The defeat of the Ottomans in the Battle of Vienna in 1683 changed the course of European history. The event became embedded in the cultural memory of the region via myriad commemorative celebrations, publications, and reenactments over the next three centuries. The material trophies won in battle were appropriated to serve as potent symbols of the supremacy of European powers. Most important among such trophies were the ornate appliqué tents representative of Ottoman power and prestige. As particularly efficacious material objects, Ottoman-style tents were consumed both privately and publicly, in aristocratic mansions and town squares, respectively. In addition to the exhibition of extant tents in such spaces, visual re-presentations and textual sources spun an historical narrative around their capture. Moreover, these dazzling tent-trophies sparked a new industry of tent making in Central Europe, particularly in modern-day Poland and Ukraine. The forms and decorative programs of the seventeenth-century Ottoman tents captured at the siege of Vienna were not merely imitated in these new production centers. Rather, they were altered and elaborated, creating a European-Ottoman hybrid fabric architecture. In other instances, fragments of Ottoman tents were repurposed in the construction of tents for the Polish nobility. Subsequently, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Nazis occupied Poland and annexed the material wealth of the country, including Ottoman tents. While residing in the Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków, Nazi leaders used various sections of Ottoman tents as backdrops for banquets and, most intriguingly, to line the walls of their makeshift movie theater. Ottoman imperial tents were coveted objects to be sure, embodying imperial power and military might in their ornament and monumentality. The tents were thus appropriated time and again from the late seventeenth century until World War II in Austrian, Polish, and German spheres in particular, where their “Oriental” cache served to visually buttress changing political and ideological agendas.

What meanings do spaces take on when they are extrapolated to a different socio-political context? If in the 1960s shopping malls played a dubious role in the life of the American suburban dweller—creating communal spaces while promoting a culture of consumption—what were their intended and actual socio-political functions in the Tehran of the 1970s? My essay will investigate these questions by exploring the genesis and development of the modern shopping mall in Iran in the last two decades of the Pahlavi reign (1960-79). Through an analysis of architectural representations and the physical/social space of shopping malls, I argue that rather than a straightforward replication, the creation of malls should be understood as part of an effort to appropriate images and spaces of modernity. I show how in its Iranian manifestation, the shopping mall has retained the core paradoxical function of the original American model—oppressive and liberating, a tool of social engineering and the locus of a subversive culture. I first analyze the textual and visual representations of the shopping mall in the discourse of urban planning, focusing specifically on the master plan of Tehran, prepared in the late 1960s with the collaboration of the American-Austrian architect and urban planner Victor Gruen, often considered as the mastermind of shopping malls in the US. Drawing on Gruen’s theories and designs, Tehran’s master plan was conceived as an agglomeration of ten sprawling urban towns, each with a commercial and administrative center. The design of these unrealized centers provides an interesting case study of how the original forms acquired new meanings in the process of transplantation in a new context. I then analyze the architecture and social context of Golestan Shopping Center, a popular mall of Tehran to the present day. Located in an upper middle class quarter, Golestan Center is a rare project planned and constructed in accordance with the guidelines of the pre-revolutionary master plan. Moreover, the building’s architecture, designed by a famous Iranian architect of the time, Kamran Diba, is modern but imbued with references to traditional architecture, which adds another layer to its cultural significance. I will conclude with reflections on the social context of such projects after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when the spaces created to entice the modern middle class under the Pahlavi monarchy began to act as the locus of a subversive culture.

Recently there is a growing interest among architectural historians in “Other Modernisms”, architectural modernisms that developed in non-Occidental cultures. By and large, this interest bypassed the Arab world, including Lebanon and Palestine under the interwar French and British mandates. Although Western literature depicts the Zionist Modernism in Palestine/Israel as “Other Modernism,” it tends to consider its architectural production as a spearhead of Western modernism in the heart of a traditional Levant. Instead, we suggest exploring architecture we call “Levantine Arab Modernism”, when borders between Lebanon and Palestine were wide open. During the 1930s and 1940s Haifa was an important center of cultural and economic exchange; We demonstrate this phenomenon through the Garden Mansions Project - a compound designed by Lebanese architect Antoine Tabet in the German Colony in Haifa. The compound comprises 42 apartments built with reinforced concrete and artificial stone, exemplifies the intersection between different networks pertaining to architectural projection—networks of architectural knowledge, practice, administration, capital, materials and eventual use. We argue that during the mandate period open routes and porous borders allowed for such intersection. The result is the particular brand of modernism we term “Levantine Arab modernism.” The oil pipe line from Iraq, knowledge and architectural practice from Lebanon and Europe and consequently, rapid economic, urban development and change in which Levantine Arabs took an active role. The Garden Mansions project was conceived by Antoine Tabet, a Lebanese architect who studied under the French master Auguste Perret and designed many projects in Beirut, Damascus and Haifa. Implemented by the landowner Raja Rais of Haifa, the project resulted in an architectural compound which can be seen as a unique example of what we call Levantine architectural Modernism. The architect’s notion was to produce a modern housing compound which comprised of different types of flat building and flat villas for rent. The major clients who inhabited the project were British officers, marine and army personnel and IPC (Iraqi petroleum company) clerks. The modern housing compound's space became a focal point shared by local Arabs, British Mandate officers, Jewish, local hotel facility, foreign consulate representatives of a continuous changing nature. Based on archival inquiries; the Israel State Archive, Haifa City Engineer's archive, local Arabic and Mandate newspapers, this paper explores the Garden Mansion project as a crossroads of larger scale networks of politics, economy and cultural exchange, which the eventual residents of the compound were themselves people in transit.

Medieval Islamic geography has been well studied. The wealth of extant sources has stimulated a number of critical editions, translations, and studies. The majority of these works have focused on early Muslim geography from the Near East, and have consequently relegated the Maghreb to the margins. Rather than focus, as has traditional historiography, on early medieval Near Eastern geography, this paper shifts the spotlight to the late-medieval Maghreb via a close examination of a fourteenth-century Arabic-language nautical chart drawn in the Maghreb. I focus, in particular, on this chart’s relationship to contemporary Muslim and European geography, especially regarding how knowledge circulated among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, in the Mediterranean region and beyond. At a basic level, this paper reveals the possibility of transmission of knowledge in a world fragmented by violence and religious divisions, but more precisely, I argue that while the chart exhibits considerable influence from Mallorcan, Genoese, and Venetian charts in both its visual representation of space and toponymy, it nevertheless conveys a distinctively Maghrebi-Muslim representation of the world in part through the provenance of its materials and in part through its inclusion of toponymy that recalls Muslim rule and conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. In drawing the chart Ibrāhīm al-Mursī mapped an Islamic framework over the transmitted topography of Christian nautical charts. In addition to contributing to a little-studied aspect of Muslim geography and history, this paper offers a nuanced view of interfaith relations, the circulation of knowledge among Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants of the late-medieval Mediterranean, and demonstrates some of the ways that cartographers inscribe maps with specific, culturally-bound meanings and messages.