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Architecture and Ethnography
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What a home is made of. Construction matters in Khalifa, Cairo
AUTHOR: Dalila Ghodbane
CONTEXT: Presentation at the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies, panel "Good living and home building," co-organized with Samuli Schielke, Sevilla, 18.07.2018
KEYWORDS: Cairo, material, project, housing, home, ethnography, building practices, construction, temporality
In the house I study, changes are constantly made in/on the building: adding doors, managing openings with different layers of curtains, protection nets and shutters, sunblind, etc. At the end of the day, these changes are what the project of a house is made of. (…)
The first point is a description of a few works undertaken in the house, to illustrate and explore further the material nature of the project of the house, in line with the material nature of the house itself. The second point consists in discussing the notion of project, when it comes to a house that already exists. Because, considered without distinction of scale, from covering hanging clothes into dusty wind to insulating the roof, the rhythm and the tight succession of these operations allow to redefine the project not only as a horizon, or an aspiration, but rather the whole of these actions that equates to inhabiting the house.
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