Exhibition Lecture

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

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Madīnat al-Zahrā’, the 10th-century caliphal city of the Umayyads of al-Andalus, presents an exemplary site for the investigation of the intertwined notions of nature, humanity and materiality embodied in landscape architecture. The founding of the new city close to the capital in Córdoba transformed the whole territory, especially the extensive hydraulic system that supported agricultural cultivation and the network of roads that facilitated the transportation of building materials and builders. This lecture reconsiders the corresponding exploitation of natural resources at an intersection with theological conceptions of justice, human agency and the cosmic order.

Contemporaneous chronicles and legal treatises on land ownership and rights to mines, quarries, water, and free and slave labor all contribute to a better understanding of the political economy, in which taxation was the backbone of the caliphate’s wealth. In this frame, mankind is the unquestioned and self-interested lord of nature. The Qur’ān and medieval Islamic philosophy offer a conflicting view of mankind’s role, under God, as the steward of Creation. Considering archaeological and textual evidence, I examine architectural precincts and gardens in Madīnat al-Zahrā’ in the context of the built environment of the wider territory to situate architecture and urban design in that contested ideological field.

Dr. Olga Bush received her Ph.D. in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.  She has taught at Vassar College, SUNY, New Paltz and Bard College, and lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad.  Her publications range from medieval Muslim material culture and environmental science to Islamic architecture and aesthetics, to European and American Orientalism.  She co-edited with Avinoam Shalem, Gazing Otherwise: Modalities of Seeing in and beyond the Lands of Islam (2015); and her interdisciplinary monograph, Reframing the Alhambra: Architecture, Poetry, Textiles and Court Ceremonial, (2018), was a finalist for the 2019 College Art Association Charles Rufus Morey Book Award.  She has held fellowships at such leading research institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Institute for Advanced Study, Dumbarton Oaks, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, and the American Academy in Rome.

This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue were made possible by generous support from the Achelis and Bodman Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Leon Levy Foundation. Additional funding provided by Liz and Iris Fernandez Zimick.

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