Category: Art

Ideal Super Bowl XLV keepsake book City by Design Dallas features exclusive renderings of Cowboys Stadium and other iconic works of architecture | Cision Wire. The 72-story Bank of America Plaza was designed by Rees Associates (formerly JPJ Architects) in the 1980s yet stands today as impressive and progressive as the day it was envisioned, with its clever floor plate arrangement that affords 16 corner offices, as opposed to the standard four, on each floor. In contrast to this iconic structure are equally brilliant yet decidedly smaller structures such as Hidell Associates’ Ismaili Jamatkhana, a prayer hall that makes use…

Tracing Islamic History Through Its Scripts – NYTimes.com. The items, on display through Feb. 27, form part of the Aga Khan’s collection of Islamic art from the 8th to the 18th centuries, and will find a more permanent home when the Aga Khan Museum opens in Toronto in 2013. The founders say it will be the first major educational and exhibition center in North America dedicated to Muslim arts and culture.  Much of the writing displayed comes from Korans. Scribes faced the daunting task of precisely copying the Muslim holy book and in a way became early page designers, deciding…

God rest his soul. One of the great minds of the field. Oleg Grabar, Historian of Islamic Art, Dies at 81 – NYTimes.com. Oleg Grabar, a historian of Islamic art and architecture whose imposingly broad range and analytical subtlety helped transform the Western study of Islamic culture, died Saturday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 81.

Seven Stories, and Loads of Ideas, in Brooklyn – NYTimes.com. Here a dozen ecological and technology entrepreneurs work in constant collaboration. Amanda Parkes, a co-founder of a biofuel start-up called Bodega Algae, also designs what she calls “parasitic energy costumes” that capture energy generated by the body in motion. So when a Parisian dance company commissioned costumes for a performance this winter, Ms. Parkes solicited the help of James Patten, an interactive designer, and Jessica Banks, a roboticist, who sit 15 feet away.

Kordu: Arabo-Hangul Calligraphy. This website has some cool mashups of Korean/Arabic texts.

How to Meet Muslims: A (Cinematic) Primer | Culture | Religion Dispatches. The next best thing to a living, breathing Muslim is an approximation of one. That is, the silver screen (had you said robots, I’d counter: Muslims will be the last people on Earth to come up with robots). Why not? Movies explore the lives and experiences of Muslims in a format that can be watched as easily at home as on the train (that’s what iPads are for).

Muslim American Artists Strive to Bridge a Chasm – NYTimes.com. When Wajahat Ali, a young Muslim American playwright from Fremont, needed to build an audience for his work, he produced his plays in cramped Pakistani restaurants in the East Bay and used Facebook to get the word out.  His play “The Domestic Crusaders” went on to open at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in 2005, and then moved to Off Broadway.   … Mr. Ali is one of a growing number of Bay Area artists who are reimagining one of the country’s most complicated compound identities: Muslim American.  At a time…

Aleppo, Syria, Preserves the Past by Enhancing the Present – NYTimes.com. But this quiet plaza is the centerpiece of one of the most far-thinking preservation projects in the Middle East, one that places as much importance on people as it does on the buildings they live in. The project encompasses the rebuilding of crumbling streets and the upgrading of city services, the restoration of hundreds of houses in the historic Old City, plans for a 42-acre park in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and the near-decade-long restoration of the Citadel itself, whose massive walls dominate the skyline of Aleppo,…

2010 Aga Khan Award for Architecture – elan: The Guide to Global Muslim Culture. Every three years, the world of architecture gets together to recognize the best projects that have been built. His Royal Highness, the Aga Khan, himself, established The Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the highest award in the field of architecture in 1977. The award is to not only identify and encourage excellence in architecture, but to also push for other forms of intervention and technology particularly in countries where there are a significant amount of Muslims present. This year, the award ceremony took place at the…