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 […]

Rifat Chadirji, one of the “most influential shapers of modern Baghdad,” dead at 93

The staff of the Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT), is saddened to learn of the death of the great Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji (December 6, 1926-April 10, 2020). Chadirji was “a thinker, author, critic, & rationalist architect with a refined aesthetic sensitivity, he devised a particular approach to architecture that he called international regionalism,” according to Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan Professor and the Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT Rabbat went on to characterize the deceased architect as “one of the most influential shapers of modern Baghdad and an original theorist of architecture […]