Bayt Shama’ya Afandi, Damascus, Syria

I work on some fascinating projects at the AKDC@MIT.  One that we’ve just started on, and will be uploading in small increments over an extended period is a a new Special Collection in Archnet, the Michel Ecochard Archive.  A  collection of images of 19th-century Damascus is the first installment to be made available.  I’m so intrigued by the images, I wanted to tell you about them here, and about the larger collection you will eventually see more of.

French architect and urban planner Michel Ecochard, 1905-1985, spent much of his career working in the Muslim world, starting in Damascus following his graduation from École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1929, then Beirut from 1931 to 1944, Rabat from 1946 to 1952 and finally Paris from 1953 to 1983.  During this time he continued working in Africa and the Middle East.  One of his most famous works is the National Museum of Kuwait, opened in 1983.  In his later years he compiled a series of albums, based on his own photography of both cities and famous sites in general, as well as of his own architectural, planning and archaeological projects.  He was a recipient of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for his role in the ongoing restoration of the Azem Palace in Damascus, and donated his whole archive to the award.  Parts of the archive are gradually being made available on Archnet over the course of the next year.

The first installment to be made available is a collection of historical photographs not taken by Ecochard himself, but rather 17 images of 19th century Damascus that come from Maison Bonfils, a well-known Beirut photo studio founded in 1867 by Félix Bonfils (1831–1885).  He photographed cities sites of the eastern Mediterranean in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Greece.  Maison Bonfils’s photographs of monuments in those countries became some of their most widely recognized representations.
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Visit the Michel Ecochard Special Collection or read a brief biographical sketch.

See these & all the images by Maison Bonfils that appear in Archnet courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and previous donors.