Prof. NEZAR ALSAYYAD
University of California, Berkeley
Monday, DEC 1 at 7:00 pm-8:30pm
HKU Shanghai Study Centre(SSC) 虹口区北苏州路298号
Click here for the poster
Lecture Title: "From Vernacularism to Globalization: Dwellings, Settlements and the End of Tradition"
About the Speaker:
Nezar AlSayyad is a Professor of Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design, and Urban History. Educated as an architect, planner, urban designer and historian, AlSayyad is principally an urbanist whose specialty is the study of cities, their urban spaces, their social practices and their economic realities. As a scholar, AlSayyad has authored and edited several books on colonialism, identity, Islamic architecture, tourism, tradition, urbanism, urban design, urban history, urban informality, and virtuality. Among his numerous grants are those received from the U.S. Department of Education, NEA—Design Arts Program, Getty Grant Program, the Graham Foundation, the SSRC, and a Guggenheim fellowship. His awards include the Pioneer American Society Book Award, the American Institute of Architects Education Honors, and the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest honor the University of California bestows on its faculty.
In 1988, AlSayyad founded the area of Environmental Design and Urbanism in Developing Countries (EDUDC) at Berkeley, an interdisciplinary area of research and practice that connects history, theory, social processes, and design, and in the same year he also co-founded the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE), a scholarly association concerned with the study of indigenous vernacular and popular built environments around the world. Also AlSayyad also maintains a small architecture and urban design practice XXA- The Office of Xross-Xultural Architecture which provides design and consulting work to various clients in the US and several Developing Countries.
AlSayyad holds a B.S. in Architectural Engineering and a Diploma in Town Planning from Cairo University, an M.S. in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Architectural History from UC Berkeley. He is the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of books in many fields, some of which have been translated to Arabic, Turkish, and Spanish. Among these are Dwellings, Settlements and Tradition (1989), Cities and Caliphs (1991), Forms and Dominance (1992), Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage (2001), Hybrid Urbanism (2001), Muslim Europe or Euro-Islam (2002), Urban Informality (2003), The End of Tradition (2004), Making Cairo Medieval (2005), Cinematic Urbanism (2006), The Fundamentalist City? (2010), and Cairo: Histories of a City (2011). Additionally, he has written, co-produced, and co-directed two NEA-funded public television documentaries, Virtual Cairo, and At Home with Mother Earth. His latest book, Traditions: The Real, the Hyper and the Virtual, the subject of his seminar here at HKU was published a few months ago.
Lecture Synopsis:
The changes that the world has undergone over the past two decades have created a dramatically altered global order which requires a new understanding of the role of traditional settlements in the reconstruction of history. Using a model which is based on recognizing the historic inevitability of dominant relationships between the so-called First and Third Worlds, this paper will review the different historic phases relevant to the study of such traditional settlements: the insular period, the colonial period, the era of independence and nation building, and the present era of globalization. Four accompanying settlement forms – the indigenous vernacular, the hybrid, the modern or pseudo-modern, and the postmodern – are identified and analyzed in relationship to their historic contexts.
The paper also examines the evolution of the concept of national identity and its use in understanding the changes that traditional settlements have undergone. It suggests that the condition of hybridity introduced during the colonial period have reconfigured indigenous forms. It also suggests that the influences of modernity that accompanying nation-building and independence movements have resulted in the reinvention of various traditions. The paper explores the notions of the manufacture of heritage, the consumption of culture and the end of end of tradition, all important ideas that have structured the debate about vernacular practices around the start of the millennium. It concludes that in the era of globalization the forms of settlements are likely to reflect rising levels of awareness of the ethnic, racial and religious associations of the communities within which they exist.
