Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
Soumyen Bandyopadhyay is Sir James Stirling Chair in Architecture and the previous Head of School (2016-21) at the Liverpool School of Architecture (LSA), University of Liverpool. He also directs the Centre for the Study of Architecture and Cultural Heritage of India, Arabia and the Maghreb (ArCHIAM), an interdisciplinary forum with research projects in Oman, Qatar, Morocco and India (www.archiam.co.uk). His teaching and research interests are focused on the historical, theoretical and contextual approaches to architectural design and the architecture and settlements of India and the Middle East. He has previously held professorial position at the Manchester School of Architecture (MSA) and also at Nottingham Trent University, where he was Research Coordinator for the School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment and coordinated the Research Excellence Framework (REF) submission for Architecture, Built Environment and Planning. Bandyopadhyay has extensive experience of architectural practice in India and the Middle East and has undertaken advisory and consultancy work in urban development, regeneration, architectural and urban design, and conservation. In addition to his published works in journals, he is also the author of the monographs, Site and Composition (Routledge, 2016) and Manah: Omani Oasis, Arabian Legacy (Liverpool University Press, 2011) and co-editor of The Territories of Identity: Architecture in the Age of Evolving Globalisation (Routledge, 2013) and The Humanities in Architectural Design: A Contemporary and Historical Perspective (Routledge 2007).
Phone: +44 (0)151 794 9548
Address: Liverpool School of Architecture
University of Liverpool
Leverhulme Building
Abercromby Square
Liverpool L69 7ZN
Phone: +44 (0)151 794 9548
Address: Liverpool School of Architecture
University of Liverpool
Leverhulme Building
Abercromby Square
Liverpool L69 7ZN
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Books by Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
Addressing these tendencies, this book has argued revisiting the instruments of both siting and composition in Architecture to explore their true potential in achieving connections between site and context. Departing from a reconsideration of the fragment and the process of its formation, fragmentation, the book emphasises the role of the ‘positive fragment’, and the role such positive entities could potentially play in achieving both historical continuity and renewed wholeness. It focuses on architects of wide-ranging persuasion of the twentieth century – for example, Peter Eisenman, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvaro Siza, Herzog and de Meuron, and Charles Correa – whose work defy categorization under simple binary oppositions. Through the various examples studied here, we suggest that the instrumental means have the potential for enhanced analogical and scalar relationships capable of achieving poetic outcomes. By considering such architects’ works of diverse periods and geographical locations, one intention is to question the lenses of preconceptions through which their works are regarded and promptly put into artificial ‘political’ categories. However, more importantly, it is a plea to treat architecture and the city not as a collection of disjointed objects but as overlapping networks of relationships, cutting across temporal and cultural boundaries.
Architecture in the Age of
Evolving Globalization
Soumyen Bandyopadhyay & Guillermo Garma Montiel
Routledge November 2013
The expedited globalized process of exchange and new forms of cultural production have transformed old established notions of identity, calling into question their conceptual foundations. This book explores the spatial and representational dimension of this phenomenon, by addressing how the reshaping of the key themes of place, architecture and memory is altering the nature, as well as our understanding, of identity.
Cutting across boundaries, the book drives discussion of identity beyond the well-worn concern for its loss within a globalized context, and importantly provides links between identity, and place, memory and representation in architecture. Examining a number of case studies from Australia, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Turkey and Singapore, as well as with contributions cutting across temporal boundaries, this volume addresses a range of critical issues in the monitoring and mapping of identity shift within a rapidly globalizing context.
With contributions from renowned authors in the field, including Nezar AlSayyad, Robert Brown, Catherine Ettinger, Patsy Hely, John Hendrix, Liane Lefaivre, Fiona MacLaren, Andrzej Piotrowski, Raymond Quek, Luz Marie Rodríguez, Ana Souto, Nicholas Temple and Stephen Walker, this book presents fresh insights and diverse perspectives on the evolving question of identity and globalization.
Soumyen Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Architecture and Design at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
Guillermo Garma Montiel is Principal Lecturer in Architecture at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
“As we crossed these, with lofty almond, citron and orange trees, yielding a delicious fragrance on either hand, exclamations of astonishment and admiration burst from us. ‘Is this Arabia’, we said; ‘this the country we have looked on heretofore as a desert?’ . . . I could almost fancy we had at last reached that ‘Araby the blessed’, which I have been accustomed to regard as existing only in the fictions of our poets.”
Standing out amidst the arid barrenness of the regional landscape and restrained by the desert-bound wadi courses, Manah once truly affirmed the Arabic meaning of its name, ‘the gift from God’.
This monograph brings to light the architectural and urban character of Harat al-Bilad – the principal settlement of Manah. One of the frontier settlements straddling the boundary between the foothills of the Jabal al-Akhdar (Green Mountains) and the desert foreland, the oasis had played an important role in the historical and cultural development of the region. The Ministry of Heritage and Culture is currently undertaking conservation work in Harat al-Bilad a heritage site of national importance.
Contents. Introduction p7. Chapter 1 Passages into a land-locked island p13. Chapter 2 Core revealed: our expanding knowledge of ad-Dakhiliyah architecture p39. Chapter 3 Manah and Harat al-Bilad: setting and townscape p61. Chapter 4 Mosques of Harat al-Bilad p91. Chapter 5 Dwellings large and small p109. Chapter 6 Tribal pattern, settlement structure and the sablah p129. Chapter 7 Harat al-Bilad: origin, morphology and structure p161. Chapter 8 Water, purity and places of worship p189. Chapter 9 From the twilight of cultural memory: the distinctive mosque type of ad-Dakhiliyah p221. Chapter 10 Topographic conflation in the decorated maharib of Omani mosques p245. Chapter 11 Privacy and the deconstructed courtyard: dwellings of ad-Dakhiliyah p273. Conclusion Precarious negotiations: architectural invention amidst cultural continuity p291. Bibliography p297. Index p307.
Written by leading academics in the fields of history, theory and philosophy of design, the essays draw profound meanings from cultural practices and beliefs (religious, mythic, poetic, political and philosophical). The traditional inter-relationships between word and image, narrative and space have been altered by the growing dominance of digital media on design and the associated influences of globalization and mass consumption. The chapters here consider how the growing monopoly of technological development in our culture is shaping architectural discourse and how emerging technologies can usefully contribute to a deeper understanding of our design culture.
Quite how we can restore - or indeed radically transform - the traditional dialogue between intellectual enquiry in the humanities and design creativity is at the core of this timely and important book.
Soumyen Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Architecture and Design at Nottingham Trent University and has previously taught at Liverpool University.
Jane Lomholt is a Senior Lecturer in architecture at the University of Lincoln where she is head of History and Theory.
Nicholas Temple is Professor of Architecture at the University of Lincoln, having previously taught at the University of Liverpool, the University of Pennsylvania and Nottingham University.
Renée Tobe is now based at the University of East London. She was recently Senior Lecturer in architecture at University of Lincoln.
Papers by Soumyen Bandyopadhyay
Birkat al-Mawz, al-Ḥamrāʾ, and Misfāt al-ʿAbrīyin, which developed during the prosperous early-Yaʿrubi period in the mid-eleventh/seventeenth century. It investigates the extent to which the Ibāḍī-Islamic legal framework allowed flexibility for the local governance, management, and organisation of this ancient system, and its adaptation to diverse demographic, environmental, and emergent socio-political conditions.
Keywords: Birkat al-Mawz; dawrān; falaj; fiqh rulings; Ibāḍī; local governance; Misfāt al-ʿAbrīyīn; Oman; qanāt; Yaʿāriba
Addressing these tendencies, this book has argued revisiting the instruments of both siting and composition in Architecture to explore their true potential in achieving connections between site and context. Departing from a reconsideration of the fragment and the process of its formation, fragmentation, the book emphasises the role of the ‘positive fragment’, and the role such positive entities could potentially play in achieving both historical continuity and renewed wholeness. It focuses on architects of wide-ranging persuasion of the twentieth century – for example, Peter Eisenman, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvaro Siza, Herzog and de Meuron, and Charles Correa – whose work defy categorization under simple binary oppositions. Through the various examples studied here, we suggest that the instrumental means have the potential for enhanced analogical and scalar relationships capable of achieving poetic outcomes. By considering such architects’ works of diverse periods and geographical locations, one intention is to question the lenses of preconceptions through which their works are regarded and promptly put into artificial ‘political’ categories. However, more importantly, it is a plea to treat architecture and the city not as a collection of disjointed objects but as overlapping networks of relationships, cutting across temporal and cultural boundaries.
Architecture in the Age of
Evolving Globalization
Soumyen Bandyopadhyay & Guillermo Garma Montiel
Routledge November 2013
The expedited globalized process of exchange and new forms of cultural production have transformed old established notions of identity, calling into question their conceptual foundations. This book explores the spatial and representational dimension of this phenomenon, by addressing how the reshaping of the key themes of place, architecture and memory is altering the nature, as well as our understanding, of identity.
Cutting across boundaries, the book drives discussion of identity beyond the well-worn concern for its loss within a globalized context, and importantly provides links between identity, and place, memory and representation in architecture. Examining a number of case studies from Australia, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Turkey and Singapore, as well as with contributions cutting across temporal boundaries, this volume addresses a range of critical issues in the monitoring and mapping of identity shift within a rapidly globalizing context.
With contributions from renowned authors in the field, including Nezar AlSayyad, Robert Brown, Catherine Ettinger, Patsy Hely, John Hendrix, Liane Lefaivre, Fiona MacLaren, Andrzej Piotrowski, Raymond Quek, Luz Marie Rodríguez, Ana Souto, Nicholas Temple and Stephen Walker, this book presents fresh insights and diverse perspectives on the evolving question of identity and globalization.
Soumyen Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Architecture and Design at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
Guillermo Garma Montiel is Principal Lecturer in Architecture at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
“As we crossed these, with lofty almond, citron and orange trees, yielding a delicious fragrance on either hand, exclamations of astonishment and admiration burst from us. ‘Is this Arabia’, we said; ‘this the country we have looked on heretofore as a desert?’ . . . I could almost fancy we had at last reached that ‘Araby the blessed’, which I have been accustomed to regard as existing only in the fictions of our poets.”
Standing out amidst the arid barrenness of the regional landscape and restrained by the desert-bound wadi courses, Manah once truly affirmed the Arabic meaning of its name, ‘the gift from God’.
This monograph brings to light the architectural and urban character of Harat al-Bilad – the principal settlement of Manah. One of the frontier settlements straddling the boundary between the foothills of the Jabal al-Akhdar (Green Mountains) and the desert foreland, the oasis had played an important role in the historical and cultural development of the region. The Ministry of Heritage and Culture is currently undertaking conservation work in Harat al-Bilad a heritage site of national importance.
Contents. Introduction p7. Chapter 1 Passages into a land-locked island p13. Chapter 2 Core revealed: our expanding knowledge of ad-Dakhiliyah architecture p39. Chapter 3 Manah and Harat al-Bilad: setting and townscape p61. Chapter 4 Mosques of Harat al-Bilad p91. Chapter 5 Dwellings large and small p109. Chapter 6 Tribal pattern, settlement structure and the sablah p129. Chapter 7 Harat al-Bilad: origin, morphology and structure p161. Chapter 8 Water, purity and places of worship p189. Chapter 9 From the twilight of cultural memory: the distinctive mosque type of ad-Dakhiliyah p221. Chapter 10 Topographic conflation in the decorated maharib of Omani mosques p245. Chapter 11 Privacy and the deconstructed courtyard: dwellings of ad-Dakhiliyah p273. Conclusion Precarious negotiations: architectural invention amidst cultural continuity p291. Bibliography p297. Index p307.
Written by leading academics in the fields of history, theory and philosophy of design, the essays draw profound meanings from cultural practices and beliefs (religious, mythic, poetic, political and philosophical). The traditional inter-relationships between word and image, narrative and space have been altered by the growing dominance of digital media on design and the associated influences of globalization and mass consumption. The chapters here consider how the growing monopoly of technological development in our culture is shaping architectural discourse and how emerging technologies can usefully contribute to a deeper understanding of our design culture.
Quite how we can restore - or indeed radically transform - the traditional dialogue between intellectual enquiry in the humanities and design creativity is at the core of this timely and important book.
Soumyen Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Architecture and Design at Nottingham Trent University and has previously taught at Liverpool University.
Jane Lomholt is a Senior Lecturer in architecture at the University of Lincoln where she is head of History and Theory.
Nicholas Temple is Professor of Architecture at the University of Lincoln, having previously taught at the University of Liverpool, the University of Pennsylvania and Nottingham University.
Renée Tobe is now based at the University of East London. She was recently Senior Lecturer in architecture at University of Lincoln.
Birkat al-Mawz, al-Ḥamrāʾ, and Misfāt al-ʿAbrīyin, which developed during the prosperous early-Yaʿrubi period in the mid-eleventh/seventeenth century. It investigates the extent to which the Ibāḍī-Islamic legal framework allowed flexibility for the local governance, management, and organisation of this ancient system, and its adaptation to diverse demographic, environmental, and emergent socio-political conditions.
Keywords: Birkat al-Mawz; dawrān; falaj; fiqh rulings; Ibāḍī; local governance; Misfāt al-ʿAbrīyīn; Oman; qanāt; Yaʿāriba
The Centre consists of an international team of researchers from a variety of academic backgrounds in architecture, social history, architectural technology, archaeology, conservation and digital documentation, among others. In this sense one of the fundamental themes underlying the Centre's research aims is the multidisciplinary study of how human culture and social practices are expressed spatially, and how in turn space affects the cultural practices of groups and communities.
A further aim is the dissemination of a wide range of research material developed at ArCHIAM through a searchable online repository of photographs, drawings, videos, fieldwork reports and also academic publications.
Research
The Centre is interested in furthering the study and understanding of influence and interconnectivity that existed between cultural spheres. Indian, Arabian and North African artistic developments never occurred in isolation from one another as traders, pilgrims and travellers shifted goods and ideas over great distances. These vast spatial cognitive networks that spanned, either directly or indirectly, from Marrakesh to Madras, gave individuals and communities access to intellectual developments that lay far beyond their horizon.
Current research at ArCHIAM is emphasising the fieldwork based study of the built environment, its secular, vernacular and religious architecture and urbanism. The focus lies on heritage management and sustainable development in Arabia, the Subcontinent and North Africa, with a clear view towards incorporating studies in related fields in the arts and humanities and the social sciences. The Centre's spatial ambition is mirrored by its temporal interest ranging from pre-history to modernity.
Projects
For a number of years ArCHIAM team members have been involved in the ongoing study and documentation of heritage sites in the Middle East. By request of the Ministry of Heritage and Culture of the Sultanate of Oman a series of high-quality documentation efforts were carried out to ascertain the state of preservation of some of the country's most important architectural exponents, including the Bahla UNESCO World Heritage Site. Beyond the production of plans, drawings, photographs, virtual reconstructions and other materials of the highest standard, the ArCHIAM Heritage Management Plans aim for the development of sustainable re-integration strategies of the traditional vernacular architecture into the country's rapidly changing economic and social realities. To achieve this a strong emphasis is placed on the cooperation of local stakeholders and understanding the sensitivities and requirements of the inhabitants.
In keeping with the ArCHIAM mission statement, the study of anthropological substrates of the built environment and the spatial relationships within vernacular settlements figures very highly on our list of priorities. The members of the team pursue their individual research agendas in architectural technology, fortification, archaeology, tribal identities, conservation, etc., the results and conclusions being cohesively fed into the management plans and numerous ancillary scientific publications.
Dissemination and Outreach
ARCHIAM strives to provide high quality research materials for educational and public outreach programmes. ArCHIAM visualisations, plans and drawings are being displayed in a variety of museums and exhibtions on architectural history and vernacular architecture.
As part of fieldwork efforts undertaken in Oman, ArCHIAM team members have engaged with members of the community and trained students and ministry employees in survey techniques, photographic documentation and architectural analysis in order to build up local expertise and interest in the traditional lifestyles.