Historic Preservation

Technology has become a transformative medium for the transmission of information within the indigenous, post-colonial Native Hawaiian land control movement.  The movement has harnessed the power of the Internet to convey traditional knowledge and heritage values, and to disseminate information on Native Hawaiian political movements for self-determination and land control of heritage sites.  Previous efforts to develop coordinated and effective movements were impacted by geographic distances in this Pacific Island state.  The volcanic island landscapes posed difficulties in the dissemination of information and the ability of communities to respond in a timely manner to threats to heritage sites.  However, with the introduction of advanced communication networks and technologies these difficulties have been overcome.  Communication among community members is now instantaneous as technological developments, such as cell phones, computers and other personal technologies have become the primary means of communication.  Information for community involvement in Native Hawaiian land control efforts to encourage, protect and preserve threatened heritage sites and practices now reaches not only the Native Hawaiian community on the eight major islands of Hawai'i, but also extends to Hawaiian diaspora enclaves within the continental United States, and indigenous communities throughout the world.  Local concerns are now global discussions, with potential political impacts on Native Hawaiian heritage issues from communities of interest throughout the world.

The Indigenous Native Hawaiians have survived in their Pacific Island homelands through generational transmission of traditional knowledge, values, and practices, and by emphasizing collective responsibility over personal achievement. They are a post-colonial people who have been historically disenfranchised from traditional lands, yet have survived with limited economic resources and minimal social and political capital. Statehood in 1959 created a second level of Westphalian sovereignty challenge as the Native Hawaiians were now subject to a sovereign state, the United States. This initially compounded their struggle to form an effective, coordinated movement for sovereignty and land control. Ironically, the arrival of the Internet in Hawai'i was transformative on a local, national and international scale. It allowed the Native Hawaiians to forge relationships over large distances and build alliances with other groups to achieve common goals. Locally, the Internet provided opportunities to strengthen the community through educational programming, to encourage and coordinate community activities across islands, and to effectively engage, encourage and inspire a younger generation for activism. Nationally, the Internet fostered initiatives with other minority groups for greater representation and promotion of civil rights. Internationally, the Internet encouraged and supported the creation of new trans-global networks of Indigenous and minority activism, inspiring cooperative programs to achieve common goals of national representation and recognition. Such collective actions have the potential for economic or political change. In Hawai'i, the development of Native Hawaiian Internet networks, linkages and associations beyond conventional geographical territorial limits is transforming Indigenous identity. For as Native Hawaiians redefine themselves a part of a broader ʻotherʻ of those disenfranchised by Westphalian sovereignty, they are in the process challenging notions of Indigineity, Westphalian sovereignty and nationhood. .

Historic preservation in Georgia is not always about history or preservation. Georgia's struggles to protect Tbilisi's historic architecture tell us more about Georgian identity than about urban policy. Heritage generally aims to connect communities with the past, but crafting a post-Soviet identity in Georgia has often meant avoiding reconciliation with history. Although tempting to blame the usual post-Soviet specters of state corruption and stunted civil society, the most dramatic changes in fact reflect efforts to craft both new personal and national identities, as well as changing notions what Georgians expect from historic spaces, city planning, and urban life more broadly. In Tbilisi, both public and private forces in the city have undertaken an identity project enacted through the built environment, replacing traditional vernacular architectures that emphasized communality with new forms more amenable to both private consumption and individual ownership.

For half a century or more, citizens of the Eastern Bloc viewed public space as the primary setting for urban life. Socialist architects and planners envisioned common space as a transformative cultural force, deploying “social condensers” meant to break down inequitable hierarchies and foster a sense of the collective. Private property effectively disappeared from view. But just as the nationalization of property transformed cities at the opening of the twentieth century, so too did privatization at the century’s close. This two-day colloquium on “Commons: Public Space in the Post-Socialist World” will explore the cultural, political, and socioeconomic implications of post-socialist urban transformation.

Tbilisi architecture is a fantastically unreliable narrator. It is a Silk Road outpost with caravanserais newer than brownstone Brooklyn. The Orientalist landmarks that prompted many a traveller to invoke the Thousand and One Nights were, in fact, usually built by members of a now-forgotten German minority emulating European trends. Today, touts may peddle tours of “Brutalist” Soviet ruins, but one would be hard pressed to find many clear examples of the style within city limits. In short, architecture offers perhaps the best guide to the myriad contradictions and conflicting narratives of the city’s history.

These two excerpts feature selected essays by the author: one collection includes an overview of urban history and neighborhood development; the other gathers thematic essays (on historic preservation, urban planning, Russian colonial influences, and Soviet modernism) that provide context for over 120 individual building profiles.

This lecture course will introduce students to some key ideas, policies, spatial forms, and conflicts in the historical development of cities. Instead of taking a traditional nation-based approach to urban history, the course structure will move chronologically (from the early modern period to the present) and thematically (from colonization to globalization), continually emphasizing transnational flows of people, resources, and ideas with case studies from around the world. The lectures and readings encourage students to consider plural histories—how one group or individual may experience a time and place completely differently from another—and what it means to build historical pictures of a city from these sometimes-contradictory perspectives. In the process, we will critically examine evolving approaches to urban studies and urban planning.

Across culture and time, architects have interrogated the built environment and their role in shaping it. Questions of artistic agency, political power, social control, and cultural preservation all contribute to the fundamental debate of what architecture is—and is for. This syllabus aims to introduce students to the expansive theory, practice, and study of architecture. At once an examination of disciplinary history and theory, this course will investigate the diverse ways architects have understood their world (and situated their profession within it) by actively negotiating between written ideas, drawings, and built projects. To do so, this syllabus adopts an explicitly transnational perspective, challenging the Euro-American canon of architectural theory
by presenting it as just one tradition amongst a range of cultural, geographic, and historical perspectives. Through exposure to a range of thinkers, students will be able to consider their own work within a diverse spectrum of theories concerning architecture, urbanism, and space.

My thesis aims at preserving a historic event in Beirut through the proposal of a historic district. The event in question is the Battle of the Hotels, a 5-month urban battle that took place within and around the historic luxury hotel district in the Minet El Husn neighborhood of Beirut at the beginning of the 15year Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The battle opposed the left-wing pro-Palestinian Lebanese National Movement against the right-wing Christian-nationalist Phalanges Party. The battle is worth commemorating, and therefore preserving, for its instrumental role in shaping the urban rift that divided the city of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, violently affecting the lives of all Lebanese citizens for a period of 13 years. Lebanese society shares a violent history that could, if considered a common heritage, be part of its postwar nation-building identity and inspire socio-political reform. The Battle of the Hotels' significance also lies in its status as the first high-rise urban battle in the world.

In part one of the Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant wrote that "the judgment of taste . . . is not a cognitive judgment, and so not logical, but is aesthetic [1]." While the condition of aesthetic discernment has long been the subject of philosophical discourse, the role of the arbiters of that judgment has more often been assumed than
questioned. The art historian, critic, connoisseur, and curator have long held the esteemed position of the aesthetic judge, their training, instinct, and eye part of the inimitable subjective processes that Kant described as occurring upon artistic evaluation. Although the concept of intangible knowledge in regard to aesthetic theory has been much explored, little discussion has arisen in response to the development of new types of artificial intelligence as a challenge to the seemingly ineffable abilities of the human observer. This paper examines the developments in the field of computer vision analysis of paintings from canonical movements within the history of Western art and the reaction of art historians to the application of this technology in the field. Through an investigation of the ethical consequences of this innovative technology, the unquestioned authority of the art expert is challenged and the subjective nature of aesthetic judgment is brought to philosophical scrutiny once again.

Although computer scientists are generally familiar with the achievements of computer vision technology in art history, these accomplishments are little known and often misunderstood by scholars in the humanities. 1 To clarify the parameters of this seeming disjuncture, I and my collaborator, Ahmed Elgammal, in the recent article "Computational Beauty: Aesthetic Judgment at the Intersection of Art and Science," addressed the concerns that one example of the digitization of the humanities poses on social, philosophical, and practical levels. 2 In support of our assessment of the perceptions held by computer scientists and art historians about the use of computer vision technology to examine art in this study, we based our

This paper addresses the interpretability of deep learning-enabled image recognition processes in computer vision science in relation to theories in art history and cognitive psychology on the vision-related perceptual capabilities of humans. Examination of what is determinable about the machine-learned image in comparison to humanistic theories of visual perception, particularly in regard to art historian Erwin Panofsky’s methodology for image analysis and psychologist Eleanor Rosch’s theory of graded categorization according to prototypes, finds that there are surprising similarities between the two that suggest that researchers in the arts and the sciences would have much to benefit from closer collaborations. Utilizing the examples of Google’s DeepDream and the Machine Learning and Perception Lab at Georgia Tech’s Grad-CAM: Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping programs, this study suggests that a revival of art historical research in iconography and formalism in the age of AI is essential for shaping the future navigation and interpretation of all machine-learned images, given the rapid developments in image recognition technologies.