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Volume 14, Issue 1

Volume 14, Issue 1, 2025

  • Dialogues

      • Colonial Heritage in a Postcolonial World

        https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/ijia_00157_7

        ’s annual Dialogues series brings together scholars and practitioners from across varied disciplines for a discussion of critical contemporary issues that interrogate the boundaries between architecture, art, anthropology, heritage, and history. This session, its fourth instalment, was held as a webinar in February 2024 and was convened by Associate Editor Daniel Coslett. It featured three heritage specialists – Leila Ben-Gacem, Alaa El-Habashi, and Lahbib El Moumni – from across North Africa. In it, participants addressed the salience of colonial-era built environments, national identities and activism, sources of funding for heritage management, and revealing variances in the region’s conservation practices. Though focused on Tunisia (occupied by France from 1881 to 1956), Egypt (occupied by the United Kingdom in various ways from 1882 to 1956), and Morocco (occupied by France and Spain from 1912 to 1956), the optimistic conversation engaged issues that have a wider relevance across the postcolonial world. This annotated excerpt of the conversation has been slightly edited for clarity and length.

  • Design in Theory Articles

      • Takiyyat ibn Tulun, Preservation, and ‘Utility’ in the Case of a Deserted Mosque

        https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/ijia_00158_1

        Between 1846–80, the Ibn Tulun Mosque (876–79) was recast as a poorhouse, its long-deserted spaces transformed to meet new programmatic requirements. However, the modernizing state that enacted that transformation was also responsible for its undoing, ending traditional practices of reuse that had previously characterized Cairene architecture and instituting a modern philosophy of preservation. Following the poorhouse’s closure, the Comité de la Conservation des Monuments de L’Art Arabe (Committee for the Conservation of the Monuments of Arab Art), in conjunction with the Ministry of Awqaf (Ministry of Endowments), initiated a decades-long restoration of the mosque’s historical form and use. This article takes the plans of the mosque/poorhouse published by K. A. C. Creswell and Yusuf Ahmad, which capture opposite ends of the restoration period, as a lens through which to analyse and outline the Comité de la Conservation des Monuments de L’Art Arabe and the Ministry of Awqaf’s divergent doctrines of preservation and ideas on the (re)use of deserted mosques.

    • Mapping Identity: Constructing Colonial Visions in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Aceh

      https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/ijia_00159_1

      This article investigates three cartographic representations of the city of Aceh (now Banda Aceh, Indonesia) drawn in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The mappings illustrate very different aesthetic interpretations of Aceh, presenting imaginative visions deliberately constructed for the colonial enterprise. The article examines the diverse motivations for multiple ways of conceiving the same human environments. To what extent did the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mappings contribute to the construction of Aceh’s architectural and urban history? Using concepts from the study of cartographic history, this article investigates the tangible and intangible aspects of Aceh’s urban form and architecture. The maps have created Aceh’s diverse urban identity and served as a creative way to visualize various historical events in witnesses’ notes. Discrepancies in conceptions of place are brought to light through these maps, encompassing aspects such as building form, location, the objectives behind Aceh’s urban design, and perceived influences ranging from cosmological thinking to the environment.

    • (Re)Inventing the Past: The Metamorphosis of a Palace (Qasr) in Modern Tehran

      https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/ijia_00160_1

      In this article, I examine the monumentalization of the Pahlavi regime’s sites of political imprisonment and torture in contemporary Tehran, with a focus on the Qasr Garden Museum. The Qasr (palace) edifice was initially constructed as a summer palace under Qajar rule in 1790. The abandoned Qajar palace was then transformed into a prison by the Pahlavi state in 1929, and ironically named the Qasr Prison (Palace Prison). The latest metamorphosis of the old palace occurred in 2012, when the ruined Prison was opened as a museum under the Islamic Republic of Iran. This article addresses the various re-inventions of this historical site by the Pahlavis and the Islamic Republic, and aims to evaluate its role as a trans-functional monumental space and a cultural instrument for both states. The monumental site in this sense is produced through the re-invention of the past, first as a modern disciplinary and then as a cultural instrument.

  • Design in Practice Articles

      • A Multifaith Space Paradigm for the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport

        https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/ijia_00161_1

        Sacred architecture does not always respond to the needs of specific religious beliefs and practices. Multifaith spaces that explicitly challenge both religious exclusion and the specificity of designated religious settings have the potential to cater to religious and non-religious users alike. In this article, I explicate how my architectural declaration on approaching multifaith space design, dubbed the ‘Designer’s Guide to Sacred Spaces’, can be put into practice. The guide, exemplified with renderings and graphics, is structured as a dictum for architects to consider the conceptual and spatial areas in which multifaith design should exist. Here, I employ this guide to present my design for a conceptual multifaith space proposed for the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport. In this analysis, I use Marc Augé’s notion of the non-place to challenge some of the architectural exclusion experienced by practitioners of religion, and Muslims in particular, within modern society. Airports are among the most religiously, ethnically, and geopolitically diverse non-place building typologies. While place can offer the masses identity, the non-place cannot foster an intimate sense of individual identity. The Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport proposal thus offers a paradigm for addressing sacred and religious design needs in the multifaith context.

    • Heritage and Identity: Neoliberal Mega-Projects in Mecca

      https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/ijia_00162_1

      This article investigates how mass urban development schemes have influenced changes in the urban identity and heritage of Mecca (Saudi Arabia) in connection with recent concepts of mega-events and hosting cities, event legacies, and hyper-identity. The study focuses on the impact of urban neoliberal redevelopment on cultural identity, city image, vernacular architecture, and city residents. This article analyses and compares the historical socio-political impact of mega-events and religious tourism through the concepts of mass gathering events, such as Hajj. It takes up a comprehensive analysis of one of Mecca’s recent state-sponsored urban developments, the Jabal Omar Development Project, and considers how this project’s developers responded to the city’s urban fabric. As an important sacred city for contemporary Islamic societies, and with an exceptionally cosmopolitan social fabric, Mecca’s rapid privatization exemplifies the new neoliberal urban condition led by a series of mega developments, such as hotels and malls, recently undertaken by the Saudi state. By outlining Mecca’s urban conditions, this article highlights the impact of twenty-first century neoliberal urbanism on Mecca’s urban fabric, socio-political context, and ‘new identity’.

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