Posts Tagged Egypt
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 6, 2012
Helsinki's Chapel of Silence combats consumer culture, New York's cats get designer shelters and Arash and Kelly propose an inverted pyramid for Tahrir Square
The new year is a time to reflect on the excesses of consumer culture. As an antidote, may I recommend the Kamppi Chapel of Silence on Helsinki's Narinkka Square? Designed by K2S, a firm of young Helsinki architects, the chapel opens later this year and is very close to the main entrance of the city's big, slick Kamppi shopping mall. The idea is for the Chapel of Silence to be a place of respite for those worn down by retail culture in the most commercially active part of the city.
The curving, windowless chapel – it will be lit, numinously, from slits and chutes around its roof – is clad in waxed spruce planks with an interior lined in oiled alder. I have a feeling that it will be a very beautiful sanctuary indeed, this new, compact, not-for-profit building. City centres used to be this way, with markets and places of worship, the sacred and the secular (whether church, temple or mosque) nestled and working together. Today, our new retail centres are soulless places. Could we begin a campaign to introduce such contemplative beauty to city centres elsewhere? After all, we have nothing to lose but our shopping bags, and everything to gain from architecture offering nothing for sale.
The Chapel of Silence has been included in Architectural Digest's list of exciting new buildings to look out for this year. It could hardly be more different from the others chosen by the Manhattan-based magazine, or from the winning entry by Co Adaptive Architecture – a prototype cat shelter (itself the winner of a competition arranged by New York's Architects for Animals). The city has 10,000 stray cats and the mayor has decided to do something for them. The winning design is a bright yellow plastic shelter, lined with denim and topped with a moss-covered lid. Nifty electronics will connect each shelter to a central database so the city can monitor the welfare and whereabouts of the cats. Gee whizz: most cities do far less than this for their two-legged inhabitants.
Baghdad, and Iraq in general, is desperate for new homes. This week, Peter Besley, director of Assemblage architects announced that the London, Doha and Baghdad-based firm has won the United Nations Habitat competition to design new housing in Iraq. The Assemblage proposal, says the practice, is for "a fully integrated settlement for 3,000 people including schools, markets, a health centre and a variety of green spaces and playing fields ... combin[ing] modern construction methods with aspects of traditional Iraqi urbanism." Images of the new housing do indeed reveal an updated form of design that has been around in the region for many thousands of years.
As an ideal new year present for Cairo – and Tahrir Square in particular – Arash and Kelly, an industrial art and design studio run by Royal College of Art graduates, proposes a beautiful "inverted pyramid-shaped auditorium for people to come and talk and participate and share ideas and to have a focal point ... a space to celebrate liberty."
Hopefully, there will be many inspiring ideas for new homes and public places at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. Now that Paolo Baratta (the Biennale president who Silvio Berslusconi tried to oust last year) is secure in his role, the new board of administration has announced that David Chipperfield is to be director of the Architecture Sector.
Given the hurly burly of the first weeks of the Biennale, and Venice in general during the summer, perhaps Chipperfield should take a leaf out of Helsinki's book and offer visitors a Venetian cappella contemoporanea di silenzio. Happy new year.
Threshold to Cleopatra’s mausoleum discovered off Alexandria coast
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 23, 2009
• Threshold to massive door found off Alexandria
• Queen's mausoleum part of sunken palace complex
They were one of the world's most famous couples, who lived lives of power and glory – but who spent their last hours in despair and confusion. Now, more than 2,000 years since Antony and Cleopatra walked the earth, historians believe they may finally have solved the riddle of their last hours together.
A team of Greek marine archaeologists who have spent years conducting underwater excavations off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt have unearthed a giant granite threshold to a door that they believe was once the entrance to a magnificent mausoleum that Cleopatra VII, queen of the Egyptians, had built for herself shortly before her death.
They believe the 15-tonne antiquity would have held a seven metre-high door so heavy that it would have prevented the queen from consoling her Roman lover before he died, reputedly in 30BC.
"As soon as I saw it, I thought we are in the presence of a very special piece of a very special door," Harry Tzalas, the historian who heads the Greek mission, said. "There was no way that such a heavy piece, with fittings for double hinges and double doors, could have moved with the waves so there was no doubt in my mind that it belonged to the mausoleum. Like Macedonian tomb doors, when it closed, it closed for good."
Tzalas believes the discovery of the threshold sheds new light on an element of the couple's dying hours which has long eluded historians.
In the first century AD the Greek historian Plutarch wrote that Mark Antony, after being wrongly informed that Cleopatra had killed herself, had tried to take his own life. When the dying general expressed his wish to pass away alongside his mistress, who was hiding inside the mausoleum with her ladies-in-waiting, he was "hoisted with chains and ropes" to the building's upper floor so that he could be brought in to the building through a window.
Plutarch wrote, "when closed the [mausoleum's] door mechanism could not open again". The discovery in the Mediterranean Sea of such huge pieces of masonry at the entrance to what is believed to be the mausoleum would explain the historian's line. Tzalas said: "For years, archaeologists have wondered what Plutarch, a very reliable historian, meant by that. And now, finally, I think we have the answer.
"Allowing a dying man to be hoisted on ropes was not a very nice, or comforting thing to do, but Cleopatra couldn't do otherwise. She was there only with females and they simply couldn't open such a heavy door."
The threshold, part of the sunken palace complex in which Cleopatra is believed to have died, was discovered recently at a depth of eight metres but only revealed this week. It has yet to be brought to the surface.
The archaeologists have also recovered a nine-tonne granite block which they believe formed part of a portico belonging to the adjoining temple of Isis Lochias. "We believe it was part of the complex surrounding Cleopatra's palace," said Zahi Hawas, Egypt's top archaeologist. "This is an important part of Alexandria's history and brings us closer to knowing more about the ancient city."
According to Plutarch, who based his accounts largely on eyewitness testimonies, Antony died within seconds of laying eyes on his beloved queen and mother of his children.
Cleopatra, the most powerful woman of her day and Egypt's most fabled ruler, is believed to have taken her own life just days later, legend has it with the aid of an asp.