Once home to the earliest cities and organized forms of cultivation, the region known as the Arab East
(Al Mashriq) is today host to a diverse and contradictory spatial production. Here, archaeological sites, folk architectures, and monuments of empire intermingle with extralegal settlements, low-rise high-density sprawl, stylish office towers, artificial islands, and luxury desert resorts. Underlying this simultaneous collapse of ‘past’ and ‘future’ is the relatively recent shift in the locus of cultural production from the once-vibrant urban centers of Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and Beirut to the super-rich and relatively sparse nations of the Arabian peninsula (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Oman). This symposium examines the implications of this shift and anticipates alternative futures by reclaiming the region's spatial, material, and symbolic practices as sites for a renewed architectural imagination.
Program
10:30 a.m.
Welcome by David Brown
Introduction by Zehra Ahmed
10:45 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Session 1: Landscape & Memory
Ahmad Al-Jallad
Ohio State University
“The Written and the Unsaid: Mortuary Monuments Among the Nomads of the Pre-Islamic Ḥarrah”
Faysal Tabbarah
American University of Sharjah, Carleton University, & A.+ O.T.
“‘A Goodly River Runneth’: An Incomplete Story of Barada, Écochard, and Damascene Imaginaries”
Pascal Ménoret
University of Oxford
“Floating Weeds Haunting the Egyptian Post-Plantation”
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) & RIOT Laboratory
“Housing Cairo, Unlearning Field Research”
1:00 p.m.
Lunch Break
2:00 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Session 2: Urban Ethnography & Design Research
Ali Karimi
Civil Architecture
“Architecture Between Seasons”
Amale Andraos
Columbia University, GSAPP & WORKac
“Hotel Beirut”
Hussam Dakkak
Architectural Association (AA) & Malcolm Reading Consultants
“The Sacred and the Unmaking of Memory”
Ziad Jamaleddine
Columbia University, GSAPP & L.E.FT Architects
“After Typology”
4:15 p.m.
Coffee Break
4:45pm–5:30pm
Student & Panelist Roundtable Discussion (4530 Octagon + Ribbon Gallery)
5:30 p.m.
Reception (4530 Octagon)
Arabia Interrotta is curated and organized by
Zehra Ahmed and moderated by
John McMorrough (University of Michigan). Further details can be found
here.
This event is sponsored by the School of Architecture and the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts (CADA). It is free and open to the public.
Image credit: Documentation from The Mobile Exhibition, 2003. Photos by Abdullah Al Saadi. Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.
