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.
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Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre / Ramses Wissa Wassef
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- 09 April 2016
- Datum Editorial
- Selected Works , Aga Khan Awards For Architecture , Sustainability , Art , Cultural Centres ,
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 forms had been adopted in turn by Paranoiac, Coptic and Islamic civilizations. The choice of this traditional technology also reflected his desire to transmit the values of handicraft to succeeding generations in a rapidly industrializing country.
From the AKTC Summation:
The Ramses Wissa Wassef Center was designed and built to create a harmonious place to live work , and display artwork , where young people would be "made to feel encouraged to develop their innate sense Of creativity and History. The late Ramses Wissa Wassef was an architect and a teacher at the Fine Arts College in Cairo. Along with a small group of Egyptian architects, he adhered to an ideology whose aim was to develop an Egyptian architecture well—adapted to the economic realities and climatic conditions specific to the country. They rejected conventional modern Egyptian architecture and sought instead, to rediscover the conditions of building with local simple and inexpensive.
They sought to demonstrate the potential of existing possibilities and believed construction to be an opportunity to train good craftsmen artisans and builders. The Wissa Wassef Arts Centre is located on the banks of the Nile River (fleuve Nil) on cultivable land near Cairo. No initial or definite program— was developed; the complex grew progressively over twenty years of building. Using the approach as medieval builders, they emphasized the importance Of collective work; the architect (re-defined in the process) considered neither the sole or authoritative member of the group.
In the rapport developed among the group, exchange between knowledges and skills was continuous, developing practical abilities alongside artistic ideals. The concept of an evolving construction process, the consequence of continuous interaction between daily life and a lifelong oeuvre, excluded any idea of profit-making.
After construction of the weaving school, those of the weavers who desired to live in close proximity to the centre were allowed to build their own houses in the immediate area. These 7 houses were first in clay by the weavers themselves and later built on—site; they include the many and subtle imprecisions of this node of design and of mud construction. The volumes of the houses were first completely built; windows and ventilation holes were determined later and from the interior to achieve specific lighting orientation and control. The facades, for which no drawings were made, reflect this attitude.
The subtle entry of daylight in the varied spaces, rendered in a diverse range of hand—applied plaster distinguishes each.
The deep darkness of the small sculpture museum is interrupted only by a few, intense rays of sunlight illuminating the model led wall niches. The arts centre complex comprises of the workshops and Wissa Wassef's private residence, a large workshop for pottery and weaving, a long exhibition gallery, a sculpture museum, two private houses, seven weavers' residences and various farm buildings.
The Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre / Village Compound expresses and accommodates the professional and private needs Of a group of people devoted to creative and social change while maintaining traditional architectural solutions.
The use of local traditional materials and techniques has resulted in a less expensive and appropriate architecture than conventional modern construction. The centre has re-introduced traditional forms and techniques to the Cairo area since 1954, and has set an architectural standard that is currently influencing, regional design and building.
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