Sandy Isenstadt

Recurring Surfaces: Architecture in the Experience Economy

Architecture today is split. Arrayed on the one hand are varied, intelligent, and often provocative investigations into the making of form. New materials, new design processes, virtuoso manipulations of irregular geometries, whole new metaphors for the generation of form, surprising borrowings from unlikely sources: each of these characterizes some of the most innovative design thinking of our time. Equally, architects working with self-imposed formal constraints and strict spatial orders have brought minimalist modernism to new levels, while others speculate on the future of architecture in a world increasingly dominated by visual media and virtual flows of information.

Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America

JAE 68: 1 Rabbat’s chapter on “Architecture and Language” is essential reading for those students of Islamic architecture who cannot easily read the Arabic primary sources. The author is sensitive to the nuances of architectural terminology in the written texts of the period, warning that consistent usage cannot be assumed. A chapter is devoted to each of four essential terms: waqf, iwan, qasr, and qubba. The waqf, a legal document laying out a religious endowment for building in very precise terms, is an invaluable source of architectural information, as Rabbat explains in a chapter of just three pages—in reality just an extended definition. The other three chapters explore the names of specific architectural forms. The iwan, a lofty vaulted hall open on one side, inspired by the Sasanian Iwan Kisra in Iraq, came to symbolize monumentality and rulership, as seen in the four great iwans of the Madrasa of Sultan Hassan in Cairo. Rabbat argues that, during the Bahri sultanate, a qasr was both an emir’s palace and the upper hall of such a palace but that the second of these meanings seems to have faded by the time of the Burji Mamluks. Finally, he shows that a qubba, a domed structure, was used interchangeably with the term iwan by the Mamluks to refer to a throne room or audience hall, as, for instance, in the Iwan alNasiri in Cairo (now destroyed). This investigation into the slippery nature of architectural terminology of the past is a model for architectural historians in any field. Finally, Rabbat confronts the difficult theme of “Architecture as Cultural Index.” The first essay in this final section is a short literature review of studies in Mamluk architecture, but it is devoted almost entirely to the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte, Creswell’s Early Muslim Architecture, and the textbook by Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Islamic Architecture in Cairo: An Introduction.1 Rabbat is overtly negative about Behrens-Abouseif ’s book, whereas he mentions only in passing the valuable work of Michael Meinecke.2 This direct criticism of a fellow scholar sits uneasily in the present book. The second essay in this section examines the almost forgotten building type known as the dar al`adl, or palace of justice, of which five were built within 150 years, all since destroyed. Here Rabbat argues that these were expressions of the Islamic Counter Crusade and provides fascinating graphic diagrams of their ritual use. The third section examines the apparent lack of interest of Mamluk literary scholars in works of art, usually dismissed with no more than brief remarks on their gharib or `ajib—that is, their strange and wondrous quality, a deficiency here attributed to a “long neglect of philosophical reflection and artistic appreciation among the literati” (p. 172). The last chapter examines NeoMamluk architecture in Egypt, with a particularly useful discussions of the work of the French architect Pascal Coste and of the building of the Al-Rifa’i Mosque in Cairo. This is a thought-provoking, informative, and highly original book that confronts many of the core issues in the evolving discipline of architectural history. Though challenging for the general reader, it is essential reading for every historian in the fields of Islamic architecture and Mamluk culture. Its insights into the complex synergy between history and architecture reveal a sharp critical intelligence and a deep insight into the textual and visual legacy of the Mamluk sultanate.

Groping in the Dark

ABSTRACT Government mandated blackouts precipitated a crisis in the optical consciousness of the American public in the first years of the Second World War. In an effort to foil potential aerial bombardment, citizens were asked to turn off their lights and so break an otherwise unqualified promise of modernization: ubiquitous illumination. After decades of constantly increasing levels of artificial light, blackouts challenged not only nighttime visibility, but spatial perception more generally. Americans discussed ways to adjust to dimmer surroundings, to infer spatial information from non-visual senses and familiarize themselves with nightscapes based on specular rather than geometric properties of surfaces. Although the blackouts lasted only a few years in the USA, they reveal the profile, albeit in negative terms, of how the nations visual environment was imagined around 1940.