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Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture @mit
Prof. Nasser Rabbat @nasserrabbat
Prof. Azra Akšamija @azraaksamija
Prof. Huma Gupta

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Dear friends and colleagues,
The Aga Khan Documentation Center (AKDC) and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at MIT cordially invite you to join artist Laurelie Rae for a public lecture titled “Cities of Islamic Art: From Historical Visual Systems to the Formation of Contemporary Islamic Art in North America.”
Date: Monday, October 26, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: MIT, Room 3-133
Open to all; no registration required
The Lecture
The lecture uses Cities of Islamic Art, Vol. 2, now part of the permanent collection of the Aga Khan Documentation Center, as both an object and a methodology to examine Islamic art as a mobile system of visual knowledge rather than a fixed historical style.
Beginning with historical surfaces from Isfahan, Istanbul, Damascus, Cairo, and Granada, the talk traces how motifs migrate across ceramics, tiles, manuscripts, and architecture to form the fabric of visual culture and heritage known as “Islamic Art.”
The lecture then turns to Rae’s doctoral research, examining how these visual systems are reframed and redefined by visual and sonic artists within the North American diaspora. The artist’s book functions here as a curatorial and analytical device—a way of reorganizing visual knowledge outside conventional art-historical and museological categories. Learn more about Laurelie Rae at akpia.mit.edu/lectures-conferences-events/ by @akpiamit

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2 days ago

Poster by Elshareef Kabbashi Please join us on Friday October 9th when The Aga Khan Program Fall 2026: An Evening With Lecture Series presents: A Symposium organized by Professor Nasser Rabbat: Narratives of Destruction

2pm to 5pm in 3-133

free and open to the public

in person and live stream here https://www.youtube.com/live/-LcQDO7kark?si=99lq2UcarvPpPEXJ

Nasser Rabbat, MIT: “Narratives of Destruction.”

Tom De Csillery, Harvard University: “Narrating Urbicide after the fall of Tripoli.”

Mher Tarakjian, MIT: “Temur’s Conquests in Syria: Historiography at the Outer Limits of Sovereignty.”

Ashley Koca, Harvard University: “Reading the New Julfa’s All Savior’s Cathedral in Light of Armenian Urbicide.”

Fahad Zuberi, MIT: “Urbicide in Urdu: History, Eschatology and Lament in Shahr Ashob Poetry.”

Tianyu Yang, MIT: “The Making of Scorched Earth in Wartime China.”

Discussant: Michele Lamprakos, MIT and University of Maryland

here for bio’s https://architecture.mit.edu/events/fall-2026-akpia-lecture-series-evening-symposium-organized-professor-nasser-rabbat by @akpiamit

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16 days ago

Please join us on Monday September 28th when
The Aga Khan Program Fall 2026: An Evening With Lecture Series presents Ali Karimi, hosted jointly with the Urbanism Group.
6 pm in the new MIT MET W-41 room 1216 Sidara Auditorium: Recording here https://youtu.be/6NnI4Gz8DjU
Free and open to the public
In person. Recording will be available here: https://akpia.mit.edu/lectures-conferences-events/
Books will be available for purchase at the lecture hall
“Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History”
Ali Karimi
Bio
Civil Architecture is a cultural practice preoccupied with the making of buildings and books about them. The work of Civil asks what it means to produce architecture in a decidedly un-civil time, presenting a new civic character for a global condition. Since its founding by Ali Ismail Karimi and Hamed Bukhamseen in 2017, the practice has attracted a strong following for its provocative works and its vision of an alternate future for a nascent Middle East.
Abstract
Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban Historyrevisits the founding principles of architectural and landscape discourse in the Arabian Peninsula. The publication explores instances of pre-oil planning, ranging from desert kites to fish traps and water channels, upending the toolset for thinking through architecture’s relationship to its context.
The narrative of the oil economy has overwritten previous traditions of landscape and territory: long spans of highway cut disinterestedly across the desert, vast reclamation works alter the shoreline, and agricultural land is extensively cleared to build new cities. This totalizing mono-myth renders previous spatial narratives as a distant pre-history, more fable than precedent. Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History acts as a primer to the spatial history of the Arabian Peninsula, compiling narratives related to geology, agriculture, mariculture, and seasonality—providing an alternative genealogy and history from which to reimagine the region. This treatise by Civil Architecture also includes an appendix of the practice’s projects, expanding on the themes of the publication with possible trajectories for architectural intervention. by @akpiamit

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23 days ago

In the AKPIA Lecture Series, SMArchS Urbanism hosts Civil Architecture for a book talk on Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History on Monday, September 28, 2026 at 6:00pm in W41-1216, the Sidara Auditorium in MIT SA+P’s newly opened Metropolitan Storage Warehouse.

The book is a primer on the landscapes and environments of the Arabian Peninsula, exploring how architecture and planning existed in the region prior to the discovery of oil. The book is structured around four chapters - desert kites, fish traps, agricultural planning, and seasonality.

Civil Architecture is a cultural practice based between Bahrain and Kuwait. It was founded by Ali Ismail Karimi and Hamed Bukhamseen. The work of Civil asks what it means to produce architecture in a decidedly un-civil time, presenting a new civic character for a global condition and offers alternate futures for the Gulf region.

The book is published by Kaph Books and supported by Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities and Graham Foundation.

📍 134 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

@mitarchitecture
@mitsap
@civilarchitectureorg
@aikarimi
@hamedbukhamseen
@kaph.books
@culturebah
@grahamfoundation by @akpiamit

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a month ago

Join us on Monday September 21st for the Aga Khan Program Fall 2026: An Evening With Lecture Series with Valentina Grasso

6 pm in MIT Room 3-133

Free and open to the public
A Red Sea Pan-Culture from Almaqah to Allah: Pagan Temples, Christian Churches, and the Great Mosque of Sana’a. See bio and abstract at architecture.mit.edu/events by @akpiamit

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2 months ago

Póster by Elshareef Kabbashi by @akpiamit

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2 months ago

Join us on Saturday, May 23rd for “Critical Historiography as Method,” a symposium in honor of @nasserrabbat. For the full schedule and to register, please visit the symposium website! https://sites.mit.edu/festschrift/. @memozimo @pamela.karimi @dr.glaire @heghnar08 @can.bilsel @celhayek @nisorry by @akpiamit

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6 months ago

Join us on Thursday, April 16th in the MIT Long Lounge 7-429 Ali Mangera, MEng Dip Arch RIBA, Practice Director and Principal
Part of the Spring 2026 MIT Architecture Lecture Series. “Translocalism and the Construction of Identity.
Biography
Ali Mangera is an Architect-Engineer and co-founder of Mangera Yvars Architects (MYAA) with Ada Yvars Bravo. Ali studied Architectural Engineering at Leeds University, UK and Pennsylvania State University, USA completing a Master’s in advanced structural-environmental design before studying Architecture at the Architectural Association London. He worked at Skidmore Owings & Merril, Chicago and Zaha Hadid Architects, London before establishing MYAA. With offices in London, Barcelona and Riyadh, MYAA works on award-winning projects globally. Recent works include The Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies, UNESCO Sagrada Familia, as well as Museums and Cultural buildings.

As an Architect and Engineer and is uniquely placed to understand the intricacies of collaborative design. Ali has helped shape MYAA’s focus on technology, the use of data, digital fabrication, and complex geometry through to sustainable earth construction and zero energy cities. Born in London, Ali’s family moved to the UK from South Africa during the apartheid era which made Ali acutely aware of contextual underpinnings, in particular, culture and identity which are embedded in MYAA’s work. Please visit our website at akpia@mit.edu for more insight about this talk. by @akpiamit

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6 months ago

Join us on Monday March 16th for the Aga Khan Program Spring 2026: An Evening With Lecture Series with Ahmed Abdelazim.
6 pm in MIT Room 3-133 or live stream https://mit.zoom.us/j/93558688031
Free and open to the public
In The Name of God And The People: The Mosque And The State In Socialist Egypt
Ahmed Abdelazim
Bio Ahmed is the current Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on Egypt’s material, visual, and architectural culture in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular attention to the intersections of architecture, politics, religion, and everyday life.

Abstract
Recent scholarship has underscored the centrality of architecture in materializing Egypt’s revolutionary political project, with infrastructural and mass-housing schemes operating as visual and spatial instruments of modernization. This process was accompanied by a deliberate and systematic marginalization of Islamic symbols and institutions from the public sphere. As this paper argues, this configuration, shifted decisively in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat in the Six-Day War. In response to the crisis of political legitimacy, the state recalibrated its ideological project through the selective reactivation of Islamic visual and material culture. Drawing on archival research and primary sources, this paper examines state-commissioned mosques and the mediated circulation of Islamic imagery in print culture as technologies through which national politics were rearticulated and authority was reconstituted. by @akpiamit

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7 months ago

Wednesday March 25, 2pm EST Chester Beatty Annual lecture 2026 by Nasser Rabbat in Dublin, Ireland and online: https://chesterbeatty.ie/whats-on/against-ruin-al-maqrizi-and-the-art-of-writing-history/. Recording Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Th8ph-OaM&list=PPSV&t=2s by @akpiamit

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8 months ago

Dear Community

It is with heavy heart that I share with you the news of the passing of Andras Riedlmayer today, February 9, 2026, after a short stay at the hospital.
Andras was 79 years old. He was born in Budapest, Hungary and studied at the University of Chicago and Princeton University, In 1985 he became the Aga Khan Librarian and the director of the Documentation Center for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University’s Fine Arts Library where he stayed until 2020.

Andras was expert witness for the prosecution on the systematic destruction of cultural heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 and 1996, and destruction of cultural heritage of Kosovo in 1999, at the ICTY in the trials of Serbian leaders in the Bosnian War. His advocacy for the preservation of the Bosnian and Kosovan heritage in the face of ethnic cleansing wars was relentless despite the dangers to his person and reputation. His pioneering work documenting how architecture was used as an instrument of genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo was crucial in establishing that architectural destruction constitutes a weapon of war, a recognition formalized through his testimonies in the ICTY. In fact, Andras was a committed and passionate defender of human rights and cultural preservation in many contexts in our sadly violent age: Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and elsewhere.

But above all, Andras was, in the words of Professor Azra Aksamija of MIT, “the most generous, kind, and humble genius who always shared his encyclopedic knowledge with everyone who sought his help.” She, like many of our graduates at both MIT and Harvard, remembers his “dedicated mentorship,” which helped many anchor their research in its proper scholarly context. His formidable linguistic ability, vast scholarly knowledge in all things Islamic art and architecture, and above all altruistic attitude toward all who seek his advice were legendary.

I extend my and AKPIA’s sincerest condolences to Andras’s family. We will let the community know the arrangement for any memorial for him are finalized.

Nasser by @akpiamit

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8 months ago

Join us Monday March 2 at 6 pm in MIT Room 3-133
Free and open to the public
“I Light Fire to the Tradition” – Radical Art Practices in 1960s Iraq, by AKPIA Research Fellow Dr. Elizabeth Rauh

Talk recording available now: https://mit.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=341fb83d-62c7-4c14-ab17-b4080161536d by @akpiamit

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8 months ago