A groundbreaking study that redefines Islamic architectural history by placing the Americas at the center of transregional cultural and artistic dialogues.
Walking us through colonial courtyards in Peru to the mosques and cultural centers built by contemporary immigrant communities across North America, Islamic and Islamicate Architecture in the Americas depicts how architectural traditions tied to the Islamic world have taken root and evolved across the Western Hemisphere. This volume confronts conventional geographical boundaries by situating the Americas in dialogue with transregional aesthetic and cultural networks that span centuries.
Using diverse case studies, contributors examine the migration of construction techniques, the adaptation of Islamic architectural motifs in colonial and modern contexts, and the role of patronage in shaping built environments. This book expands our understanding of how cultures travel and take on new meanings in different spaces by bridging North and South America, two regions often excluded from the Islamic architectural canon.
Stimulating material for scholars and students of architecture, art history, and cultural studies, this volume offers a vital reconsideration of Islamic and Islamicate architecture through a hemispheric lens, revealing a rich and complex architectural legacy that continues to shape the Americas today.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Transregional Manifestations of Islamic and Islamicate
Architecture in the Americas
Caroline Olivia M. Wolf
PART I: Rethinking the Mudéjar in the Americas: Colonial Contexts
Chapter
1. Design, Disruption, and Disease: Reconstructing the Historical
Context of the Mosque-type Chapels in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
Luis Carlos Barragán
Chapter 2. A 'Church of Mosque Proportions: Debates of Mudéjar Style in New
Granada
Juan Ricardo Rey
Chapter
3. Echoes of Mashrabiya in Latin America: Reconsidering the Balconies
of Lima
Fernando Luis Martínez Nespral
PART II: Revisiting Orientalism in the Americas: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-
Century Forms and Patronage
Chapter
4. The Turkish Style Cozy Corner: Everyday Appropriations of
Islamicate Objects and Spaces in the American Parlor, 1885-1910
Sarah Wheat Ordu
Chapter
5. Midwest Middle East: Forms of Synthesis in Chicagos Baháí
Temple
Vajdon Sohaili
Chapter
6. Constructing Orientalism in Interwar Florida
Emily Neumeier
PART III: Revealing Diasporic Patronage in the Americas: Modern and
Contemporary Representational and Religious Space
Chapter 7. Crafting Cosmopolitanism in the Brazilian Mahjar: Eclecticism,
Orientalism and the Syrian-Lebanese Architectural Patronage of Centennial São
Paulo
Caroline Olivia M. Wolf
Chapter
8. Independent and/or Instrumentalized: Surveying Mosque Architecture
in Chile (1986-2006)
Courtney Lesoon
Chapter
9. Canadian Mosques: Hybridity of Form and Program
Tammy Gaber
Chapter
10. Diasporic Aesthetics and the Genealogy of an Urban Mosque: An
Analysis of the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C.
Akel Kahera
Contributor Biographies
Index
Caroline Olivia M. Wolf is an assistant professor of Art History at Loyola University Chicago, USA. Her research emphasizes diasporic and transregional visual intersections across the Global South, with areas of specialization in Latin American modernism, as well as Middle Eastern art and architecture. Wolfs work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays DDRA, the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH).
