Since 1945, the globalization of education and the professionalization of architects and engineers, as well as the conceptualization and production of space, can be seen as a product of battles of legitimacy that were played out in the context of the Cold War and what came after. In this book James Steele provides an informative and compelling analysis of one of Egypt's foremost contemporary architects, Abdelhalim Ibrahim Abdelhalim, and his work during a period of Egypt's attempts at constructing an identity and cultural legitimacy within the post-Second World War world order.
Born in 1941 in the small town of Sornaga just south of Cairo, Abdelhalim received his architectural training in Egypt and the United States, and is the designer of over one hundred cultural, institutional, and rehabilitation projects, including the Cultural Park for Children in Cairo, the American University in Cairo campus in New Cairo, the Egyptian Embassy in Amman, and the Uthman Ibn Affan Mosque in Qatar. The first comprehensive study of the work and career of Abdelhalim and his office, the Community Design Collaborative (CDC), which he established in Cairo in 1978, Abdelhalim Ibrahim Abdelhalim: An Architecture of Collective Memory is inspired by Abdelhalim's deep belief in the power of rituals as a guiding force behind various human behaviors and the spaces in which they are enacted and designed to play out. Each chapter is consequently dedicated to one of these rituals and the ways in which some of Abdelhalim's primary commissions have, at all levels of scale, revealed and expressed that ritual. In the sequence presented these are: the rituals of possession, reverence, order, the transmission of knowledge, procession, human institutions, geometry, light, the sense of place, materiality, and finally, the ritual of color.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Commitment to Resistance
Prelude: Discovering Rituals
Chapter 1: Regeneration
Chapter 2: Possession
Chapter 3: Reverence
Chapter 4: Order
Chapter 5: The Transmission of Knowledge
Chapter 6: Procession
Chapter 7: Human Institutions
Chapter 8: Geometry
Chapter 9: Light
Chapter 10: A Sense of Place
Chapter 11: Materiality
Chapter 12: Color
Conclusion: The New Meaning of Resistance.
Chronology of Work
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
James Steele is professor in the School of Architecture, University of Southern California, where he has taught courses on the history and theory of architecture and on design. Prior to that he held a teaching position for ten years at the King Faisal (now Dammam) University near Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. He is the author of over 50 books, including An Architecture for People: The Complete Works of Hassan Fathy, Turkey: A Traveller's Historical and Architectural Guide, and Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Tracing the Next Generation.
Review :
"Thanks to an extensive body of visual material, including sketches, color drawings, and photographs of models, buildings, and sites, this richly illustrated book allows the reader to understand the diversity of Abdelhalim’s work and thought."—International Journal of Islamic Architecture
"An impressively informative, exceptionally detailed, and expertly presented combination of biography and architectural study"—Midwest Book Review
"Abdelhalim Ibrahim Abdelhalim was an Egyptian architect who saw his role as social enabler, working for community betterment through design. His work was inspired by its context, and often by the concepts he saw fitting to the projects at hand. Through a combination of diplomacy and persistence he successfully navigated the challenges of implementing large projects in his native Egypt at a time when functionalism was the order of the day.” —Seif El Rashidi, Al-Ahram Weekly
