Whose Tradition? ─ Discourse on the Built Environment

This is the fourth book, edited or authored by Nezar AlSayyad, to examine the relationship between tradition and the built environment. Here the focus is on four broad themes: Place: Whose Nation, Whose City?; People: Whose Indigeneity?; Colonialism: Whose Architecture?; and Time: Whose Identity? The first explores how traditions rooted in a particular place can be claimed by different groups whose aims are odds with one another. Part Two looks at the concept of indigeneity and its changing meaning in the globalising world, while Part Three looks at the lingering effects of colonial rule in altering present-day narratives of architectural identity. The final Part, in acknowledging that all traditions must face change and modernization, explores how traditions construct identities and in turn how identities inform the interpretation and manipulation of tradition within contexts of socio-cultural transformation.

Nezar AlSayyad

Professor AlSayyad is Professor of Architecture, Planning, Urban Design and Urban History, former Associate Dean for International Programs in the College of Environmental Design; former Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies; all at the University of California, Berkeley, He is current President of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE); and Editor of Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review (TDSR). He has also produced and directed two public television video documentaries: "Virtual Cairo" and "At Home with Mother Earth." Among his numerous grants are those received from the U.S. Department of Education, the NEA Design Arts Program, the Getty Grant Program, and the Graham Foundation. Awards include the Beit AlQuran Medal, Bahrain, the Pioneer American Society Book Award, and the American Institute of Architects Education Honors and a Guggenheim Fellowship,. Professionally active as both an architect and planner in the United States and Egypt, he is Principal of XXA-Office of Xross-Xultural Architecture. His projects include houses and apartment buildings in Egypt, California, and Saudi Arabia, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at U.C. Berkeley, and award-winning competition entries As a scholar, he has authored and edited numerous books, including Traditions (2014); Cairo: Histories of a City (2011); The Fundamentalist City? (2010); Cinematic Urbanism (2006); Making Cairo Medieval (2005); The End of Tradition (2004); Urban Informality (2002); Muslim Europe or Euro-Islam (2001); Hybrid Urbanism (2001); Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage (2000); Forms and Dominance (1992); Cities and Caliphs (1991); and Dwellings, Settlements and Tradition (1989)

Professor Gillem is an Associate Professor who teaches architecture and urban design at the University of Oregon through a joint appointment in the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. His book America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) draws on a decade in the U.S. Air Force, both as an architect and planner and as a faculty member of the Air Force Institute of Technology. America Town, which received the Environmental Design Research Association Book Award in 2008, examines the forces behind the exportation of the American lifestyle to military bases abroad and explores the impact of this approach on foreign lands. He also contributed an essay on this topic to Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State, edited by Michael Sorkin (Routledge, 2007) and to Political and Social Impacts of Military Bases: Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Challenges, edited by Luis Rodrigues (Portuguese Institute of International Relations, 2009). Other essays on issues of urbanism co-authored by Gillem have been published in Reclaiming Brownfields: A Comparative Analysis of Adaptive Reuse of Contaminated Properties, edited by Richard Hula, Laura Reese, and Cynthia Jackson-Elmore (Ashgate, 2012) and Synergicity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City, edited by Paul Kapp and Paul Armstrong (University of Illinois Press, 2012). He also addresses sustainability, social responsibility, and historic preservation through his research and his professional practice. His work has received fifteen national design awards. Other honors include a Design Excellence Award from the U.S. Air Force and the Crocker Award for Teaching Excellence at the Air Force Institute of Technology. His diverse portfolio includes a renovation honored by the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (California) and pro-bono designs for projects in New Guinea, Guatemala, and Indonesia, as well as master plans for NASA’s Johnson Space Center and White Sands Test Facility. Gillem is a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects and he serves as the Director of International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments. He is also the Director of the University of Oregon’s Urban Design Lab.

David Moffat is an architect and planner in Berkeley, CA, and editor of numerous environmental-design publications over the last 25 years. He is currently Managing Editor of Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, the journal of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, with which he has been affiliated since its founding. He has played a major role in planning and producing many of the edited volumes that have emerged from conferences and other initiatives of the association since its landmark 1989 Dwellings Settlements and Tradition: Cross Cultural Perspectives. He also served as Managing Editor of the journal Places from 2002 to 2009