Session three:
Opacity in historiographies of global modernism
Keynote:
Inheritance, Intergenerational Knowledge, and Historiography
Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (Barnard College)
Sari designed by Minnette De Silva, ca. 1960, photo by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, 2014.
This talk examines problems of historical framing and knowledge sharing within the confines of the enclosed community as well as in the putatively open arena of the postcolonial society. Drawing on archival and material architectural research in Sri Lanka, India, Hong Kong, Greece, France, and England, oral histories with craftspeople and architects, and a body of intellectual labors to narrate monumental ecologies, I examine the care of a cultural and social ‘inheritance’ by the caste-enclosed community as well as the national and global polity. How do we write histories that both honor the opacity of carefully conserved intergenerational knowledge and preserve it for the widest posterity? This talk asks how we care for our inheritance, marking works of historiography and works of handicraft as records of intergenerational knowledge.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an art and architectural historian specializing in histories of modernity, migration, and settlement. She is an Associate Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and her writing and teaching builds on yearslong research in Africa, Asia, and Europe for two scholarly monographs, Architecture of Migration (Duke University Press) and Ecologies of the Past. These two projects inform her research on histories of architecture, craft, settlement, and land, experiences of migration and territorial partition, and knowledge of the past through architectural practice, pedagogy, and discourse on the African continent and South Asian subcontinent. Siddiqi is a coeditor of the University of Minnesota Press series Cohabitations. For more, please see https://www.anooradhaiyersiddiqi.net.
Graduate student lightning talks
Neoliberal Architecture in the Here and Now
Sben Korsh (Ph.D candidate, Architecture)
A fog is lifting across the academy. It was recently quite common to hear scholars claim “neoliberalism” was an amorphous meta-term of limited use. Yet recent waves of scholarship have shown its analytical purchase across the academy via increasingly fine-grained intellectual histories, cultural studies and socioeconomic research. The architectural academy appears as behind as ever, with some seeking to still prove neoliberalism’s very existence “on the ground” while others wield historical relativism to evacuate the here and now of its urgency. This paper moves the discussion forward by offering an exemplary case of how we can understand architecture’s own institutions as transformed by actually-existing neoliberalism. Using newly unsealed records of Taubman College’s administration offers a means to read the architecture of neoliberalism as immediately here—in contrast to a built environment of elsewhere—and makes plain the political stakes that face us in the now—rather than as mere analogy with the past.
Sben Korsh is an architectural scholar and educator. His research focuses on how architecture—as building, profession and discipline—is implicated in political economy. He is a PhD Candidate at Taubman College and an affiliate at the Center for Inequality Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research. His dissertation offers a history of how institutions of Anglo-American architecture have transformed through neoliberalization since the late-20th century. He has studied architectural history and theory at the City University of New York, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hong Kong.
Pan-Islamic Worldmaking and Its Afterlives in Cold War Pakistan
Sarah K. Cheema (Ph.D candidate, Architecture)
Across Cold War Pakistan, architecture emerged not only through buildings and plans, but through wider infrastructures of diplomacy, representation and exchange that linked the country to a broader Muslim world. This project examines how pan-Islamic infrastructures reshaped architectural production in Pakistan during this period. I argue that although cross-regional Islamic circuits in South Asia were much older, the decades after the 1960s intensified and institutionalized them through summit diplomacy, regional cooperation, cultural programming, technical exchange, and postcolonial development platforms. Rather than treating pan-Islamism as a singular ideology or fixed geography, I approach it as a heterogeneous field in which Islamic solidarity intersected with Third Worldism, non-alignment, and state-led projects of legitimacy and worldmaking.
The talk asks how political affiliation becomes operational in architecture through the procedures, institutions, and representational forms that authorize the built environment. Reading buildings, monuments, and documentary and visual forms – including commemorative stamps –together, I argue that pan-Islamic worldmaking survives not as a transparent archive, but through partial and uneven afterlives. Opacity, then, is not a failure of method but a condition of the archive itself.
Sarah K. Cheema is a PhD candidate in Architecture (History/Theory) at the Taubman College, University of Michigan where her research focuses on Cold War Pakistan. Her work foregrounds pan-Islamic networks and other forms of South-South collaboration to rethink how development, expertise, and architectural knowledge circulated during the Cold War. Against scholarship that centers Western aid and technical authority as the primary drivers of postcolonial modernization, she asks what comes into view when we follow postcolonial institutions, cultural programs, and professional exchanges operating within and across the Muslim world and the broader Third World. She studied Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and Architectural Design at the National College of Arts, Lahore.
Photography and the Visual Politics of a Saharan Hospital (1943–51)
Dana Salama (Ph.D student, Architecture)
Architect Michel Luyckx, disciple of modernist Auguste Perret, constructed an earthen hospital in Algeria’s ‘Southern Territories’ between 1943-51. This talk represents ongoing research examining the role of the military architect, Luyckx, in circulating the earth brick—a modern vernacular that flattened ‘styles’ from Timbuktu to Kairouan. In addition to his role as an architect Luyckx staged photographs of locals in front of the hospital’s facades. I will focus on the central role that modern architects played in cementing material mobilities and imaginaries of the Sahara, in particular through photography and periodicals.
Dana is an architectural designer, curator, and researcher who is interested in how public memory and power shape the built world. Her research works to develop critical methodologies towards the interpretation, disclosure, and use of heritage sites, particularly in North and West Africa. She is a member of Taubman College’s Africa Alliance. Dana’s architectural practice spans research, design, and project management, with a focus on socially sustainable ecotourism, co-design, and the conservation of Modern heritage. From 2019-2023, she served as an associate at Aziza Chaouni Projects, where she led curatorial initiatives and managed international projects in Morocco, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, “Canada,” and beyond. She received two LafargeHolcim Sustainability Awards for her design and research work in this capacity and her film work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. She has served as a sessional lecturer at The University of Toronto, and OCADU’s Faculty of Design.
Discussant: Dr. Dicle Taskin
Dicle Taskin is an architect and historian of the built environment who recently completed her Ph.D. in Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. In her dissertation, Taskin examined the shifting power dynamics of Pan-Americanism through the Pan-American Highway project and its infrastructural imprint on the built environment. Her doctoral research was supported by the Graham Foundation’s Carter Manny Writing Award and the Fulbright Scholarship, among other awards and scholarships from the University of Michigan. Taskin received her B.Arch from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and her M.Arch from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. She currently works as a studio instructor at the University of Detroit Mercy's School of Architecture and Community Development.