This panel will focus on hygienic design, tracing the development of healthcare from traditions to contemporary adaptations in Islamic societies that historically materialized and translated health-conscious architecture. The panelists will discuss whether Islamic traditions challenged or enriched the universal design principles that emerged in the bacteriological era of the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, with a focus on translations of healthcare modernization and the modernist design across cultures. The discussion will engage with not only hospitals or healthcare facilities but also different building typologies and urban contexts, and the ways universal design principles were integrated in culturally specific spatial solutions. Other key questions include the influence of top-down and/or state-led modernization and healthcare agency to private domestic spaces, the domestication of institutional settings of healthcare for patient well-being, emotions and senses in healthcare environments, and the revived interest in traditional Islamic hygienic practices in recent pandemic experiences.
Please join us for the annual ‘Dialogues’ roundtable as the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA) brings together scholars and practitioners from varied disciplines for a discussion of critical contemporary issues that interrogate the boundaries between architecture, art, anthropology, archaeology, and history. In this year’s session, ‘Healthcare Architecture in Islamic Traditions/Translations’, IJIA Assistant Editor Deniz Avci will be joined by Cansu Değirmencioğlu, Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, and Kamyar Salavati for a lively discussion exploring the current debates about culturally responsive healthcare design. The session will offer a historical perspective on the ongoing challenge of designing for health and hygiene.
Zoom registration:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83691919135?pwd=nNd8AKf7uZvzV3MKBezfZrvzNvevXD.1
Cansu Değirmencioğlu is a Berlin-based architectural historian. Her recent projects explore the architecture of sanatoria, the spatial politics of domesticity, rural public-health campaigns, and the visual culture of twentieth-century medicine.
Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi is an architectural historian of health, emotions and the body and the author of Emotion, Mission, Architecture (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). She is currently a British Academy International Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, the University of Exeter.
Kamyar Salavati is currently completing his doctorate at the University of Exeter, working on how epidemics shaped modern architecture and urbanism in the northern region of Iran from the 1850s to the 1950s by exploring the socio-cultural implications of transformations across scales.