Ijlal Muzaffar

on sabbatical academic year 2024–25

Ijlal Muzaffar received his PhD from MIT in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art, and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. He also holds a BSc in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Punjab. His work has appeared widely in edited volumes, biennale catalogues, and peer-reviewed journals. He is a founding member of the architectural history research collaborative and publishing platform Aggregate. 
 
His first book, Modernism’s Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital (University of Texas Press, 2024) examines how modern architects and planners help resolve one of the central dilemmas of the mid 20th century world order: how to make decolonization plausible without accounting for centuries of capital drain under colonial rule. In the years after World War 2, architects and planners found extensive opportunities in new international institutions—such as the World Bank, the UN and the Ford Foundation—and helped shape new models of global intervention that displaced the burden of change onto the inhabitants. Muzaffar argues that architecture in this domain didn’t just symbolically represent power, but formed the material domain through which new modes of power acquired sense. Looking at a series of architectural projects across the world, from housing in Ghana to village planning in Nigeria and urban planning in Venezuela and Pakistan, Muzaffar explores how architects and planners shaped news ideas of time, land, climate and the decolonizing body, making them appear as sources of untapped value. What resulted, Muzaffar argues, is a widespread belief in spontaneous Third World “development” without capital, which continues to foreclose any global discussion of colonial theft.
 
Muzaffar’s second book project, called Settling Dreams, charts the formation of a “cotton belt” in the Sindh desert in southwest India (now in Pakistan) by the British colonial government in 1898 when the supply of US cotton to the British mills was disrupted by the American Civil War. Collecting oral histories from surviving members of the families (his own among them) who were transplanted from other parts of India to run this grand and improbable enterprise, as well as those who were displaced by the newcomers and mounted an armed rebellion for two generations against the British plans, Muzaffar explores what does it mean to settle and unsettle on scales ranging from the global to the personal. The introductory chapters of this book have already appeared in edited volumes. 
 
These projects have given Muzaffar broad experience into the history, politics and transforming cultural landscapes of the non-Western world, particularly in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East in the 20th and 21st centuries.