Usually representing spirits, ancestors or the primordial couple, these figures were placed in shrines and treated with great respect. Through a wide range of style, scale, belief and function the couples depicted share a timeless, serene equality necessary to the continuity of their societies.

Posts
Thumbs

Al Alfy House / Shahira Fahmy Architects

Located on the coast, the 25-year-old main house is within a gated community that faces the ocean waters of Egypt's Al ‘Alamayn. It is alaboured effort towards rejuvenating an existing house and giving it permanence and relevance in contemporary architecture, something that has been at the forefront of guiding the styles of the day. While architecture cannot be solely spoken of as emphasis on s...

Nubian Museum / Mahmoud El-Hakim

The Nubian Museum celebrates the culture and civilization of the Nubian region of Egypt from prehistoric times to the present. It is located in the city of Aswan, on the eastern bank of the Nile, 899 kilometres south of Cairo. The museum is a three-storey building with an outdoor exhibition area. It houses the main finds of the UNESCO salvage campaign carried out at the time of the building of ...

Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre / Ramses Wissa Wassef

Near the pyramids at Giza, the centre was founded in the early 1950s by the late architect Ramses Wissa Wassef as a weaving school. It has since evolved to comprise workshops and showrooms, a pottery and sculpture museum, houses and farm buildings, constructed entirely of mud brick. For Wissa Wassef, vaulted and domed mud brick structures represented something quintessentially Egyptian as these...

Stone Towers / Zaha Hadid Architects ZHA

Stone Towers, named for an ancient petrified tree at the heart of this new development, comprises state of the art office facilities for a rapidly expanding city, alongside a five star hotel, serviced apartments, restaurants, bars and a central landscaped area, the ‘Delta’. Our design mediates two distinct ‘edges’ – high speed ring road to the north and residential component to the south. Delib...

The American University in New Cairo / Sasaki Associates

Continuing on the work of pioneers like Hassan Fathy and Abdel Wahed El Wakil on critical Egyptian regionalism within the North African Country, Sasaki associates in collaboration with a consortium of firms embarked on a fulfilling mission to provide New Cairo with an institution of higher learning. The American University is reminiscent of quaint Arabic architecture, with lattices, natural sto...

Datum Antique: Sasaki Associates’ Green Lung of Cairo

In 1984, His Highness the Aga Khan announced his decision to finance the creation of a park for the citizens of the Egyptian capital. The only central location that was of suitable scale was the derelict Darassa site, a 30-hectare (74-acre) mound of rubble that had been a debris dump for 500 years. Al-Azhar Park, undertaken by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, has since proven to be both a popula...

Datum Antique: Hassan Fathy's New Barris Village

"No other project dominates this mature phase of the architect's work as much as the village of New Baris, in a way that is comparable to the notoriety of New Gourna twenty years before. There are so many contrasting factors between the two projects that it is beneficial to examine the parallels between them. Discovery of a large water well sixty kilometers south of the Kharga Oasis in 1963, wh...

El Gouna Hotel Resort / Michael Seagraves Architects

Hassan Fathy would be proud standing on one side of the red sea and glaring into the yonder, eyes fixed on the red adobe architecture replication of his ideas into the El Gouna Hotel resort in Egypt’s hot and humid air. It is a oxymoron idea into architecture, using locally affordable materials and technology to create a luxurious environment for the well-heeled, trying to adopt a cultural and ...

Halawa House / Abdel Wahed El-Wakil

The Halawa House presupposes the notion of a contemporary idea within a setting that is way past its own time. Wahed El Wakil says the house is conspicuously different, both in design and materials, from what is normal in Agami. And that is no Sin. This house is an idea whose sole discretion laid with Abdel Wahed El-Wakil, perhaps one of the most famous architects (besides Hassan Fathy) to come...

Block 36, Westown / Shahira H. Fahmy Architects

Block 36, Westown apartments imbue within the contemporary, simply coming from a big box to a take away serving of facade character and resolve, glass and white washed walls that are reminiscent of the Arabic character of design. Located in the Cairo now known for flashy and characteristic design, the block apartment rises form a formerly agricultural area and falls against a backdrop of progra...

Bibliotheca Alexandrina / Snøhetta

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt is a project with one foot in the past and the other in the future. Done in 1989, the library oozes a neo-millennial political and soci-historical connotations from a previous existing library. It was meant as a connection of the city's history, a stark modern look and technological austere that decidedly would bring the town of Alexandria a landmark with bo...