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Tag Archives: pedagogy

AKDC@MIT and The Met Museum Collaborate to make images available on Archnet

The Aga Khan Documentation Center has collaborated with the Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) to digitize, catalog, and make available a number of historical photographs of Islamic architecture. The photos, most of which date between the 1880s and 1950s, show some of the great monuments of the Islamic tradition, both general and detailed views, often before modern restoration projects. The first batch of nearly 300 photos is now available on Archnet. These are among the oldest of the collection, taken by pioneering photographers such as the Turkish photographer Pascal Sébah, his son Jean […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Pedagogy Project Expanded with Teaching Collections

Archnet’s Pedagogy Project  now includes items from scholars’ archives donated to AKDC@MIT since its opening in 2011. Recognizing the significance of this collection to those teaching and learning about the material and visual culture of Muslim societies, they are being added to a new Teaching Collections section of the project. Each scholar’s collection is unique and may contain slides, prints, field notes, and other materials as outlined in the finding aids for each archive. The materials housed in this collection are free to use for teaching and research purposes. Further, they provide a unique opportunity for students and scholars to examine […]