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Aga Khan Documentation Center
Aga Khan Documentation Center

Category Archives: All AKDC News

AKDC Program Head interviewed by architecture student group at the University of Tehran: Lessons on building a documentation center

Sharon C. Smith, Ph.D., was recently interviewed by the Iran Architecture Studies Student Community of the University of Tehran, Iran, on the topic of establishing a documentation center. As the founding head of the current Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, Smith was asked to address some fundamental issues and provide insight for the students as they seek to set up a digital archive of Iranian architecture at the University of Tehran. The students stated that they found the interview informational, stating that “your words about the necessity of collaboration changed our approach to making our data center.” (Email correspondence, […]

Archnet Named One of Top 20 Architecture Sites for 2016

The Global Grid, a service focused on delivering daily news on “localized and unique architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, urban planning,” has named Archnet one of the Top 20 Architecture Websites for 2016. Ranked 17, other honored sites include the Architectural Record magazine, the American Institute of Architects, the Royal Institute of British Architects, and the online architecture forum Skyscrapercity. Archnet–developed by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT–is an open-access, scholarly resource focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues, with a particular focus on Muslim societies. Archnet presents visual […]

Dr. Marilyn Jenkins-Madina donates collection to the Aga Khan Documentation Center

  Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, Ph.D., Curator Emerita, Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has donated her research collection to AKDC@MIT.  Her gift includes ca. 4,250 35mm slides, along with some born digital images, from important sites and collections throughout the Middle East and North Africa including, but not limited to: Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, and Iran.  Many of the sites she documented have now been lost to time, natural disaster, or war and can only be studied through scholars’ collections such as this. Jenkins-Madina began her long curatorial career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in […]

Exhibition: José Luis Argüello, AKPIA Posters (2001-2016)

A retrospective of Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT posters designed by José Luis Argüello is on display now in Rotch Library at MIT. Sponsored by AKPIA MIT and AKDC@MIT, with introduction by Professor Nasser Rabbat, this exhibition illustrates José Luis Argüello’s thoughtful and extraordinary posters “that not only visually document the activities of the Aga Khan Program at MIT for the last fifteen years, but also reveal the refined sensibilities of their designer and his evolving mastery of the communicative potential of the art and architecture of the Islamic world.” The exhibition is free and open to […]

AKDC@MIT hosts Middle East Librarians Association annual meeting

The Middle East Librarians Association (MELA)  Annual Meeting will be held at MIT on 15-16 November 2016; MELA’s vendor fair will take place on 17 November at Boston Marriott Copley Place.  Sponsored by the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, the theme of this year’s meeting is Partnerships: Enhancing Opportunities. The program can be viewed here. Sharon C. Smith, program head of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, currently serving as vice president and program chair for this year’s events, will begin her four year term as MELA’s president at the end of the conference. MELA was founded in 1972 to […]

AKDC@MIT Program Head at the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations

Sharon C. Smith, Ph.D., spoke at the Media in Muslim Contexts: Inventing and Reinventing Identities conference sponsored by the Aga Khan University (International), in the United Kingdom, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations, 3-4 November 2016. There, she presented her paper “The Past Demands an Answer: What Becomes of History in the Digital Era?” exploring the opportunities, constraints, intentions, and consequences–planned and not–of the production, presentation, and dissemination of digital projects about and/or from the Middle East writ large. The conference was simulcasted with campuses in Nairobi and Karachi.  

AKDC@MIT announces holiday hours

Generosity is the disposition of the dwellers of Paradise.   The Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT will close for the  Thanksgiving (USA) holiday beginning Monday, 21 November.  We will reopen on Monday, 28 November.  We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.  

International Tangier: Exhibit in Rotch Library

Images from the early 20th and 21st century on display For centuries European powers battled one another and Moroccan forces for control of the city of Tangier, strategically positioned on the Straits of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. In 1924 an agreement made the city a demilitarized “International Zone,” administered by European representatives, yet still nominally under Moroccan sovereignty. With the exception of a period of five year occupation by the Spanish during World War II, some variation of this arrangement remained in place until the city was returned to Moroccan sovereignty in 1956. An exhibition […]

The Allure of the Digital Humanities in Times of Crisis

Sharon C. Smith, PhD, program head of the Aga Khan Documentation Center, is the invited lecturer at Western University (London, Ontario, Canada) where she will present “Allure of the Digital Humanities in Times of Crisis: Documenting Disruption in the Middle East” on Wednesday, October 12, commencing at 5:30 pm. The lecture will be held in the John Labatt Visual Arts Center, room 100. It is free and open to the public. Earlier that day, Smith will lead a graduate seminar discussion on the “Islamic City” at the invitation of Cody Barteet, professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Western.