Category Archives: All AKDC News

Archnet marks International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, August 9

To mark International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples on August 9, Archnet is highlighting the architecture of indigenous people. The background images on the site are photographs of the Amin Mosque, a Uyghur mosque built in the 18th century in northwest China; and a street in the Old Town of Ghadames, an oasis town on the edge of the Sahara Desert in Libya. Click the images and text on the homepage tiles to learn about more resources devoted to the theme. There is also an Archnet collection that gathers select resources focusing on manifestations of indigenous culture and vernacular […]

Archnet Word of Day: “ablaq”

Yesterday Archnet social media featured the first of a new series of “Word of the Day” updates. The first word is ablaq, defined by the Dictionary of Islamic Architecture as “term used to describe alternating light and dark courses of masonry.” In the image to the left you can see five examples of the style from including a hammam in Aleppo, a palace in Damascus, a mosque that is now a cathedral in Cordoba, and mosques in Tripoli (Lebanon), and a mosque complex in Damascus. The next word in the series, “almena” is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture as […]

AKDC Program Head to present in a symposium on The Architecture of Migration

Michael Toler will present on “International Tangier: Stagnation and Growth in the 20th Century” in a Symposium on “The Architecture of Migration, Clues of Transcultural Exchanges in the Mediterranean Built Environment,” July 16th-17th at the Leicester School of Architecture, De Montfort University in the UK. The symposium is organized by Beniamino Polimeni, a researcher, designer and an architectural conservator who was a 2013 postdoctoral fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic architecture at MIT, and Yasser Megahed is a Lecturer at Leicester School of Architecture, UK. Full organizer biographies are available on the conference website. The symposium comes at […]

AKDC Program Head to participate in kickoff of apprenticeship program of the Revolving Art Incubator in Lagos, Nigeria

LAGOS, Nigeria – From 12 – 13 July 2019, Revolving Art Incubator will host Michael Toler, Head of the Aga Khan Documentation Centre, MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT) and Jelili Atiku, multimedia artist and Visiting Professor at Brown University, Kola Tubosun, writer, linguist and Founder of Yorubaname.com, Judith Okonkwo, Creative Director of Imisi 3D Lab and Oliver Enwonwu, Director of Omenka Gallery and Trustee of Ben Enwonwu Foundation to facilitate the commencement of our apprenticeships programme with archiving and documenting as its central theme. The apprenticeship programme at RAI represent one-leg of our 3-pronged extroversion agenda; the other two being the outposts […]

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 […]

New Archnet collection documents monuments of Algerian architecture

“Moorish Monuments of Algeria: richness and diversity,” is a new Archnet collection documenting 27 of the most prominent historic architectural sites in Algeria. The Aga Khan Documentation Center of the MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT) commissioned Dr. Amine Kasmi, a conservation architect and associate professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Tlemcen in Algeria, to develop and curate the collection documenting “architecture produced by the local population of the central Maghreb.” Structures in the collection span the history of the region from the 3rd century BCE through the first half of the 20th c. Like “The Islamic Heritage of Bangladesh, the […]