Issue 51
Text | Zarminae Ansari
Visuals | As mentioned
In the first part of this article, we shared information about an invaluable resource for architects, scholars, and students: theBibliotheca Orientalis Attilio Petruccioli. A unique and specialized library in Italy, focusing on the architecture and urbanism of the
Islamic world. In this article, we interview its founder, Architect Attilio Petruccioli, an ICOMOS and UNESCO expert. Petruccioliholds a degree in Oriental Studies from the Università di Venezia Cà Foscari (1980), he is a Full Professor of Landscape
Architecture (Alta qualifica), Doctoral School Architettura e Costruzione, Universit‡ di Roma, La Sapienza.
Petruccioli was the Aga Khan Professor of Architecture for Islamic Societies at MIT and director of the Aga Khan Program at MIT and Harvard University (1994 – 98). Full Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Department of Civil Engineering and
Architecture, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy (1998 – 2012), he served as both the Dean and Director of the department, and as the Full Professor of Urban Design and Msheireb Property Chair at Qatar University (2012 -17). He has been the Chief Editor of
the Environmental Design Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre; as a consultant, he provided professional advice in the field of Islamic heritage and urban development in most of the Arab countries, amongst them: Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Saudi Arabia.
Due to his long-standing, passionate interest in both architectural design and history of Islamic architecture, he has written and edited 34 books and over 210 articles on these topics. Following his retirement, Petruccioli founded this specialized research center based on his extensive private collections.
The information available online intrigued me, prompting me to contact Professor Petruccioli to obtain some additional information.
This is an excerpt from my conversation with him:
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About the author:
Zarminae Ansari, equipped with her deep interest in linguistics and her lived experiences, in 12 cities around the globe, cultural tourism and marketing is Ar. Zarminae Ansari’s (MIT, 1997) forte. Currently based in Dubai, she runs ‘Joy of Urdu’, a bilingualinitiative for the revitalization of the Urdu language with chapters established all over the world.
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