call for papers DAr #5

ISSN 2785-3152

Sahara means the desert

TIn Arabic, sahara means desert. To be precise, ṣaḥrā is only one of the numerous words in Arabic that refer to the desert. While in European languages, the term desert typically denotes a hostile, uninhabitable, nearly empty, and perhaps even dangerous space, in Arabic, ṣaḥrā refers to the abundant topographical and landscape characteristics of the desert. Whereas ṣaḥrā is a flat and arid territory, raml denotes the vast expanse of sand that the Western collective imagination generally identifies as a desert. The epistemologies of raml, in turn, range from ‘ilm al-raml, an ancient method of divination, to Al-Raml, one of fifteen poetic meters in the Arabic language identified by the philologist Al-Farahidi.

Appropriating viewpoints from Islamic cultures — where nomadic forms of living typical of the desert regions coexisted for centuries with sedentary urban settlements — Western cultures have contributed to a distorted understanding of the desert, progressively mistifying its meanings and paving the way for exploiting a vast territory prosperous in life and resources.

This issue of DAr aims to contribute to reconsidering the desert not as an empty space but as the ground that, historically, has been home to human life. Numerous civilizations have thrived in the desert, adapting gestures and rituals, individual and collective settlements, productive activities and social relationships, mythologies, and imaginaries to the characteristics of its complex environment. Such a delicate equilibrium and symbiosis between humans, animals, vegetation, and natural elements are immediately evident in the specific forms of dwellings, materials, settlement strategies, and spatial devices produced “in” and “with” the desert, including, first and foremost, those concerning water and its extraction, harvesting, and distribution, which is the necessary condition for any settlement in the desert.

If it is true that «every city receives its form from the desert it opposes,» Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities, then not only the urban phenomenon is neither absent nor impossible in the desert, but perhaps the desert is the most crucial lesson for the city itself, still today. This is demonstrated by the numerous oasis-cities and mud architectures scattered across the Sahara, the Rub al-Khali, the Badiyat al-Sham, as well as metropolises like Cairo, where today the presence of the desert seems almost negated by the abundance of water or the experiments that have been ongoing since the 1960s to found new cities in places where the desert needs to be tamed to survive.

Focusing on architectural, urban, and landscape design as the means through which investigating and deepening the issues briefly outlined above or even opening up new ones, DAr welcomes submissions capable of critically addressing the desert and its forms of dwelling. Proposals could develop different approaches, analyses, and perspectives, which this call for papers does not intend to influence but only stimulate and guide. Thus, ongoing or completed research, points of reflection, open questions, or inquiries will also be considered.

call for papers DAr #4

ISSN 2785-3152

Pedagogies. Teaching architectural design

The project can be seen as the result of a process of approaching and reading reality, intended as an “open book” to be discovered and interpreted. It represents an important learning tool, whose pedagogical value goes back to the so-called “learning by doing” theorised by the American philosopher John Dewey.

According to Aldo Rossi, pedagogy invests in the realm of existence. For him, «teaching architectural design means teaching a defined system for facing and solving problems». Therefore, the ability to read reality is fundamental to defining the degree of necessity of the project and identifying the questions it must necessarily answer. Reality is the material against which the architect measures himself, transforming it and giving it new meaning through the project. The architect’s training path is a long and slow process, in which the School represents only a moment, a phase. It is, however, a fundamental moment, since it is at School that, hopefully, the future architect learns to express a critical judgement on architecture and reality.

Very often, research intersects with teaching experiences conducted on the field or in class. The research on architectural design involves typological and formal experimentations, which rarely give univocal results and always multiple answers.

On the other hand, even the learning methods are not simply unidirectional (from the teacher to the student). Questioning students through the project can lead to the definition of deeper questions and, therefore, to a concrete advancement of the research.

Considering the project as a necessary condition in architectural education, this call for papers aims to collect contributions on didactic experiences or design research focusing on the project of architecture and city in contexts that belong to the Islamic and Mediterranean world. In this framework, the contribution of undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students is considered fundamental. The call is divided into the following outlines:

• contributions presenting educational projects (works by students participating in design courses, seminars or workshops) exploring themes related to Islamic and Mediterranean culture. It will be interesting to understand how the didactic work has brought new insights into the field of design or analysis of reality. The contribution should not be merely descriptive but supported by scientifically sound considerations;

• contributions presenting Bachelor’s or Master’s degree theses in the fields of architecture, urban planning and landscape design in Islamic contexts or with Islamic influences, or proposing architectures ascribable to Islamic culture (mosques, cultural centres, etc.). The contribution should not be merely descriptive but supported by scientifically sound considerations. Contributions from both the academic supervisor and the scholar are welcome.

call for papers DAr #3

ISSN 2785-3152

The mosque. New forms and new characters

Edited by Claudia Sansò

The mosque is the most representative building in an Islamic city, a synthesis of religious and collective space in Muslim life. The first mosques in the oldest Islamic cities were built with a few simple elements. As K.A.C. Creswell writes in Early Muslim Architecture, «At  Basra, founded about AD 635, the first mosque, according to Baladhuri, was simply marked out (ikhtatta) and the people prayed there without any building. According to another version, also given by Baladhuri, it was enclosed by a fence of reeds. At Kufa, founded in AD 638, the first mosque was equally primitive. Its boundaries were fixed by a man who threw an arrow towards the quibla, then another towards the north, another to the west, and a fourth to the east. A square whit each side two arrow-casts in length was thus formed. This area was not enclosed by walls but by a ditch only, and the sole architectural feature was a covered colonnade (zulla) 200 cubits long, which ran the whole length of the south side».

Despite the Prophet's words: «A building is the vainest of undertakings, that can devour the wealth of a believer», beautiful and sumptuous mosques have been built throughout the centuries since the Hegira, both modestly sized, the local or neighborhood mosques (masjid) and larger, the so-called “congregational mosques” or “Friday mosques” (masjid jami).

According to Julius Wellhausen, the mosque constituted the foro of early Islam, the place of assembly, where measures concerning Islamic society were taken. 

The next issue of DAr intends to investigate, starting from this theory, the theme of the mosque as a collective space as well as a religious building. This analysis is proposed both in order to investigate its typological evolution - from the model of Mohammed's house in Medina to the Ottoman mosques of Sinan - to establish a fertile comparison with more recent constructions, and as an "urban fact" by investigating its role within the urban fabric, especially in the cases of European cities whose morphology is based on different rules of arrangement from those of cities in which the mosque model has been consolidated.

The call for papers will therefore welcome those contributions that investigate the architectural and urban characters of the mosque, with particular attention to the project of new buildings through two tracks:

• “the architecture of the mosque. Typological, formal and spatial renovations”

The latest design experiments seem to signal a change on a formal level, a typological renovation due to the modification that the Islamic rite is undergoing as it is updated to the times and places.

Does the mosque therefore still retain its traditional role as a place of worship and public space, central to the men (and, to a lesser extent, women) of a neighborhood or group?

This section will welcome contributions analysing the forms, typological and spatial characters, and linguistic expressions of the mosque building, especially in its most recent declinations.

• “the mosque and the city. Comparison between the European city model and the Islamic model”

The design of a contemporary mosque should probably aim at rethinking a building linked to Muslim worship that must not only be able to manifest in form and character the practise of the Islamic rite, but also " mean" its forms through the relationship they establish with those of the city in an idea of spatial definition that, in the case of new buildings in European cities, encourages integration and the encounter between the Islamic and western worlds.

So what can be the ideas behind an open comparison between the model of the European city and the Islamic model? 

This section will welcome contributions that will investigate the role of the mosque in relation to the city, both in Islamic territory - analysing the connection between the architecture of the mosque and the surrounding urban forms - and in the European context, considering the mosque building as a possible device for public and civic sharing.

call for papers DAr #2

ISSN 2785-3152

Cities of the Islamic world

Edited by Cecilia Fumagalli, Eliana Martinelli

DAr’s first issue has highlighted the complexity of the architectural practice in the Islamic world, its characters and geographies, its multiple identities. The second issue, strictly connected to the first, aims at deepening the themes around the architecture of the cities of the Islamic world.

«The cities and the other forms of urbanization […] united because they belong to the world of Islam, are far from being a solid and unanimous matter, defined by precise chronological limits and territorial settings, or by homogeneous ethnic contexts. On the contrary, they belong to a timeframe – corresponding to the last fourteen centuries of our history – unusually long for this kind of issue. Moreover, they are widespread across a vast area, extended to more or less important portions of the three continents of the Ancient World, and they express recognizable contributions of a great number of civilizations, ideologies, people». With these words, Paolo Cuneo opens the first chapter of his Storia dell’urbanistica il mondo islamico published in 1986 by Laterza, by highlighting that the cities of the Islamic world should not be considered univocally, even though they have common characters. Instead, these cities are the tangible expression of different cultures and identities, the result of histories, overlaps, transformations and modifications that have made them unique.

William Marçais, in his L’Islamisme et la vie urbaine (1928), states that Islam could be considered an eminently urban religion, as the city, being the social catalyst of nomad populations, assumed the role of externalizing the faith, while morphologically expressing the doctrine of Unity (Tawhid). The sunna, in fact, by determining all human activities, directly influences the environment and the form of the city, according to a language linked to the different Islamic cultures.

The call for papers welcomes those contributions able to explore both the common characters of the cities of the Islamic world and their specificities. Contributions can refer to the following sections:

• “the formation of the city”: the section may include contributions proposing typo-morphological studies on urban fabrics of the Islamic world, also exemplified through specific case studies, on the architectures and landscape elements that have defined the development and the form of the cities. The analyses should hopefully highlight the transformation processes that have characterized the urban fabric, in order to deduce possible design principles.

• “city and project”: the section includes contributions dedicated to urban design in the Islamic world, intended as the relation between the architectural object and the city. Contributions should highlight the urban value of the proposed projects, their continuity or discontinuity with the historic city and the pre-existing stratigraphic conformations, by adequately motivating reasons and design choices.