Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century

Preface

This book emerged from the symposium “Local Sites of Global Practice : Modernism and the Middle East,” held at Yale University’s School of Architecture, April 4–5, 2003.1 The symposium was organized to address a pressing issue in architecture today: the emerging friction between increasingly globalized economic and cultural relationships and an increasinglyheightenedsenseof localidentity.Assymbolsof indigenouscharacter and political sovereignty continue to stream through the global media, architecture has become a powerful icon for the performance of local, regional, and national identities. Many architects find themselves choosing one side or the other, either promoting regional specificity or professing the international validity of modernism. Even as they strive to synthesize local building traditions with modern construction technologies, practitioners may inadvertently reinforce stereotypes or serve only the interests of a narrow stratum of the local population. Around the world, architects are absorbingandrespondingtolocalconcernswithconstructionmethodsandmaterials that are by now familiar in any major city on earth. The symposium brought together architects and scholars from a range of backgrounds to present papers and debate issues that proved to be more conflictive than the planners originally imagined: American-led troops had marched into Iraq just two weeks before, and the symposium opened to the news that American tanks were rolling into Baghdad. Many participants were impassioned and eloquent as they spoke about these events, unfolding at a vii Preface distance but very close to their scholarly interests. At the same time, a number of participants expressed their sense of frustration and the fear that any debates about Iraq, at the very moment that the country was erupting into flames, threatened to make their concerns irrelevant. But the looting of the National Museum of Iraq one week later reinvigorated some participants’ convictions that cultural understandings and misunderstandings had contributed to processes that had led to military action. With these essays, we illustrate how the long history of the built environment in the modern Middle East can both reinforce and subvert more explicit—and more catastrophic— governmental and institutional policies. note 1. The“LocalSitesof GlobalPractice”symposiumwassponsoredbyYaleUniversity ’s School of Architecture and the Department of the History of Art, and was co-chaired by Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi, the editors of this volume, along with Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen of the School of Architecture. viii Preface ...