Workshop: The Profession’s Foundations

In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has emerged within the field of architectural studies that has sought to revisit existing Western-centric paradigms and explore new terrains for understanding architectural history and the present. By emphasizing the ‘global mobilities’ underpinning the transfer of architectural concepts, models, and skills throughout the twentieth century, scholars have expanded the historiography of modern architecture and urban planning into a more comprehensive global history. Nonetheless, this global history remains predominantly written through the experiences of colonial and foreign architects and planners and their influences on the rest of the world during the twentieth century. Contrarily, this workshop invites participants to explore the undocumented histories of the emergence of a local class of professional architects and planners in the Global South. Focusing on the Middle East, it aims to trace the thought, practice, and vision of the milieu of local architects, engineers and planners who contributed to the transnational exchange of technical expertise and the flow of architectural knowledge, experiences, and imageries both regionally and globally during the twentieth century.

Foto: Baghdad, Firdaus Square, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (built in 1959 according to a design by Rifat Chadirji, demolished for a statue of Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the 1980s)