Session three:
Fragmentation in historiographies of global modernism
Keynote:
[title forthcoming]
Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (Barnard College)
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. For more, please see 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.
From Circuits to Files:
Pan-Islamic Networks and the Record-Making of Architecture
Sarah K. Cheema (Ph.D candidate, Architecture)
My project examines how pan-Islamic infrastructures reshaped architectural production in Pakistan during the Cold War, especially from the 1960s onward. Cross regional Islamic circuits have existed in South Asia for centuries, but I argue that the Cold War accelerated and densified them –condensing older mobilities into more institutionalized platforms, programs and funding routes. I treat ‘pan-Islamism’ not as a singular ideology or a stable geography, but as a heterogeneous field of transnational alignments that braided Islamic solidarity with Third World and non-aligned diplomacies, regional cooperation and development expertise. These affiliations became practical through multiple, overlapping carriers: summit diplomacy; cultural institutions and programming (exhibitions, publications, heritage initiatives); regional cooperation platforms and technical exchange; professional delegations; and labor, finance, and institutional funding circuits linking Pakistan to wider Muslim world and postcolonial networks.
This research asks not where Islamic form appears, but how alignment becomes operational – how claims about shared civilizational belonging and postcolonial development are translated into the routines that commission, evaluate and legitimate architecture. Here, architecture names both buildings and infrastructures and the procedural field that decides them: briefs, committee review, competitions, standards, documentation and professional criteria. Records here, are therefore not neutral evidence but active instruments of authorization –minutes, correspondence, reports, publications, and project files that classify and stabilize categories such as “Islamic,” “heritage,” or “vernacular” as actionable criteria. Reading these procedural trails, I show how architecture is produced through record-making, and how archives can surface frictions, exclusions and negotiated legitimacy.
Sarah K. Cheema is a PhD candidate in Architecture (History/Theory) at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, working cold war Pakistan. Her research foregrounds pan-Islamic networks and other forms of South-South collaboration to rethink how development, expertis, 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.
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.