Aga Khan Lecture Series: David Roxburgh "Vaulting Techniques in Iranian Islamic Architecture: An Unpublished Study by Myron Bement Smith and Doǧan Kuban"

“Vaulting Techniques in Iranian Islamic Architecture: An Unpublished Study by Myron Bement Smith and Doǧan Kuban”

David J. Roxburgh

Art, architecture, and archaeology played a new nation-building role in Iran among the modernizing reforms initiated by Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925-1941), who also mandated that Islamic architecture now be made available to non-Muslims. A scramble for access and study ensued. While the story of this “first start” of academic inquiry by non-Iranian architectural historians continues to take on sharper focus in scholarship, there is one figure who remains largely neglected and virtually forgotten, the American Myron Bement Smith (1897-1970). Smith arrived in Iran in 1933 and conducted fieldwork there until 1937 sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. Alienated from his American contemporaries—who gathered around the impresario Arthur Upham Pope and the activities of the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology—, Smith sought alliance with others, including André Godard, Director of the Iran Bastan Museum, Tehran, and of the Antiquities Service, and conducted four years of fieldwork. Smith produced, throughout the 1930s, a steady stream of monographic studies on Islamic-period monuments. His return to the United States in 1938 was followed by a protracted period of scant opportunity; he spent most of his career in various capacities at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., where he built and managed the “Islamic Archives.” Though Smith completed the Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1947, his study of the vault in Iranian Islamic Architecture remains unpublished. How might our understanding of the history of the study of Iranian Islamic architecture be different by defining Smith’s approach to architecture as an object and field of study, and in relation to those approaches adopted by his peers?

While providing a broader background to Smith’s career, especially in the 1930s—and drawing from Smith’s papers given to the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. in 1972—the lecture focuses on his unpublished “Vaulting Techniques in Iranian Islamic Architecture.” Smith’s widow, Katharine Dennis Smith, made every effort to advance the book project. A long-time colleague of Smith’s, Professor Doǧan Y. Kuban, accepted the task and completed a draft by 1976. Despite these efforts, the book was not published. The lecture considers the Smith/Kuban edit of the book, its methods and approaches, and my current project of preparing its publication.

David Roxburgh, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Islamic Art History, Harvard University, completed an M.A. at Edinburgh University in 1988 and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. He has taught at Harvard since 1996.

His research focuses on art and architecture in Iran and Central Asia from the Mongol through Early Modern periods. His publications include studies on albums, primary sources in Arabic and Persian (e.g. album prefaces, travel narratives, how-to treatises), art of the book, diagrams, and calligraphy. His curatorial projects include Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years (2005, Royal Academy of Arts), Traces of the Calligrapher (2007, MFAH), and Technologies of the Image (2017, Harvard Art Museums). Roxburgh has also contributed essays on histories of collecting, exhibitions, and museums to edited books and journals.