A New Star is Born: Waleed Arafa
A new star is rising in the east, but in this case, it is architectural critics rather than angels and shepherds that are divining the portents surrounding this appearance. Because of one breakthrough project, Egyptian architect Waleed Arafa has managed to place himself above the fray because of his emphasis on background research about vernacular sources and context, and symbolic references which speak to the spirit and cerebral cortex as well as the need to satisfy purely functional needs.
Arafa is the founder and principal of Dar Arafa Architecture, Cairo, Egypt.
He received his Bachelor of Science degree majoring in architecture, urban design, and planning, from the Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University in 2001 and then joined Los Angeles-based Naga Studio Architecture +Urbanism before returning to Egypt to start his own practice, Dar Arafa Architecture in 2006.
His first project, which was the design of his own house, was nominated for the Aga Khan Award in its 11th cycle in 2010, as well as for other honors.
He then attended the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, earning a post-graduate degree in the Conservation of Historic Buildings In 2015.
History shows us that those fortunate few that do manage to emerge from obscurity and climb to the fickle stratosphere of global fame in architecture do so with one show-stopping pyrotechnic performance. For Louis Kahn, who was 55 at the time, that was the Richards Laboratory in Philadelphia. James Stirling was 33 when he completed the Leicester Engineering Building. Jørn Utzon was 41 when he won the competition to design the Sydney Opera House. Waleed Arafa was 39 when he realized his own breakthrough project, which is a small Mosque in the village of Basuna, near Sohag, just north of the U-shaped curvature of the Nile after it passes Luxor.
The Basuna Mosque satisfies Arafa’s goal of forging a new link in what he and other famous countrymen Hassan Fathy and Abdel Wahed El Wakil have characterized as the chain of the transmission of traditional knowledge that has been broken by the relentless growth of technological imperative and in the process ,he has captured the essence of Islamic architecture.
It does this in innumerable elemental ways: among which are the use of a contextually sympathetic material and color, a spherical dome of tessellated, turned brick atop a cube that recalls the Holy Ka’aba, a minimal twisting minaret that evokes the origins of that form as an inspiring light tower, a telescoping entrance that recalls the boundary wall of Saqqara, reminding us of the Islamic approval of cultural appropriation, not to mention mystical symbolism and numerology.
Waleed Arafa is an architect that is certainly on an upward trajectory.
