We’re delighted to announce that our Fry and Drew book is to be published in paperback format in a few days time. This should make it a little more affordable and hopefully accessible to a broader audience in West Africa and India…
Oxford University Press will publish ‘Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire’ on 7th October 2016. Below is a brief synopsis from the publishers website.
Throughout today’s postcolonial world, buildings, monuments, parks, streets, avenues, entire cities even, remain as witness to Britain’s once impressive if troubled imperial past. These structures are a conspicuous and near inescapable reminder of that past, and therefore, the built heritage of Britain’s former colonial empire is a fundamental part of how we negotiate our postcolonial identities, often lying at the heart of social tension and debate over how that identity is best represented.
This volume provides an overview of the architectural and urban transformations that took place across the British Empire between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Although much research has been carried out on architecture and urban planning in Britain’s empire in recent decades, no single, comprehensive reference source exists. The essays compiled here remedy this deficiency. With its extensive chronological and regional coverage by leading scholars in the field, this volume will quickly become a seminal text for those who study, teach, and research the relationship between empire and the built environment in the British context. It provides an up-to-date account of past and current historiographical approaches toward the study of British imperial and colonial architecture and urbanism, and will prove equally useful to those who study architecture and urbanism in other European imperial and transnational contexts.
The volume is divided in two main sections. The first section deals with overarching thematic issues, including building typologies, major genres and periods of activity, networks of expertise and the transmission of ideas, the intersection between planning and politics, as well as the architectural impact of empire on Britain itself. The second section builds on the first by discussing these themes in relation to specific geographical regions, teasing out the variations and continuities observable in context, both practical and theoretical.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Architecture, Urbanism, and British Imperial Studies, G. A. Bremner
PART I: Themes in British Imperial and Colonial Architecture and Urbanism
1: Beginnings: Early Colonial Architecture, Daniel Maudlin
2: Urbanism and Master Planning: Configuring the Colonial City, Robert Home and Anthony D. King
3: Stones of Empire: Monuments, Memorials, and Manifest Authority, G. A. Bremner
4: The Metropolis: Imperial Buildings and Landscapes in Britain, G. A. Bremner
5: Propagating Ideas and Institutions: Religious and Educational Architecture, G. A. Bremner and Louis P. Nelson
6: Imperial Modernism, Mark Crinson
Part II Regional Continuity, Divergence, and Variation in the British World
7: British North America and the West Indies, Harold Kalman and Louis P. Nelson
8: South and Southeast Asia, Preeti Chopra
9: The Australian Colonies, Stuart King and Julie Willis
10: New Zealand and the Pacific, Ian Lochhead and Paul Walker
11: Sub-Saharan Africa, Iain Jackson and Ola Uduku
12: Egypt and Mandatory Palestine and Iraq, Samuel D. Albert
Further details here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/architecture-and-urbanism-in-the-british-empire-9780198713326?cc=ro&lang=en&#
Announcement
Four-year PhD Studentships
Location: University of Westminster
Deadline: 26th August 2016
Two x four-year, full time PhD studentships in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment as part of ERC grant funded project Monsoon Assemblages.
Stipend of £16,000 p.a. and Tuition Fees (Home/EU fees only).
Full article
Two x four-year, full time PhD studentships
Monsoon Assemblages is a five-year long research project funded by the European Research Council (Starting Grant no. 679873) with the ambition of confronting challenges of urban climate change through novel, inter-disciplinary research in three of South Asia’s rapidly growing cities: Chennai, Delhi and Dhaka. It is driven by questions of how these cities might be transformed if no longer thought of as exclusive products of human agency, but as co-designed by the material energies of earth systems.
PhD applications are invited from the spatial design and/or environmental humanities disciplines to engage with these questions. The exact areas of…
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Settled Topographies: From Gibraltar to the Ganges
July 11 – 12, 2016
10:00 – 17:00
School of the Arts Library
19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool
Spanning the varied geographies of the 30th parallel the practices of human settlement have for millennia shaped the landscapes of this trans-continental region, while in turn the environment has both provided structure and guided the evolution of its cultures. Settlements, architecture and other forms of material culture extend beyond being expressions of a society; they shape the society and its culture through their spatiality and materiality. In the long history of human settlement in this region such juxtapositions have created a terrain of differentiated densities, imbued with the traces and the latent structures and settings, that work in tandem with the more tangible physical and spatial orders.
This two-day symposium, organised by the ArCHIAM Centre at the Liverpool School of Architecture, invites speakers and attendants to contribute to the discourse on how culture and spatiality have comingled in contemporary and historical settings. The aim is to develop these understandings through both geographically focused and cross-cultural perspectives.
All welcome to attend and further updates to follow…
I’ve recently published a paper in the Journal of Architecture entitled, ‘The architecture of the British Mandate in Iraq: nation-building and state creation’. You can read the full article here [http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2016.1179662 ], and the abstract is below…
Watercolour perspective of King Feisal’s Palace, Baghdad, designed by J. M. Wilson, courtesy of Wilson Mason LLP.
This paper seeks to examine and contextualise the architecture and infrastructure projects developed by the British during the occupation of Iraq in the First World War and the Mandate period that immediately followed. Relying heavily on military-political events for its structure and underlying narrative, the paper demonstrates how architecture, planning and ‘development’ were integral to the act of creating the new state and were very much part of the colonisers’ vision to create a nation in their own image. Works were deployed to imbue a sense of collective belonging and national identity through the creation of new town plans, as well as through institutions such as museums and universities. A certain dissonance emerges between the infrastructure and prestige projects, with the latter presenting an imagined and fabricated notion of Iraqi history, blended with a grandiose colonial style imported from India, and designed predominantly by James M. Wilson. The infrastructure projects began with sanitation improvements, road and rail installation, and expansion of the Basra docklands to attract international shipping and for the export of oil. Further building projects undertaken by the Public Works Department included a large number of administrative buildings called serais.
Watercolour perspective of Basra Airport, designed by J. M. Wilson, courtesy of Wilson Mason LLP.
Annika Seifert kindly took a group from the Urban Narratives (Simulizi Mijini) Symposium on a walking tour of the city. We met at the Old Boma and after a briefing on the history of the city plan we set off taking in the Post Office, and Anthony Almeida’s modernist St. Joseph’s school and the colonial White Fathers’ house.
L: St Joseph’s School. R: White Fathers’ House
National Bank of Commerce
Further along the dock road is the National Bank of Commerce designed by Charles Alfred Bransgrove (who also designed the British Legion Offices in Dar, 1952). From here we visited Walter Bgoya’s wonderful book shop (picking up a copy of Dar es Salaam. Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis, Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers,2007) and then venturing into the wonderful commercial district that contains outstanding architecture from the inter-war period. Some of the buildings display hints of Indian influence, others definitely deco, sweep around the corner sites with great confidence.
From the city centre we crossed the old colonial cordon sanitaire (now an ‘open space’) to venture into the Kariakoo district to take in the brutalist market designed by Beda Amuli.
Inside Kariakoo Market
Exterior of Kariakoo Market
Many thanks to Rachel Lee and Diane Barbé from The Habitat Unit at TU Berlin for organising this event. Great Job!
Urban Narratives (Simulizi Mijini) Symposium was held at the British Council building in downtown Dar es Salam on 1st April. Accompanying the event was a small exhibition of short stories – compiled by Masters students from TU Berlin and Ardhi University. During the past four weeks the students have been exploring and mapping the city as well as interviewing and recording the everyday and extra-ordinary narratives of life in the city. The result is a very special collection with some insightful, and often deeply moving, recollections. The stories should be on-line soon and we’ll post a link to them.
The symposium was arranged in 15-minute presentation slots, so the pace was fast and varied, starting with the international perspective (Jackson on India and Ghana, Lagae on curating an open air architecture museum in Lumbumbashi, Adanali offering a wonderful but at times disturbing insight into the plight of Istanbul, see http://reclaimistanbul.com).
Yasar Adanali presentation
Part 2 considered the Eastern and Southern African context with Hannah Le Roux considering the notion of movement and heritage in South Africa and Johannesburg in particular. She also shared a wonderful image from the South African Automobile Association revealing the road networks that traversed the continent in the 1950s. Joy Mboya spoke about a festival created by local communities called Nai ni Who http://nainiwho.co.ke. This was followed by a discussion of the neighboring island of Zanzibar by Muhammad Juma, and the problems of preserving and building, in and around the historical context of Stonetown. Zanzibar was explored further after lunch with a project that is seeking to catalogue and document the built fabric of stonetown as well as associated memories and stories.
Colonial Road Networks of Africa
Annika Seifert shared the vision for the new DARCH building and exhibition spaces located in The Old Boma, including how the material was selected and curated (https://www.facebook.com/DARCHTZ/). The new museum located in a historical colonial building, located opposite the Zanzibar ferry terminal, will be a great resource for the city with its roof top café and ‘public space’.
The Old Boma
The session and roundtable was wrapped up by Walter Bgoya, who kept things lively, very entertaining and sharply to the point. It was a very enjoyable day and stoked lots of ideas for future research as well as fuelling the desire to take action. As Muhammad Juma reminded us, it is never too late to start campaigning for heritage and making the case to protect and preserve our built environment.
INVITATION – International Symposium on Urban Heritage: Simulizi Mijini/Urban Narratives
The Dar Centre for Architectural Heritage (DARCH) in collaboration with the Technical University Berlin and the Architects Association of Tanzania have the pleasure of inviting you to participate in the:
Fabrications Journal: Tropical Zone: people, practices and pedagogies (27:2)
Two decades of architectural debate on environmental issues have cast new light on climatic responses, with very different interpretations of the meanings and constructions of the ‘tropical’ zone. Colonial, modernist and regional responses have been scrutinised as genealogically linked. Scientific discourses, cultural prejudices and social approaches intertwined to produce a resilient dialectic that has been reproduced, augmented or interrogated in research. This issue of Fabrications invites contributors to address the theme of the tropical zone as an architectural construct created and disseminated by a range of actors including educators, practitioners and their clientele, and state and institutional networks. Who were they/what were these and how did they approach this subject? What was their contribution to architectural production? How was that contribution received? How is it viewed retroactively in the light of new scholarship?
This issue anticipates papers that interrogate the term, its application and its imprint in regional histories, during the colonial and modern periods and after decolonisation in environments identified by the descriptor ‘tropical’. However, it also seeks new definitions of the term and its usage, in the context of contemporary environmental debates. It looks for new analyses of discursive trends from metropolitan centres of imperialism, from former colonies and from regions that regard themselves as climatically distinct. This issue is also open to papers that discuss how an understanding of the tropical zone relates to green architecture and new techno-scientific building processes, both in terms of aesthetics and politics.
Guidelines for Authors
Papers should be submitted online at www.edmgr.com/rfab by 10 October 2016, 6-9000 words, full details at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rfab20/current
Gyoji Banshoya (1930–1998) was a Japanese urban planner whose life-work was urban planning in the Middle East and North Africa. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of his work, which still remains unknown. His early masterpiece, the ‘Square House’, shows how he was influenced by Kiyoshi Seike to apply historic spatial composition to realize width and convertibility in low-cost housing.
K. Shinohara, M. Yamada, K. Seike, G. Banshoya, and S. Miyasaka. Source: Hayashi, “Seike Kiyoshi to Gendai no Jukyo Design,” 6
Following this, Banshoya studied under the supervision of Gerald Hanning and George Candilis at Ateliers de Baˆtisseurs in Paris, and went to Algiers to engage in the study of ‘evolutionary habitat’. As a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) expert, he began working with Michel Ecochard in 1962 in Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo. They were responsible for the elaboration of master plans for these three cities, and that of Damascus still remains as a legally active master plan today. Coupled with the Syrian political struggle since the 1980s, there has been some reaction against their modernist policies. However, the case is made for a detailed examination of Banshoya’s work, and re-evaluation of its legacy for the urban planning history of the Middle East and North Africa.
You may read the full article here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02665433.2015.1073610
Transnational Architecture Group 