Funky Bookends

I designed three bookends that were fabricated by stereolab.kw. The bottom three images were also taken by stereolab.kw; the upper three are mine.

الحجر

الحَجَرُ : شيءٌ من الأرض كبسته حرارة الوقت فانفصل عنها وقسا.

الحِجْرُ : أبداً كنتَ فيه ولم تعُد، ولن تعود. أو كذلك، هو مكان تبادل الرؤوس.

الحَجْرُ : أنْ تعيش داخل جِلدكَ فلا أنتَ خارجٌ منه ولا هم داخلوه.

Eclectic Houses: Embracing the Kuwaiti Style

As we are mostly staying indoors these days, I thought this video of a Pecha Kucha talk I gave in 2013 would be relevant and entertaining. The title of the talk was "Eclectic Houses: Embracing the Kuwaiti Style". It's about the apparent 'culture of weirdness' that permeates Kuwait when it comes to designing house facades. 

Has this quarantine taught us things about our houses we hadn't noticed before? 

Event—Pecha Kucha, 2013

Video Taken By—KASA 

Event Organizer—Asseel Al-Ragam 

Location—Kuwait, Amricani Cultural Centre 

Competition Entry - Meyerson Hall Basement Renovation

I submitted a design proposal to an "Ideas Competition for the Basement of Meyerson Hall", that is the main building of the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Following are the six pages I submitted:

For I Remember

Unsure, and sitting
idle in, waiting and
for what, unsure
but hoping, yet
knowing better
than be, unsure
when thinking
of being inside
of what, unsure
for I remember
when before we
went, for sure
how nice it was,
that deepest blue,
for sure, that warming
sand, and laughing
kiss, for sure.

Published - Genres of 'Architectural Theory Now?'

I recently published an article in volume 23, issue 4 (December 2019) of the journal Architectural Research Quarterly, itself published by Cambridge University Press.

You can find a link to the issue here.

تصادم اللغات

هذه الهَلْوَسة هي نتيجة ترتيب الكتب العربية حسب النظام الغربي. الصُور من مكتبة جامعة بنْسِلْفينيا في مدينة فيلادَلفِيا. 

The Site of Cultural Destruction

“...52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some... important to Iran & the Iranian culture... WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD...”

– Donald J. Trump on January 4, 2020 (2:52 PM) via Twitter

Clearly, these words show a moral baseness, political stupidity, and symbolic cheapness that only President Trump can concoct in such an appalling combination. The fact that it is objectionable is obvious. The fact that it combines current politics and architecture led many architects to rightly see it as their responsibility to decry this publicly announced intention to commit a war crime. This was best represented in the statement disseminated by the Society of Architectural Historians that warned against the targeting of “cultural sites”.[1]  Without taking away from the centrality of both President Trump’s repulsive threat and its outright rejection, I want to offer an alternative reading of the tweet.

It is significant that the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict used the term “cultural property” and not “cultural site”.[2]  Indeed, a ‘site’ usually refers to a place where artifacts, architecture, or events of cultural significance occur. In itself, a site is not ‘cultural’, but can host things of cultural significance.

President Trump was threatening the destruction of property with cultural value, such as historical mosques and tombs. That’s what the “beautiful”[3]  American weapons are built to destroy: property. They can neither destroy the placeness of a ‘site’ nor the immateriality that defines ‘culture’.[4]

Having said this, there is a site of cultural destruction in this story. That site is the white rectangle with rounded corners that hosts the reprehensible words of President Trump. The culture being destroyed is not Iranian, but American. President Trump’s Twitter platform acts as a site from which repeated attacks on American decency are launched. The aftermath, which can be seen in the peripheral site of the comments section, often shows the success of those attacks. Notions of civility, honor, and kinship are blown to pieces right off the face of American culture. They are replaced with vulgarity, pettiness, and narcissism.

Notes

[1] “Targeting Cultural Sites Is a War Crime.” AmericanAnthro.org, January 6, 2020. https://www.americananthro.org/ParticipateAndAdvocate/AdvocacyDetail.aspx?ItemNumber=25357#/8/.

[2] “1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.” Unesco.org. Accessed January 8, 2020. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/armed-conflict-and-heritage/convention-and-protocols/1954-hague-convention/.

[3] Brian Williams, on MSNBC, infamously described images showing the launching of American missiles towards Syria as “beautiful”, triggering an immediate backlash.

[4] This is not to deny the existence of ‘material culture’ or that cultural heritage can be lost as a consequence of physical destruction, but rather to say that although a people’s culture can be reflected in their physical artifacts, it is not fundamentally physical.