AKPIA@MIT lecture: Fischer von Erlach to Banister Fletcher, Sussan Babaie

Originally aired on 11/15
Fischer von Erlach to Banister Fletcher: Writing Islam into the World’s Architectural History
Sussan Babaie
Professor of Islamic and Iranian Art and Architecture, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
Abstract:
Focusing on Fischer von Erlach and his book Entwurf einer historischen Architektur … (Vienna 1721), this talk asks a “what if” question: what if von Erlach’s approach toward a universal history, in which peoples beyond Europe and their architectural cultures were featured, were to become the dominant narrative. The picture book and its associated texts give us a glimpse into the ways the age of rational knowledge, of Enlightenment, was in fact predicated upon that emergent discourse whereby not all cultural worlds and histories outside Europe were as marginalized as they became in the aftermath of that same age, with its virulently growing imperial, colonial and Orientalist perspectives and powers. Banister Fletcher’s (father and son) A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method precisely encapsulates the effects of those historical processes that unfolded from late eighteenth through nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, and that produced knowledge about the world in the shadow of European supremacy. In contrast to Fletcher’s image of a unitary source of all human/architectural/cultural progress-from the Greeks to the Americans as captured in his (in)famous “Tree of Architecture,” we may have been working now with a von Erlach imaginary in which dense woods bore multiple and competitive historical trajectories. Where then would the peoples of Islam, and their architectural cultures fit in these altered models of history?
Biography:
Sussan Babaie is Professor of Islamic and Iranian Arts at The Courtauld, University of London. A Safavid specialist, with a wider interest in trans-Asian art (from Aleppo to Isfahan to Beijing), Sussan’s publications have explored architecture and urbanity, visual representations of sexuality, sensory experiences of things and spaces, and notions of transculturality. A trained graphic designer, she also writes on modern and contemporary Iranian arts with a view towards the role of history. Among her publications are Isfahan and Its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi‘ism and the Architecture of Conviviality in Early Modern Iran (2008, PB 2018), and several co-authored books and articles including Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (2004, PB 2017), and with Talinn Grigor, of Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis (2014). Sussan was President of the Historians of Islamic Art Association (2017-19) and is the incoming President (2022-24) of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies.