Professor Nasser Rabbat gave a lecture on “Solid Illumination: Light in Islamic Architecture”.
Professor Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and the Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. An architect and a historian, his interests include Islamic architecture, art, urban history, and post-colonial criticism.
His lecture will focus on light as a fundamental design element in Islamic architecture – not only for its symbolic and metaphysical connotations, but also for aesthetic, spatial, social, and environmental reasons.
In his lecture, Professor Rabbat looked at many architectural strategies that have been developed over the last fifteen centuries to filter, refract, magnify, focus, conceal, and altogether mystify light.