New Universities for a New Nation: American Architects Redesign Higher Education for a Modern Pakistan

Abstract

Indian Partition in 1947 left Pakistan without an educational infrastructure sufficient to transform itself into a modern nation. Pakistan inherited several universities from the British Raj that had been intended to train civil servants for a colonial territory, not leaders for an independent country. The predominantly Hindu faculty subsequently left for India. Seeking to build new universities on the American model, Pakistan turned to a number of prominent United States-based architects who, in collaboration with their Pakistani colleagues and with funding from US foreign aid programmes and international agencies, designed new universities for science, technology, and medicine. The University of Islamabad (later Quaid-i-Azam University), the East Pakistan Agricultural University (later Bangladesh Agricultural University), five polytechnics in East Pakistan, and the Aga Khan Hospital and Medical College in Karachi were all planned in the 1960s and early 1970s and completed by the 1980s. Each architect sought to design universities appropriate for a post-Partition and post-colonial state that would be at once Muslim and modern in their curricula and in their architectural designs. However, the universities could not heal the rupture that created them, and in some ways contributed to furthering it.