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Another Egyptian architect who advocated sustainability would be Ramses Wissa Wassef. Hes a relative of Will Suter (who was one of the debate panels on the May Group Talk). I visited both Fathys and Wassefs projects last winter and preferred Wassefs more, because Wassef s was more of an experience-oriented design. Since the architect and his projects are not exposed in Korea, Ill write a bit more specifically this time.
For this advocacy, Ill specifically look at my own preference: a sculpture museum in the complex of Wissa Wassef Arts Center, near Cairo.
Wissa Wassef was a trained Beaux-Arts architect, who had been very influenced by a 1941 trip to Upper Egypt with Hassan Fathy. He also found there a living tradition of mud-brick structures. Basically, what both of them advocated is very much the same, except Wissa Wassef more rooted from Christianity, whereas, Fathy from Islam. Similar to many other scholars in independent countries after World War Two, Wissa Wassef had foreseen the destructive force of modernization.
His whole point of reviving craftsmanship was to promote creative impulse. He firmly believed the lack of creativity doomed tradition to give its way to modernization. Moreover, he had doubts on the modern education systems role of fostering creativity thereby establishing a school of his own.
In 1952, he acquired a plot (3,000 square meters) at Harraniya (near Cairo) to build a school of weaving for local orphans. Surprisingly, the children easily projected their imagination on the loom, creating beautiful weavings. The works soon acquired public attention, encouraging Wissa Wassef to apply the same approach to other arts: pottery, carpet weaving, and stained glass.
There are three main exhibition areas of roughly equal importance in the museum: an open courtyard, a long gallery, and a dome with three iwans and a lesser-domed space.
The configuration of the plan designates architects intentional off-NSaxis arrangement of the center part. This sort of adjustment of different axes (or geometry) can be seen in mosques. Historically, the mosques were unevenly formalized for the purpose of combining irregularity of a site to the absolute orientation of a qibla wall.
In this case, however, two main axes are overlapped; the one aligned towards Mecca (southeast) and the other justified by sustainability (natural lighting). Consequently, the museum has created irregular rooms and extra round-walks thereby deceiving the visitors expectation on the forthcoming spaces. This notion of tortuous circulation and the oblique juxtaposition of spaces could be interpreted as a deliberate reference to the traditional Egyptian town with its narrow winding lanes.
In terms of sustainability the Sculpture Museum uses relatively small amount of electricity for thermal comfort and exhibition lighting. This was achieved by; first, mud (adobe) and second, natural lighting system. Obviously, mud bricks have their great advantages which we are all familiar with - and second, his use of double walls in the western part of the building to block the direct solar infiltration and to accomplish the focusing light effect are ingenious. In addition, the building also uses a courtyard as a climate controller. Most of the large openings inside the rooms are adjusted to the courtyard where a large tree shades most of the sunlight.
When one visits this museum, he/she enters into a more or less small domed room. The condensed and the dark quality of the space perceptively transit into spacious and brighter space through consecutively arranged interior, semi-interior (corridor), and exterior (courtyard) spaces.
In the corridor, clay sculptures are either embedded on the wall or placed in the wall. The clay pictures embedded on the wall remind one the nearby (Giza) esthetical expressions in the Tombs. That is, planar expressions deliberately depicting three-dimensional environment.
After this labyrinthine passageway, one slides into the main rooms of the sculpture museum. Here, one encounters a dome-crowned room that disrobes into the different set of rooms. This central room, similar to a Durqaa (see image below) in Islamic architecture, embodies its spatial, typological, constructional, structural, and environmental elements: a dome, a screen window, and a courtyard.
Cf> Images I mentioned earlier as a typological elements repeatedly used in Islamic Cairo.
In other words, the horizontality of the screen wall smoothly transforms into a verticality of a dome. Moreover, the vertical centrality by the dome transforms into a horizontal linearity the long gallery- where the openings are carefully adjusted to invite direct light into the room.
The first impression when one enters into this room is a hovering effect created by the alignment of apertures lit by the direct solar illumination. Such spontaneity of spotlighting and hovering effect by the double wall system gracefully terminates at a courtyard.
.left - one of the exhibiting aperture in a long gallery
middle - relationship between the long gallery and the courtyard
right - picture of the courtyard from the long gallery.
At this termination, the visitor realizes that he/she has undergone series of different
types of rooms and strategies of illumination. Moreover, one finally recognizes that the
most dramatic openings inside are the ornamentation of the outside.
As a conclusion, allow me to summarize issues dealt here.
First, he used earth as an overall material for the construction. This enabled him to
save a cost for the maintenance of thermal comfort.
Second, he boldly incorporated typological aspects repeatedly used in Egypt into
respective sustainable adjustments.
Third, as a consequence, he accomplished diverse spatial effects.
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