Earlier this week, we had the pleasure of touring the Metropolitan Museum of Art ‘New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia’ with Achva Stein on its opening day. Stein, a principal of an ASLA award-winning landscape architecture and design firm Benzinberg Stein Associates and the founding Director of the Graduate program in Landscape Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, was asked to join the MET’s endeavors after her noted publication, Morocco: Courtyards and Gardens, showcased her passion for and understanding of the country’s varied garden types found in regions such as Marrakech and Fez. For the new wing, Stein has created a fantastic 14th century Maghrebi-Andalusian-style courtyard that goes beyond a mere representation, and truly infuses the spirit and essence of a Moroccan court into a small interior space of the MET.
More about our trip to the MET after the break.
When we first entered the galleries, Stein shared a brief history of the rapid spread of Islam across the Arab Lands, explaining that although these regions shared an Islamic heritage, their artistic expression was more individual. Throughout the years, the regions’ aesthetics began to overlap and, soon, influence each other. In this sense, the 14th century interior courtyard, for which Stein designed and supervised the construction, is designed using classical Moroccan elements which show the region’s unique expression and hints at the influences of the Spanish.
