EuropIA 10: Augmented Heritage / Damascus, 13-15 September
[Click on images to enlarge]
The conference venue
Central Damas
Old Damas
At the Souk El-Hamidiyeh
Near the Citadel
Street delight: fresh mulberry juice
Sunset at the Omayyad Mosque
The Omayyad
The Omayyad
A last and
late night view of the Omayyad
Mosque.
The southeast
minaret in the
background is called the Minaret of
Jesus, for a local tradition saying
this is where Jesus will appear
on the Day of Judgment
Thinking of augmented heritage...
Trying a fruit cocktail with Björn Van
Genechten and Urs Hirschberg,
after our presentations.
Damascene foods are worth the trip in
themselves
Thanks to Urs for the picture
On an informal
trip we visited this old
city palace which is under the threat
of loss
The open
recess in the middle
is the 'iwan'
Inside the building
One of the entrances from the main courtyard
Interior of a room on the main courtyard
One of the ceilings
Around the
third courtyard
Left
is our guide, architect Luna Rajab,
who's not only an expert in heritage
but as much an expert in defending it
Traditional
musicians for one of the
many wedding parties at my hotel.
Sometimes
a hotel obviously
is not a place for sleeping...
IAHS 33: Transforming Housing Environments Through Design/ Pretoria, 25 - 30 September
The
'High Performance Centre' sports hotel of the University of Pretoria,
where I spent a night by happy mistake
Inside the HPC
The lounge
and under it the fitness (I didn't
dare to show up there. As the South African
National Cricket Team was training around
I would pretty misfit in the scene)
The HPC at
night. There were no
wedding parties, so I could
recuperate from Damascus
View from the sports fields
and again at daytime
The HPC auditorium
The law building
by Kruger Roos
Architects, near the conference
venue
Martin Kruger
was one of the
speakers at the conference
The flowering
trees are Jacaranda's,
famous for Pretoria
One of the inner patios
Detail
Here's Martin
Kruger's Informal Theory on the life of an architect.
By
his fifties, an architect very probably does one of the following:
- divorce
- make a heart attack
- do both
Nellmapius,
a township on which we
had a pre-congress design charette
The exercise
was to make a
structuring proposal for enhancing
the emergence of an urban community
One of the
questions was how to provide a
framework for informal businesses
Playing soccer
on Sunday afternoon
We would keep about all of this site for sports,
which are very important for South-Africans
There's a
community centre under
construction which would be on the
main axis of intervention
One of the
things we were thinking of
was how to plant and sustain a lot
of greenery in Nellmapius
We would
even fold up future parks
onto buildings to become green urban
walls
With Amira
Osman at the Eerste
Fabriek railway station, a vital
mobility node for Nellmapius
Amira co-organized the congress
Communication
technology gets where
other things don't get...
This, by
contrast, is
central Johannesburg
The diamond-shape office building
is De Beers' headquarters
Prof. Crina
Oltean-Dumbrava and
prof. Antonio Frattari at the site,
where we visited the Brickfields
social housing project (left)
Overview
Very nice
designs mark the rehabilitation
effort in the city centre
If you look
in the back,
you will find high-rise buildings
wrapped in advertisement textiles
They have
been abandoned
by companies; some of them
are subsequently hijacked and
illegally rented
Some things
made me very much think
of New York Bronx
The kids
at Brickfields showed an
irresistable enthousiasm for knowing
more about us
You shall
not go to South Africa
without spotting some wild animals
This is easy
This is a bit more tough
View on the
central lake of the
Pilanesberg crater reserve
The park
was very dry at this stage
and a lot of areas had burnt
A wild pig
after his mud bath
It helps him getting rid of parasites
A waterbuck
Humans
Here we have some zebras and a rhino
Of course there were also giraffes
The monkey family
Bird's nests
- but this is
Amira's garden
On South-African ways...