“Specifically, the study considers how, between 1955 and 1965, native architects and artists articulated discourses that resisted hegemonic modes of practice, advocated an engagement with contextual idiosyncrasies, and pioneered the institutionalization of architecture in Iraq and the region... the apparently self-provincializing approach deployed by native architects and artists was a deliberate attempt to assert a definition for the ‘global,’ the idea that each culture participates in making a pluralistic world, which flourishes only by amplifying diversity.”

Publication: Amin Alsaden. “Conceiving the Global: Crises, Encounters, and Architecture in Baghdad, 1955-1965.” Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2018.

Keywords: doctoral, dissertation, PhD, research, scholarship, archives, history, historiography, Harvard University, art, architecture, synthesis, buildings, culture, global, local, movements, modernism, post-WWII, 20th century, anti-colonial, post-colonial, politics, revolution, coup, oil, development, modernization, globalism, worldism, imaginary, diversity, plurality, Rifat Chadirji, Mohamed Makiya, Kahtan Awni, Ellen Jawdat, Hisham Munir, Jewad Selim, Lorna Selim, Mediha Umar, Shakir Hasan Al Said, Latif Al-Ani, Baghdad, Iraq, Southwest Asia (”Middle East”), Arab world

Image: Amin Alsaden