Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) — Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) (1970)

Mimar / Tasarım Ofisi: Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) | Yapım Yılı: 1970 | Konum: Belirtilmemiş | Proje Tipi: Kültür merkezi

The School and Arts Centre at Harrania, which bears his name, is the magnum opus of Ramses Wissa Wassef (1911–74), a prominent Egyptian architect and educator. Convinced of the value of and the need for training and practice in arts and crafts and in the educational and cultural development of young children, he began teaching weaving to a small group of children who attended a primary school that he had designed in Old Cairo in the 1940s. The satisfaction and benefit that those children gained from his devoted teaching and the high quality of the work they produced persuaded Wissa Wassef to establish a school specifically for training children in the arts and crafts. In 1951, he and his wife bought a plot of land at Harrania, a small village near Giza, for that purpose. There was no precise brief. Wissa Wassef was his own client, and the demand for the sort of school he had envisioned was unknown, unproven; initially, it would have to be funded solely from his own resources. It would have to be built economically, and it must not alienate the community of fellahin (peasant farmers and farm laborers) among whom, in the village of Harrania, he had settled. He would use only local materials—the silty brown earth of the narrow fertile plain between the Nile and the desert escarpment to the west—and he would design and build in the vernacular tradition. From the field study visits that he had made with his architectural students to Upper Egypt, he had discovered the quality and the beauty of the Nubian villages; his colleague at the School of Fine Arts, Hassan Fathy, had recently embarked on the planning and design of a new village, in the Nubian vernacular tradition, on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor in Upper Egypt. Encouraged by Hassan Fathy’s example and fired with enthusiasm by his own discovery of Nubian architecture, Wissa Wassef described his decision to build in the traditional way: I had just visited Aswan, where I had been struck by the beauty of the Nubian houses in the villages of the area, I learnt that it was still possible to find bricklayers who could make vaulted roofs for houses. I felt a strange excitement when I thought that these same methods had existed since the first dynasties of the Pharaohs. They had survived throughout Egyptian, Coptic and Islamic history, and were still used in popular architecture. I decided to make use of some these bricklayers from Aswan, and turn their experience to account in building vaults for my school. (de Stefano, n.d.) The school grew slowly. Village children were enrolled to learn weaving, and they were encouraged to assist the Nubian builders in making mud bricks and building adobe walls for the school buildings: weaving workshops, storerooms, and display spaces. Later, Wissa Wassef introduced the teaching of pottery: kilns, pottery workshops, and storerooms were needed. By the late 1950s, tapestries and carpets designed and made by the students were being exhibited internationally—in the United States, Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden—and money earned from the sale of the students’ work was shared between the weavers themselves and the school. The pace and scale of building increased; by 1970, the first phase of building was complete. In the early 1970s, his daughters Suzanne and Yoanna joined Wissa Wassef and his wife, Sophie, in teaching at the school. The small ceramic sculpture museum was designed and built and named after Sophie’s father, the sculptor Habib Gorgy. In 1973, Suzanne married the architect Ikram Nosshi, one of her father’s former students at the School of Fine Arts. After Wissa Wassef’s unexpected death in 1974 at the age of 63, Nosshi continued the architectural development of the school under the direction of Sophie Habib Gorgy, Wissa Wassef’s widow. She expanded and extended the scope of the school, acquiring more land, encouraging the building of houses on the site for her daughters and their families, and creating the Ramses Wissa Wassef Museum, which houses the permanent collection of the Arts Centre and traces the development of tapestry weaving, ceramics, and all the crafts taught there since the early days of its foundation. Completed in 1989, the museum, designed by Nosshi, forms the culmination of the complex and, although designed by a different hand, fits perfectly into the environment created by Wissa Wassef and his wife. On entering the main gate of the Arts Centre, one enters a new world. The immediate environment is bleak; the village of Harrania has grown out of all recognition since the 1950s, when the Wissa Wassefs began to realize their vision, and has become a peri- urban suburb of greater Cairo. Within the boundary walls, the naturally rendered adobe walls, roof terraces, vaults, and domes of the congeries of buildings are linked by arcaded verandas, courtyards, brick-paved passageways, open staircases, and small shady gardens, all planned in an organic and apparently spontaneous way. The whole complex is surrounded by an extensive garden, planted with a wide variety of trees and shrubs, and has the appearance of an old, established rural community. Internally as well, the various working spaces, large and small, and the museums and galleries for displaying the tapestries, carpets, textiles, batiks, pottery, and ceramics are comfortably cool and appropriately lit with tiny skylights set into domes and vaults, clerestory windows, and simply designed perforated screen walls. The whole place is an oasis of calm and peace and at the same time an ever-flowing spring of creativity. In 1983, its merits were internationally recognized by winning the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. In the award citation, the project was commended “for the beauty of its execution, the high value of its objectives and the social impact of its activities, as well as its influence as an example...for its role as a centre of art and life and for its endurance, its continuity and its promise” (quoted in de Stefano, n.d.). At the dawn of the 21st century, the Arts Centre has become an icon of “green architecture,” a model of holistic design for architects around the world; and for Egyptians, trying to cope with the environmental pollution and population pressure of peri-urban greater Cairo, it has become a beacon of hope. Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3 (P-Z). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) — Mimari Görseller, Planlar ve Kesitler

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 1 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 2 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 3 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 4 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 5 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 6 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 7 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 8 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 9 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 10 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 11 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 12 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 13 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 14 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 15 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 16 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 17 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 18 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 19 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 20 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 21 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 22 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 23 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

Harraniya Art Center (Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre) - Ramses Wissa Wassef (Egypt) — Mimari Proje, Plan ve Görsel 24 | TONOZ Mimari Proje Arşivi

TONOZ — Mimari Proje Arşivi, Mimari Arşiv ve Mimari İlham Panosu Ana Sayfası