Salman Rashdi

Salman Rashdi’s work revolves around modern architecture in the Muslim world and its diasporas, with particular interests in Islamic modernism, pluralism, architectural judgment, and the politics of cultural difference. His work examines how architectural institutions, buildings, and urban spaces negotiate the relationship between culturally and ethically specific traditions and the claims of an increasingly global architectural discourse.

His doctoral dissertation titled The Double-Bind of Pluralism: Islamic Modernism and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, is a study of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, where he examines how an institution rooted in an Islamic ethical and intellectual horizon has sought to engage a global and ostensibly secular architectural public. His recent parallel research in Copenhagen, Denmark, examines mosques, public space, and multicultural urbanism, exploring how religious and cultural differences are made visible, accommodated, and constrained within contemporary European cities. Across these projects, his work explores the built environment as a site where competing ethical, political, and cultural claims are negotiated.

His teaching encompasses architectural history and theory, global histories of the built environment, modern and contemporary architecture, and the built environments of the Muslim world. Drawing on his training in both architectural design and architectural history, he approaches architecture as simultaneously a material practice and an object of historical and theoretical inquiry. His teaching encourages students to examine how established categories, canons, and methods change when buildings and cities are understood through the social, cultural, religious, and environmental worlds in which they participate.