Historical Architecture in Disaster Zones: Digital Documentation, Archiving, and Preservation

About

This talk present a project that works in an international, collaborative research setting to gather data - photographs from the nineteenth century to the present, scholarly literature, oral histories, maps and plans—to document historical monuments affected by the February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. The project is focusing on the city of Antakya, where monuments dating from the Roman period to the Ottoman Empire, from 300 BCE to the nineteenth century, ranging from commercial buildings to churches, mosques, and synagogues were heavily damaged or destroyed by the earthquakes. This talk will present initial versions of virtual tours through monuments and neighborhoods, as well as the website based on an OCHRE database, to be launched in early 2027.

About the Speakers

Patricia Blessing is Associate Professor of Art History at Stanford University. Blessing is the author of Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014) and Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With Elizabeth Dospel Williams and Eiren Shea, she co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400 for the Cambridge Elements series Global Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In addition to the project presented here, she is currently working on a book on water in Ottoman architecture.

Faith Han is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University, specializing in the art and architecture of the Islamic Middle East, with a focus on Anatolia and the Levant. His current research investigates the sensorial qualities of cross-cultural metal objects typically attributed to the “Mosul school” and examines their function and movement within architectural contexts. An advocate of visual culture studies, he also explores Islamic theology and visuality as additional frameworks for engaging with Islamic art. Han earned his BA in Art History, specializing in European and American art, from Free University Berlin, and his MA in the History of Art and Architecture of the Islamic Middle East and Arabic from SOAS, University of London. Currently, he is a predoctoral fellow at ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul.

Angele Yang is a Master’s student in History of Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, specializing in global art and architecture, with a focus on the Middle East, North Africa, and greater Mediterranean during the medieval and early modern periods. Prior to Stanford, she worked closely with Art History Prof. Niall Atkinson on the CATASTO project at the University of Chicago, using OCHRE to spatialize socio-geographic networks of fifteenth-century Florence, Italy. Hir writing on visual culture and the built environment appears in academic and literary publications alike, including the Yale Philosophy Review, and hir research has been supported by the IFPDA Foundation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and more.