Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World: A Critical Anthology

Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World explores how architectural traditions and practices were shared and exchanged across national borders throughout the world, departing from a narrative that casts European actors as the importers and exporters of Islamic designs and skills. Looking to cases that touch on empire building, modernization, statecraft and diplomacy, this book examines how these processes have been contingent on a web of expertise informed by a rich and varied array of authors and contexts since the 1800s. The chapters in this volume, organized around the leitmotif of expertise, demonstrate the thematic importance and specific utility of in-depth and broad-ranging knowledge in shaping the understanding of architecture in the Islamic world from the nineteenth century to the present. Specific case studies include European gardeners in Ottoman courts, Polish architects in Kuwait, Israeli expertise in Iran, monument archiving in India, religious spaces in Swedish suburbs and more.

This is the latest title in Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East, a series devoted to the most recent scholarship concerning architecture, landscape and urban design of the Middle East and of regions shaped by diasporic communities more globally. 

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Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World: A Critical Anthology

Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World explores how architectural traditions and practices were shared and exchanged across national borders throughout the world, departing from a narrative that casts European actors as the importers and exporters of Islamic designs and skills. Looking to cases that touch on empire building, modernization, statecraft and diplomacy, this book examines how these processes have been contingent on a web of expertise informed by a rich and varied array of authors and contexts since the 1800s. The chapters in this volume, organized around the leitmotif of expertise, demonstrate the thematic importance and specific utility of in-depth and broad-ranging knowledge in shaping the understanding of architecture in the Islamic world from the nineteenth century to the present. Specific case studies include European gardeners in Ottoman courts, Polish architects in Kuwait, Israeli expertise in Iran, monument archiving in India, religious spaces in Swedish suburbs and more.

This is the latest title in Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East, a series devoted to the most recent scholarship concerning architecture, landscape and urban design of the Middle East and of regions shaped by diasporic communities more globally. 

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Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World: A Critical Anthology

Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World: A Critical Anthology

Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World: A Critical Anthology

Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World: A Critical Anthology

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Overview

Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World explores how architectural traditions and practices were shared and exchanged across national borders throughout the world, departing from a narrative that casts European actors as the importers and exporters of Islamic designs and skills. Looking to cases that touch on empire building, modernization, statecraft and diplomacy, this book examines how these processes have been contingent on a web of expertise informed by a rich and varied array of authors and contexts since the 1800s. The chapters in this volume, organized around the leitmotif of expertise, demonstrate the thematic importance and specific utility of in-depth and broad-ranging knowledge in shaping the understanding of architecture in the Islamic world from the nineteenth century to the present. Specific case studies include European gardeners in Ottoman courts, Polish architects in Kuwait, Israeli expertise in Iran, monument archiving in India, religious spaces in Swedish suburbs and more.

This is the latest title in Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East, a series devoted to the most recent scholarship concerning architecture, landscape and urban design of the Middle East and of regions shaped by diasporic communities more globally. 


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781783209293
Publisher: Intellect Books
Publication date: 08/15/2018
Series: Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East , #1
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 304
File size: 26 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Peter Christensen is a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he is also an affiliate of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. His work focuses on geopolitical traditions and their connections with environmental issues relating to the borders of Islamic and Christian cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Along with Barry Bergdoll, Christensen was the recipient of the Philip Johnson Book Prize in 2010 from the Society of Architectural Historians. Christensen is the recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst and the Historians of Islamic Art Association.


Peter H. Christensen is assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester.

Mohammad Gharipour is professor of architecture and director of the Graduate Architecture Program at the Morgan State University School of Architecture and Planning in Baltimore, Maryland. He obtained his master’s degree in architecture from the University of Tehran and his Ph.D. in architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has published eleven books, including Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in Poetry, Arts and History (I.B. Tauris, 2013), Synagogues of the Islamic World (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), and Architectural Dynamics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran (Intellect, 2019). Gharipour is the director and founding editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.

Contact: School of Architecture and Planning, Morgan State University, 1700 East Cold Spring Lane, Baltimore, MD 21251, United States.


Christiane Gruber is a professor of Islamic art in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan as well as Founding Director of Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online. Her work explores medieval to contemporary Islamic art, especially figural representation, depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, book arts, architecture, and modern visual, material, and digital cultures. Her two most recent publications include The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (Indiana University Press, 2019), and The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World (Gingko, 2010). Her public-facing essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Conversation, Prospect Magazine, Jadaliyya, Ajam, and New Lines Magazine.

Contact: 110 Tappan Hall, 855 S. University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

'I don't want orange trees, I want something that others don't have': Ottoman Head-Gardeners after Mahmud II

Deniz Türker

The reform-minded sultans Mahmud II (r.1808–36) and his son Abdülmecid (r.1836–61) eagerly sought out advisors to help transform their environments to befit the enlightened, politically engaged, public role they cast for themselves. The sites they chose for their new residences on the shores of the Bosphorus would naturally become emblematic of this imperial refashioning. Ciragan Palace's vast and hilly backdrop, which would later become Yildiz Palace's ten-hectare park, would constitute the principal experimental ground for this image quest. The site's makers were the trained recruits of a Bavarian gardener called Christian Sester (1804–66). Leading labourers predominantly from Albania and the Black sea, Sester, his assistants, and his successors would institute a predominantly German gardening dynasty in the Ottoman court – a new kind of gardening corps crafted from a long-established imperial institution. The work of Sester's team would only be disrupted at the turn of the century, when the court began to value different modes of horticultural expertise, and turned its attention to France. If, in very broad strokes, the nineteenth-century Ottoman garden history is characterized by grand landscaping projects modelled on Yildiz, the twentieth century marked an obsessive turn to cultivation and acclimation of plants inside the most technically advanced greenhouses and palm houses. Ultimately, these changes of interest were not only related to matters of taste, but also tinged with the competitive spirit of shifting diplomatic alliances, as well as national and international political networks.

Until Mahmud's overhaul of the Janissary corps in 1826, the Ottoman imperial gardens, from aspects of their design to the agricultural production derived from them, were tied to one of its most prominent branches: the bostanci ocagi (gardeners' corps). Only a few months after the Janissaries were violently disbanded, the gardeners' corps was completely and, much more peaceably, restructured under a military charter (nizamname) on August 5, 1826. The eldest members were forced to retire with lifetime pensions (kayd-i hayat), while the able-bodied were redeployed to train with Mahmud's new army, the asakir-i mansure-i Muhammediye, and serve as officers (zabit) in the gates, barracks, and police offices on the DolmabahCe-Ortaköy shoreline, where the court now resided full-time. A decade later, Mahmud's ambassador to Vienna came back with an idea that would fill the void for the upkeep of the many imperial gardens: a foreign garden-director – a professional with knowledge of the latest in landscape design, botany, and horticulture – would restore the vacant post of the palace's bostancibasi (translatable to head-gardener) to its erstwhile garden-centred metier. This practice would continue until the First World War at Yildiz, the longest serving imperial palace of the nineteenth century, transformed in half a century into the corps' operational headquarters.

In the gardeners' corps' earliest incarnation under Mehmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81), its members attended to the palace gardens and royal retreats, while their superior bostancibasi, the only court official allowed to grow a beard, held the privileged position of helming the sultan's boat during the latter's seafaring trips along the Bosphorus [Figure 1.1]. The structure of this corps would undergo drastic transformations, and shed the fifteenth-century horticultural requisites of the young Janissary conscripts that gave their group its name. Especially with the emergence of Janissary unrest in the seventeenth-century, the corps started to represent the personal security force of the imperial household. By the time Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier (d. 1817), the French ambassador to the court of Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–1889) and dilettante-antiquarian of ancient Greek artefacts, published his Voyage pittoresque en Grèce (1782), the head-gardener had become 'la police intérieure du sérail' (interior police of the palace), who presided over the Bosphorus in an austere waterfront building in Kurucesme, allocated to his office and in the immediate vicinity of the sultan's summer retreat in Besiktas [Figure 1.2]. Later, the first recruits of Selim III's new model army, the ill-fated nizam-i cedid, wore the red-felt barata headgear of the ruler's bostanci-bodyguards as a symbolic gesture of the trust established between the ruler and his protectors.

Foreign Head-Gardeners in the Ottoman Court

In fact, it was during Selim III's reign that the court first experimented with a foreign headgardener to redesign its imperial gardens in the capital. Later on, Mahmud II's restoration of a majority of the novel offices that Selim had instituted would also extend to the reactivation of this post. Baron von Herbert, the Austrian internuncio to Selim's court, had imported a gardener from Rastatt by the name of Jacob Ensle (d. 1832) in 1794, who was fortunate enough to be residing with his stepbrother, the distinguished naturalist Franz Boos (1753–1832), botanical gardener and menagerie director of the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, during von Herbert's recruitment efforts. Ensle, who appears to have led many a late-eighteenth century European traveller through the doors of the Topkapi's new sections, while maintaining relative anonymity as 'M. Jacques from Rastadt' in their accounts, himself left a narrative of his time in the Ottoman court. In it, he boasts that 'through the skilful leveraging of a connection [he] managed to achieve an assignment as the chief-gardener of the Bostandji [der Obergärtners der Bostandgi's] in the palace,' and notes that Selim III's mild regime allowed a Christian to fill this post. This work is also traceable in the detailed map that Antoine Ignace Melling (1763–1831) provides in his Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et de rives du Bosphore (1819), and the eyewitness account that the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) provides in his Constantinopolis und der Bosporos (1822), but Ensle also contributed to the gardens in Selim's Besiktas Palace and Eyüp. At Topkapi, he worked on a set of terraced spaces reserved for Selim and for the women's quarters, and as per the sultan's request, instituted the 'French and Dutch conventions [Sitte]' rather than the picturesque landscapes that Europeans had begun to install in their own estates. If Napoleon hadn't conquered Egypt in 1798, Ensle's work in the gardens of Topkapi and other summer dwellings of the court would have had a chance to flourish. Not wanting to remain in an environment suddenly hostile to foreigners and volatile due to ceaseless uprisings against Selim's reforms, he left for his fatherland in 1802.

The subsequent decades pitted a young Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) against influential viziers, powerful provincial rulers, Balkan insurgencies, Russian advances, and, most significantly, insubordinate janissaries. These disruptive events also made crossing through the Balkans, which Ensle undertook, geographically impossible for even the most adventurous Westerner. Besides a few European renegades, expatriates were hard to come by in an increasingly unstable Istanbul. After a beleaguered but resolute Mahmud restored a semblance of order in his empire through a complete overhaul of the military and political bodies, the multilingual Ottoman bureaucrats of his newfangled administration began the hunt for foreign experts to furnish the backdrops of their homes. The English travel writer Julia Pardoe (1806–62) identifies the beginnings of this practice by remarking on the foreign gardeners of varying European nationalities attending to each of the terraces of Mahmud II's garden in the Beylerbeyi Palace in 1836 [Figure 1.3].

While serving as an ambassador to Austria, Ahmed Fethi Pasha (d. 1858), Mahmud's anglophile son-in-law, an enterprising industrialist of glass factories, and long-time marshal (musir) of the Tophane armoury, signed a contract with Sester [Figure 1.4]. According to the loosely worded agreement, once the 31-year-old landscape gardener arrived in Istanbul, he would begin ordering the grounds allotted for the Sultan's imperial gardens, draw out the plans appropriate for growing multifarious trees, and closely supervise all aspects related to gardens and their walkways himself. Promised a generous annual stipend of two thousand florins, comfortable lodgings, candlewax, coal and firewood, protection from any hindrances to his work, and an option to quit with a six-month notice, Sester arrived in Istanbul in 1835 along with an assistant (muavin). He was given – or, rightfully borrowing from his European precedents, requested for himself – the lofty title of Imperial Garden Director (großherrlicher Gartendirektor). Until his death in 1868, Sester would remain in the service of three out of the four nineteenth-century sultans – Mahmud II, Abdülmecid, and Abdülaziz – and transform most of the imperial gardens of the period in Istanbul.

Christian Sester and the English Landscape Garden in the Ottoman Capital

The Bavarian parvenu's resume played a significant role in his selection to the Ottoman post. Born and raised in Aschaffenburg, Sester came from a family of gardeners employed in the upkeep of the picturesque park of Schönbusch Palace, then belonging to Karl Theodor von Dalberg (d. 1817), the Prince-primate of a confederation of Rhenish states that, in alliance with Napoleon I, had declared their independence from the Holy Roman Empire. At a very young age, Sester abandoned his training in Latin in order to completely devote himself to 'the noble art of gardening'. He grew up in a world of affluent provincial patrons and their German garden experts who travelled around Europe to master the various branches of the practice. His obituary, published in a local Aschaffenburg newspaper, would later mention Sester's hereditary calling for the garden arts from a very young age as follows: 'The seed that slept in him, suddenly awoke to unfold itself into a blossom, which shone forth as alone in its kind.' With this familial predisposition, he was first apprenticed in his hometown under Schönbusch's head-gardener, Christian Ludwig Bode (fl. 1801–24). Under his supervision, Sester honed his skills 'as a gardener in general, and as a landscape gardener [landschaftsgärtner] in particular'. Soon after that, young Sester initiated his scholastic Grand Tour (often referred to as the gardener's 'journeyman years')21 with a visit to the Nymphenburg botanical gardens in Munich, which were conceptualized by Schönbusch's first landscape gardener, Carl Ludwig von Sckell (d. 1828) as extensions to the baroque summer palace of the Bavarian rulers. Bode was a disciple of Sckell, and was entrusted with the creation of English gardens with a German bent – a complete turn to nature, and a sparse, economical use of garden structures – which he must have imparted to his apprentice while at Schönbusch. Following his training in Munich, Sester was appointed head-gardener to Dalberg's smaller country estate in Bohemia – his first venture into the Habsburg domains – and then returned to Bavaria in 1832 when he was tasked with the supervision of the gardens of Frauendorf's horticultural society. He had only recently been hired as a head-gardener (obergärtner) by Prince von Dietrichstein to lay out the gardens of his new Viennese summer residence, when his eastern adventure beckoned. Dietrichstein had recommended him to Sultan Mahmud II.

Although a drawing or plan from Sester's own hand of the Ottoman gardens he created has yet to be identified, he left behind a short ekphrasis from 1832, which appeared in the newspaper Frauendorfer Blätter on July 3, 1845, on how he envisioned the gardens while he served as a head-gardener. Borrowing from the hackneyed European convention of describing the Tanzimat courts of Mahmud II and Abdülmecid as stalwartly progressive, Sester's erstwhile hosts in Frauendorf heralded him in this news item as the artistic counterpart to these two reform-oriented sultans, and republished the piece in 1845 with a lengthy prologue praising his international success:

A letter from Constantinople that was printed in the daily newspaper on the 12th of last month emphasised that the young Sultan [Abdülmecid], like his father [Mahmud II], found a great deal of pleasure in everything new and better. For example, when setting up his palaces, the Sultan expressly ordered, on numerous occasions, that he no longer wanted the Old, but rather the New according to better European taste. Thusly, the garden at Tscheragan [sic] Palace, which was installed some six years ago by one of our countrymen, Herr Sester of Aschaffenburg, pleased the Sultan so extraordinarily that while he was recently moving from his palace to Beylerbeyi, he ordered that Tscheragan should be outfitted for the next winter so that he could spend Fall and also the Winter there. We are pleased by this news all the more because we have not heard from our old friend Herr Sester for quite some time. What a wonderful direction human fate can take! In 1832, Herr Sester was still helping to install the gardens in Frauendorf. While this garden was later destroyed by high winds and hail, we can take solace in the fact that the spirit of progress managed to transplant a refined taste for gardens in Turkey in the form of Herr Sester, placing him at the summit of that country's artistic reform.

In Sester's ekphrasis, titled 'On the Cliff Bench in Frauendorf, May 8, 1832', and appended to this flattering introduction, the gardener describes his walk through the garden of his own creation much in the way of a musical composition. The sentimental tone of the narrative, which the gardener intends to evoke with his garden, is in dialogue with his literary companion Hirschfeld, and with Pückler-Muskau, whose treatise reads like a real-time walk in his own gardens, where each view brings about different sets of emotions. From a vast and stage-like clearing, Sester enters a steep and narrow path lined with a thick mass of conifers with only a 'handrail made of bark-stripped branches' to hold onto, having been seduced by the violets under the shade of a spruce tree down below. As he descends, he reveals his horticultural knowledge by pairing up plants that share a symbiotic relationship – cherry trees against the pine, hardy berries with delicate dayflowers, primrose entwined about the pear tree – but the experience is so immersive and natural that the environment belies the human hand that put it together. At some point, he comes across a bench, where he sits to listen to the sounds (of starlings, blackbirds, and the rushing creek) and contemplates the moss-covered precipice and all that is beyond it. As night descends and nature's sublimity takes over, Sester reveals his philosophical inspiration: Johan Gottfried Herder (1744–1803)'s short work of prose titled Kalligenia: Die Mutter der Schönheit (1803) that inquired into the aesthetic qualities of nature and its laws, and the happy convergences between an artist and scientist's findings when studying them. The gardener, who crafted himself from facets of both of these professions, writes: 'The philosopher should hurry to this spot, disdaining the trinkets of the masses, and devote serious contemplation to the purpose of man; and celebrated goddess will come to him, as Kalligenia did to Kallia, in the dreams of Herder.'

(Continues…)


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Table of Contents

Introduction

Peter H. Christensen

Chapter 1: ‘I don’t want orange trees, I want something that others don’t have’: Ottoman Head-Gardeners after Mahmud II                                                   

Deniz Türker

Chapter 2: A Nineteenth Century Architectural ArchiveL Syed Ahmad Khan's Āṣar-us-Ṣanādīd

Mrinialini Rajagopalan

Chapter 3: The Balyan Family and the Linguistic Culture of a Parisian Education

Alyson Wharton

Chapter 4: Drawing Knowledge, (Re-)Constructing History: Pascal Coste in Egypt

Eva-Maria Troelenberg

Chapter 5: A Bourguibist Mural in the New Monastir? Zoubeïr Turki's Play on Knowledge, Power, and Audience Perception                                                       

Jessica Gerschultz

Chapter 6: Expertise in the Name of Diplomacy: The Israeli Plan for Rebuilding the Qazin Region, Iran

Neta Feniger and Rachel Kallus

Chapter 7: Industrial Complexes, Foreign Expertise, and the Imagining of a New Levant        

Dan Handel and Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

Chapter 8: Mobilities of Architecture in the Global Cold War: From Socialist Poland to Kuwait and Back

Łukasz Stanek

Chapter 9: Form Follows Faith: Swedish Architects, Expertise, and New Religious Spaces in the Stockholm Suburbs

Jennifer Mack

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