Browsing by Author "Abdel-Ghani, Taher"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

The architectural features of socio-spatial transformation in Hassan Al-Imam’s Cairo Trilogy
(Intellect Ltd., 2023-02) El-Feki, Sameh; Abdel-Ghani, Taher
The urban scenery that dominated Cairo since the nineteenth century was a spatial superimposition of tradition and modernity, represented in the social and architectural composition of the city. The cinematic medium in Egypt attempted to visualize such overlap through a vivid depiction of spatial transformations occurring within the micro and macro urban levels revealing hidden aspects of social order and organizational behaviour. This article sheds light on Egyptian filmmaker Hassan Al-Imam’s Cairo Trilogy films, based on the critically acclaimed novels by Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz, where the story takes place in the heart of early twentieth-century Cairo spanning from 1917 to 1944. The films’ physical features illustrate the morphology of time and urban space constituting to the socio-spatial narratives of the local setting, a theoretical framework adopted by the authors named cine-spatial representation. Through the examination of such connection within the settings across the three films, the article reveals the influence of non-physical elements on the physicality of architectural and urban space, creating a visual narrative from social collectivism to individualist fragmentation
Enclosurotopias: A Heterotopian Simulation of Reality
(A+U, 05/08/2020) Abdel-Ghani, Taher; Tahoon, Zeinab
Michel Foucault identifies heterotopias as forms of space that exists somewhere between reality and utopia. It’s real but does not serve or correspond to reality. What appears to be real within heterotopias is the notion of signs, a parallel hyperreal world that encompasses the definition of reality to an extent that it has become the actual meaning of being. Gated communities have long been categorized as the places where fragments of utopia and simulation coexist, and where the illusion of safety flourishes in its most vivid forms. This paper attempts to highlight such heterotopian features within gated communities, with an analytical focus on the Fuyunxindu community in the Tiexi district of Shenyang – a highly controlled residential zone that gave rise to the insider/outsider dichotomy. Through this outlook, the reader gets to answer a simple question: What kind of spatial vision do gated communities provide within the urban realm? Keywords: Gated Communities; Heterotopias; Chinese Urbanism; Neoliberalism; Contemporary Urbanization.
Using Bernard Tschumi's Manhattan Transcripts as a Cinematic Pedagogical Tool in Architecture Schools in Egyp
(2021-02) Abdel-Ghani, Taher
This research aims to use Bernard Tschumi’s cinematic approaches to offer a different reading of architecture in which architectural language is not limited by precise and generative drawings, rather the organic behavior plays a significant role. Space, movement, and events are the main pillars of Tschumi’s The Manhattan Transcripts, where conventional components of architecture are broken down and rebuilt along different axes. This paper addresses architecture schools in Egypt that convey conventional architectural methodologies to students in the form of a market-driven intellectual economy without challenging the presumed focus on form either through abstraction or simulation. Eventually, the purpose is to introduce the notations of experience and time for all forms of intervention in the reading of the physical environment.