architecture islamic

Hardcover. New York, Aperture, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 96 pages, color photographs, Like new in publisher's shrinkwrap. Doors of the Kingdom is a unique collection of photographs depicting the ancient and disappearing craft of doormaking in Arabia. The Islamic concept of hurma, or sanctity of a place of dwelling or worship, is recurrent throughout Arabic poetry and literature. The door (bab), preserver of sanctity, becomes symbolic of the boundary between public and private space, and between the profane and the sacred. In 1995, Haajar Gouverneur traveled throughout the Arabian Peninsula photographing each region's distinctive doorways and the remaining artisans who make them. The doors of Arabia, painstakingly hand-carved from the wood of the Al-Athel trees, last in their exquisite variety for hundreds of years. This ancient craft, passed down from generation to generation in the central and northern regions of Saudi Arabia, is now nearly extinct. Modern materials, technology, and changing priorities threaten the continuity of the sacred and artisanal tradition of doormaking.

Softcover. London/NY, Routledge , 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 288 pages, illustrated in b&w. Empire Building is a study of how and why Western architecture was exported to the Middle East and how Islamic and Byzantine architectural ideas and styles impacted on the West.The book explores how far racial theory and political and religious agendas guided British architects (and how such ideas were resisted when applied), and how Eastern ideas came to influence the West, through writers such as Ruskin and buildings such as the Crystal Palace.Beautifully written and lavishly illustrated, Empire Building takes the reader on an extraordinary postcolonial journey, backwards and forwards, into the heart and to the edge of empire.

Hardcover. London, Faber and Faber, Reprint, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Orange cloth covers with gilt titles to spine. 93 pages of text followed by 613 monochrome plates, non-paginated. Frontis illustration, Tabriz, Tilework in the Courtyard of the So-called Blue Mosque, A. D. 1465, in full page, full color. Toning to edges. Clean, unmarked. A nice copy.

Hardcover. New York, HMH Books for Young Readers, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 96 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON TITLE PAGE. Otherwise, clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Color drawings throughout.

Hardcover. NY, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 120 pages. An insightful and unbiased account of a much-maligned and rapidly growing culture around the world, taken in perhaps the one place in the world where all manifestations of religious adherents live and work: New York City. The book features photographs, essays, and interviews documenting the mosques that New York's Muslim communities have built at their center, revealing the ways these buildings reflect and create identities for Muslims within a dense and diverse urban fabric. "... Mr. Grazda's penetrating black-and-white photographs and Ms. Dodd's insightful commentaries reveal the range of the city's Islamic houses of worship and their ethnic congregations...."--The New York Times

Hardcover. London, Thames and Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 144 pages, Color photos by Ara Guller. Sinan was the greatest architect of the Ottoman Golden Age of the sixteenth century when the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith of power and magnificence. His style marks the apogee of Turkish art. Under Sleyman the Magnificent and his succcessor Selmi II, Sinan designed hundreds of buildings: mosques, palaces, tombs, mausolea, hospitals, schools, caravanserai, bridges, aqueducts and baths, many of them presented and analysed in this book. In his greatest works, he adapted Byzantine and Islamic styles to produce something quite new: a centralized organization of absolute space unhindered by pillars or columns and covered by a soaring dome. An architect of genius in a dynamic new empire expanding into both Asia and Europe, he was a true man of the Renaissance. Clean, bright copy.