The Time of Building: Kamil Khan Mumtaz and Architecture in Pakistan

Join us for the book launch of The Time of Building: Kamil Khan Mumtaz and Architecture in Pakistan

Join us for the launch of The Time of Building: Kamil Khan Mumtaz and Architecture in Pakistan by Chris Moffat, with Kiran Ahmad and Amen Jaffer.

Kamil Khan Mumtaz’s approach to building, refined over a sixty-year career, represents a radical challenge to how architecture is practised in the contemporary world.

The Time of Building brings together Mumtaz’s reflections on architecture and history with rarely seen photographs, drawings and archival documents. Moving from the precision of the stonemason’s chisel to the expansive imagination of the urban planner in an area of climate change, Mumtaz offers critical insights into architecture’s relationship to time, politics, craft and the sacred. His words and buildings provide a powerful example of South Asia’s vitality is a site for rethinking modern architectural thoughts. They bear critical lessons for the present and the future – the question of what architecture could and should be in a world shaped increasingly by inequality, environmental crisis and scarcity.

We’re honoured to welcome author Chris Moffat and architect Kamil Khan Mumtaz, plus guests Tania Sengupta and Edward Bottoms to the AA Bookshop to celebrate the launch of this new publication.

Kamil Khan Mumtaz is one of Pakistan’s most celebrated architects and continues to run his private practice in Lahore. In 2019, he was awarded the Sitara-e-Imtiaz by the Government of Pakistan for services to architecture. He is the author of Architecture in Pakistan (1985) and Modernity and Tradition (1999). Mumtaz studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in the late 1950s-early 1960s.

Chris Moffat is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of India’s Revolutionary Inheritance (2019) and co-editor of Lahore in Motion (2025). His monograph on Pakistani architecture, entitled Learning from Lahore, is forthcoming.

Tania Sengupta is Associate Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. She is the winner of the 2019 RIBA President’s Award (History and Theory) and Medal for Research. Sengupta is co-editor of Reclaiming Colonial Architecture (2024) and her monograph, Colonial Margins, is forthcoming.

Edward Bottoms is Head of Archives at the Architectural Association and teaches a Diploma Course in History & Theory Studies. He has published in AA Files and the Journal of the History of Collections, and speaks regularly on the history of the AA.

The book will be sold at a special launch price of £10 (RRP £13)

This event is supported by the AA Archives and the Queen Mary University of London Impact Fund.