Displaying the Orient: architecture of Islam at nineteenth-century world's fairs

Abstract

Gathering architectural pieces from all over the world, the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 introduced to fairgoers the notion of an imaginary journey, a new tourism en place. Through this and similar expositions, the world's cultures were imported to European and American cities as artifacts and presented to 19th-century men and women as the world in microcosm, giving a quick and seemingly realistic impression of distant pieces. The author examines the display of Islamic cultures at 19th-century world's fairs, focusing on the exposition architecture. She asserts that certain socio-political and cultural trends now crucial to our understanding of historical transformations in both the West and the world of Islam were mirrored in the fair's architecture. Furthermore, dominant attitudes toward cross-cultural exchanges were revealed repeatedly in Westerner's responses to these pavilions, in Western architects' interpretations of Islamic stylistic traditions, and in the pavilions' impact in such urban centres. Although the world's fairs claimed to be platforms for peaceful cultural communication, they displayed the world according to a hierarchy based on power relations. The author's delineation of this hierarchy in the exposition building enables us to understand both the adversarial relations between the West and the Middle East, and the issue of cultural self-definition for Muslim societies of the 19th century.