Recent history has moved the “architectural” idea of the Middle East from that of a petrified place where nothing changes to that of a site of immense opportunities where everything is possible, albeit not without great perils. A selection from the material collected during the one year research and study trips to the area depicts some of the many facets of places that do not rest in the domain of decent origins of our profession any more. To the contrary, we consider them the sites where its future, exciting possibilities are being tested, right now!
In Three Stories on Painting and Time Orhan Pamuk traces the distinctive qualities of the Ottoman miniature back to a very remarkable ancestral event: the Mongolian siege of Baghdad of 1258. Architecturally structured way of “depiction of the world from an elevated Godlike position attained...
Read moreAnd Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And The Lord showed him all the land,...
Read moreDEFINITION
Yaşar Adanali: Defining the Middle East, its boundaries, different meanings, layers is by itself a very difficult, value-bounded and mainly a political challenge. Especially, when one looks at the region from the perspective of its “western” neighbors, many...
Why are questions of identity and authenticity so central to the discourse on architecture in the Arab world?
Bechir Kenzari : As far as I am concerned, I think it is a wrong question, it is a false problem. In time of crises the issue of identity becomes a refuge. Eventually it...
There is a certain romantic aspect to the Middle East, very hard to avoid when we look at it from a European perspective: a mythical storybook place where anything can happen. How does the contemporary Middle East look from the inside, in terms of architecture?
After having lived for such...
And when we move from these private projects with a certain public purpose to the more “normal” projects like the residential blocks with very neutral, generic names, such as #183, IB3, #732, #893 etc? Do these projects for everyday purposes reflect the same experimental origin...
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