The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s Architectural History Seminar (supported by the IHR) has joined forces with the Oxford Architectural History Seminar during the pandemic/lockdown.

In Pakistan, a country born from the rupture of British India in 1947 and partitioned again in 1971 with the independence of Bangladesh, the meaning of ’the past’ has been subject to considerable debate. This paper offers some provisional reflections on how architects have negotiated Pakistan’s ‘unsettled historicity’ in their design and building work. It explores the ways in which architecture – as both object and practice – has been approached as a terrain for confronting some of the tensions animating culture and politics in this postcolonial polity: a site for articulating a new ethics of dwelling. The paper will introduce a generation of Pakistani architects who began practising in the 1960s and whose early careers were shaped by military coups and popular rebellions at home, ’Third Worldist’ and ‘Pan-Islamic’ constellations regionally, and a crisis of confidence in the promises of architectural modernism globally. What are the legacies of their work and architectural activism? What can this history reveal about the relationship between architecture and politics today?