New for the Fall Semester
As we start the 2024-2025 academic year, we bring you nearly 5,000 records added since the end of the last academic year: 30 new sites, 21 publications, 73 authority records, and 4,842 media records. The collage to the left includes 7 of the new site records. How many can you identify? For answers, see the following links corresponding to the images, clockwise from the top left: www.archnet.org/sites/21840 www.archnet.org/sites/21841 www.archnet.org/sites/21825 www.archnet.org/sites/21816 www.archnet.org/sites/21815 www.archnet.org/sites/21835
NOTICE: Archnet will be unavailable for several hours on July 10th
Archnet.org will be unavailable starting at 9 am EDT/ 1 pm UTC on July 10 while we migrate over 140,000 media (images, documents, and videos) to an IIIF-capable server so that we can continue making Archnet media available to you via state-of-the-art technology. The process is likely to last 6-8 hours, though it is not possible to start precisely. IIIF stands for “International Image Interoperability Framework,” a standard for hosting, serving, describing, sharing, and viewing images of other visual media that has been widely adopted by libraries, archives, galleries, and museums to further facilitate the sharing of their collections. This...
Registration Closing Soon for “Re:Fest: A Research Festival for The Curious” in Lagos, Nigeria
NAIROBI, 10 June 2024 – CoDesign Collective [till recently operating as Ministry of Architecture] is launching a new initiative, Co-School with its first event titled Re:Fest: A Research Festival for The Curious. In the words of Anthony Baba-Oladeji, Founder of CoDesign Collective, “Africa’s present educational system is unable to grapple with the pace of advancements in her built environment and cities, and as such, ReFest will be a yearly event intervention to complement Africa’s presently underfunded educational operation by filling knowledge gaps such as metadata on cities, research into local materials and new representation techniques & technologies such as film,...