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Modernism and the Middle East

Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century

Kishwar Rizvi editor Sandy Isenstadt editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Washington Press

Published:22nd Sep '08

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Modernism and the Middle East cover

Uses architecture as a window onto the powerful forces that shaped the modern Middle East.

Presents a collection of essays offering treatment of the development of architecture in the Middle East. This book also demonstrates the political dimensions of both creating the built environment and, subsequently, inhabiting it.

This provocative collection of essays is the first book-length treatment of the development of modern architecture in the Middle East. Ranging from Jerusalem at the turn of the twentieth century to Libya under Italian colonial rule, postwar Turkey, and on to present-day Iraq, the essays cohere around the historical encounter between the politics of nation-building and architectural modernism's new materials, methods, and motives.

Architecture, as physical infrastructure and as symbolic expression, provides an exceptional window onto the powerful forces that shaped the modern Middle East and that continue to dominate it today. Experts in this volume demonstrate the political dimensions of both creating the built environment and, subsequently, inhabiting it. In revealing the tensions between achieving both international relevance and regional meaning, Modernism in the Middle East affords a dynamic view of the ongoing confrontations of deep traditions with rapid modernization. Political and cultural historians, as well as architects and urban planners, will find fresh material here on a range of diverse practices.

"This book is a product of a very impressive scholarly effort to contextualize the problem of modernity in the Middle East. . . . Modernism and the Middle East lays the foundation for future research on this underexplored topic in Western scholarship and it is a unique contribution to the sophisticated multidisciplinary discourse on modernism in general."

* Journal of Society for Architectural Historia

ISBN: 9780295988214

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 590g

320 pages