Category Archives: Call for Contributors

Documenting Heritage Destruction from the Turkey-Syria Earthquake

العربية Türkçe Even as it continues to rise, the number of fatalities from the horrible earthquake that shook large parts of Turkey and Syria defies comprehension, and the number of those injured and left homeless is many times that number. Many children have lost their families and will need to be provided for. Heartbreaking seems too mild a word! Addressing this urgent humanitarian need is the first priority, and we urge you to support relief efforts however you can. There is a list of international aid agencies on this page from the Aga Khan Development Network. Humanitarian aid is and […]

AKDC Program Head to edit volume on the topic of restitution of cultural artifacts

AKDC Program Head Dr. Nur Sobers-Khan is one of the curators of §RETURN, HEAL, REDISTRIBUTE, an upcoming issue of ROOTS§ROUTES a multilingual, independent quarterly magazine of visual culture published in Italy. The focus of the issue curated by Dr. Sobers-Khan, Domenico Sergi, Anna Chiara Cimoli and Giulia Grechi is Restitution, an important and timely issue in contemporary museum practice, the debate of which often serves to expose “deeply rooted colonial epistemologies.” In Europe and the US, “one of the most frequent objections to restitution is the weak scientific infrastructure of the communities where objects would be returned,” a premise that […]

CFP: Cities and Migration: Visual approaches to the challenges of increasingly diverse cities

Beniamino Polimeni, Lecturer in Architecture at the Leicester School of Architecture at De Montfort University and Michael A. Toler, Archnet Content Manager in AKDC@MIT, will be guest editors of DISEGNARECON ISSUE Vol 15, No 28 (2022) on the topic of “Cities and Migration: Visual approaches to the challenges of increasingly diverse cities.” According to the Call for Papers, the issue: will highlight new architectural and landscape/urban planning responses on migration, including strategies for reinforcing social inclusion and urban diversity. Priority will be given to papers based on an argument that analyses visual and material culture; look at issues of migration […]

Content added to Archnet in 2020

2020 has been an unusually difficult year around the world, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As universities took courses online, Archnet.org, a joint project of the Aga Khan Documentation Center of the MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT) and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) worked with our partners step up the pace through which we made available quality resources for studying Islamic architecture and the built environment of Muslim societies more broadly. Approximately 3,350 new records have been published on Archnet so far this year. In addition to making over 2,700 new images available for download, we have also published records […]

What was new and who was using Archnet in October?

58,272 users visited Archnet between October 1 and October 31, viewing a total of 286,946 pages, watching 140 videos, downloading 7,820 publications, and conducting 7,556 searches. The most-watched video was Close to Home: Al-Khimyah, written and directed by Prince Aly Muhammad Aga Khan, and revealing how a pile of rubble in Cairo became Al-Azhar Park, a 30-acre green space with lakes and fountains in the heart of the historic city, and its impact of the lives of residents in the area. The most downloaded publication continues to be Charles Correa, a survey of the architect‘s early work. You can find […]

New resources for teaching and learning about architecture

On March 12, just before the Aga Khan Documentation Center closed along with the rest of the campus due to the pandemic, we published “Resources for teaching and studying architecture during COVID-19 closures” on this site. Few other articles in this site have been visited as much as that one, and Archnet saw a significant increase in traffic that lasted through the rest of the academic year. We’ve also been busy since then, adding 62 sites, 151 publications, 42 videos, 1714 images, and 54 authority records to Archnet. We hope that some of those resources will prove useful to you […]

6 Days to the Application Deadline for Nigerian Students Seeking to Join the A3/Archnet Team

February 28th is the deadline for students in Nigerian to submit applications to join A3/Archives of African Architecture and the Aga Khan Documentation Center of the MIT Libraries in a project to document the architecture of Nigeria, particularly endangered architectural heritage, and contemporary projects. Both undergraduate and graduate students are invited to compete for the prize. Recipients will join the A3 – Archnet team on a fully-funded weeklong trip to Boston, Massachusetts where they will receive training in the documentation of architectural heritage, and participate with the A3-Archnet team as they plan and begin development of the database. To apply for the […]

Michael Toler Chairs Conference Committee for the American Institute for Maghrib Studies

AKDC Interim Program Head and Archnet Content Manager Michael Toler has volunteered to chair the conference committee for the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS). The main purpose of the committee is to evaluate proposals to organize the annual AIMS Conference, which rotates each year between one of the AIMS centers in Oran, Algeria, Tunis, Tunisia, and Tangier Morocco, where this year’s conference will be held. The AIMS conference is a signature event that brings together delegations of scholars from the US, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and occasionally individual scholars from other countries. The 2020 AIMS Conference will be held in […]

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 […]

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 […]