9 Hafiz Ibrahim St., Wabour El Miah, Alexandria, Egypt
Alexandria
مصر
- Arts
Just like The Anna Lindh Foundation, ICARCH Gallery attempts to promote dialogue between cultures. This is why the focus of our projects are everywhere in this world where we believe a certain problem can be solved, or improved upon, by a significant and beneficial architectural gesture. Thus, we had projects in Paris, Florence, Chicago, Brasilia, and now Alexandria and Cairo.
Indeed, a peaceful and creative dialogue between cultures, across time and space is our main objective.
ICARCH stands for International Competitions in Architecture.
It also hints, sufficiently well, towards Icarus, Daedalus' son, who perished when he dangerously approached the Sun.
The name ICARCH has a few other meanings, but these are more obscure and we choose to leave them aside, for now.
ICARCH came into being from a deeply seated belief that architecture should be again intimately connected with broader cultural issues. It tries nothing else but to build bridges between diverse cultural fields, generally not connected with architecture.
More than this, it tries to "personalize" again architecture by re-connecting it with the "story of life" at a time when everything seems to point towards an increased abstractization and depersonalization, not to say alienation...! But how to "tell a story" through architecture is not very easy... perhaps a possible answer might derive from that intuition Gaston Bachelard had when he stated that a mollusk does not build a house to live in, but lives in order to build its house...!
There is an important difference here. If the "house" is not just another "product" to be quickly possessed and consumed by the voracious "consumer," but the culmination of his / her existential journey, then the house becomes, essentially, the most accurate expression of his / her biography, all the better if that biography had / has a certain relevance. And if the "house" expresses intimately that biography, we can only expect it to be rich, and sufficiently individualized to be able to receive a proper name. Not the name of its architect, but the name of the "author" of that biography, whose expression, in built form, it actually is!
We are interested mainly in "houses." but we use the word "house" in the most generic, almost archetypal way. At bottom, in architecture everything is a "house." A school is "the house of learning," a bank is "the house of money," a church is "the house of god," a library is "the house of books," etc... It is this very primal meaning that interests us, be it "real," or metaphorical.
To end: we can only say, together with Jean-Luc Godard, in his film "Notre Musique," (Our Music) that even a more or less banal castle like Elsinore, in Denmark, could become a very special one, once we learn that it was Hamlet who lived there...!
This is because, all of a sudden, the "house" becomes illuminated by a significant biography, that is, by an "earned life," that is, by a LIVED LIFE!
Thank you,
ICARCH Gallery
Since 2003 we initiated at least fifty international architectural competitions and we received more than four hundred projects from more than thirty-five countries. All these works, original contributions to culture, are displayed on our website.
The latest competitions we just launched are: A BRIDGE FOR ALEXANDRIA - through which we try to unite, physically and symbolically the Coptic Church and the Mosque on the street Khalil Hamada that have been recently involved in the tragedy that left almost 30 people dead and many others injured. Through our project we try to promote peace and to unite the Crescent with the Cross, as a symbolical way to show that two religions should not necessarily be segregated, but united.
In the same spirit we just launched another project for Egypt, A NEW TAHRIR SQUARE - Cairo. We feel the existing Tahrir Square does not express any longer the socio-political realities of Cairo and Egypt in general and that a new spatial configuration for this important square is needed, after the recent revolution.
Please see the invitational texts for these two last competitions on our website.