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A Dream of Cairo Reborn
A Dream of Cairo Reborn
An Architect Reflects on What Could Have Been in Egypt
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 27, 2005; Page A01
continue reading: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/26/AR2005112601291.html?sub=AR
An Architect Reflects on What Could Have Been in Egypt
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 27, 2005; Page A01
source: ArcNewsNow.com, November 29, 2005CAIRO As Abdelhalim I. Abdelhalim recalls it, the power of the vision struck him, as if he had been on a modern-day road to Damascus. It was in 1982, though the Egyptian architect no longer remembers the precise date. He stopped the car in front of an open lot. Even today, a generation later, he cannot forget the inspiration.
He had arrived in Sayyida Zainab, a hardscrabble neighborhood in Cairo as poor as it is vibrant. Down the street was the Ibn Tulun Mosque, one of the city's oldest, with a courtyard so vast it could be seen in satellite images and a 1,100-year-old, spiral minaret that stood like a sentry over the road where he had parked.
(....)
The designs in the office are imbued with the spirit of Hassan Fathy, arguably Egypt's greatest 20th-century architect, who sometimes supervised construction as a gramophone played at his side and whose book "Architecture for the Poor" won him fame as a visionary who drew on age-old techniques to build affordable housing.
Abdelhalim is a man of many, sometimes conflicting worlds. (....)
continue reading: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/26/AR2005112601291.html?sub=AR
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