ArchitecturalArchives.pk: The Time of Building: Kamil Khan Mumtaz and Architecture in Pakistan

The Time of Building: Kamil Khan Mumtaz and Architecture in Pakistan

Kamil Khan Mumtaz is one of Pakistan’s most celebrated architects. The approach to building he has refined over a sixty-year career represents a radical challenge to how architecture is practised in the contemporary world.

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The Time of Building brings together Mumtaz’s reflections on architecture and history with rare photographs, drawings and archival documents. Moving from the precision of the stonemason’s chisel to the expansive imagination of the urban planner in an era of climate change, Mumtaz offers critical insights into architecture’s relationship to time, politics, craft and the sacred. His words and buildings provide a powerful example of South Asia’s vitality as a site for rethinking modern architectural thought. They bear critical lessons for the present and the future – the question of what architecture could and should be in a world shaped increasingly by inequality, environmental crisis and scarcity.

Photograph of a mosque under construction in Gujrat, Pakistan. — Construction of Challe Sharif Tomb and Mosque, Gujrat, 2022. Courtesy: RK Studios

Chris Moffat is a Senior Lecturer in South Asian History at Queen Mary University of London. In 2019 he was Visiting Faculty in the Department of History at Government College University, Lahore. Moffat is the author of India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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Kiran Ahmad is a multidisciplinary graphic designer and visual artist based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is currently an adjunct faculty in the Department of Communication Design at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Kiran established her studio practice in 2013. Her portfolio is online at http://www.kiranahmad.com.

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Amen Jaffer is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He is trained as an urban ethnographer and is interested in the study of everyday life, difference, and social control. Jaffer is preparing a book manuscript on sociality and spirituality in South Asian Sufi shrines.