AR321 7th Homework

Student’s name: Ahmad Al-aql 1007811

TWA Terminal

Saarinen's terminal for TWA is sculpted as a symbol of flight - abstract, and not intentionally as a landing eagle as it has often been described. The expressive curves of the design create attractive, spacious halls and a rare degree of exhilaration for an airport terminal. The period bright orange carpets are gone, and the atmosphere is a more contemporary cool with the tone set by the purple-tinted glazing, but the romance of flight is very much alive. Although the building appears to be made of sculptural concrete, the structure is in fact braced within the concrete by an invisible web of reinforcing steel

TWA Terminal.

TWA Terminal’s Plan.

TWA’s Interior.

Heinz Galinski School

The building that houses the Heinz-Galinski School was designed by the Israeli architect Zvi Hecker. Its unusual shape, with interlocking segments, makes it reminiscent of a sunflower. Viewed from above, the building also resembles an open book – a direct reference to its function as a school. After all, the Hebrew word for book, “sefer,” is part of the word for school: “beit sefer” (house of books). The symbolism of sunflower and books together reflects the nature of children: pure joy and boundless curiosity, playfulness and serious concentration, optimism and the need to explore.

a joyful experience being led into one of Hecker's colored pencil drawings where a curving "snake" intercepts with the sunflower theme. The petals form the classrooms; the curving snake connects and conceals them at the same time...you move through a landscape of walls and roofs, alleys and corners. It is always about light and how the light penetrates the building; direct light, reflected light, diffused light (picture below).

The spaces between the walls form the "canyons," the stairways are the "mountains," the windows frame views or open up to balconies and roof terraces. One never comes directly to an empty space, but arrives slowly. There is a hierarchy of space; it is closed, but never really closed. And there are endless hiding places for children. Hecker was at the site every day during construction. Although they were designing and changing things to the very end, they still managed to stay within the budget. The materials are ordinary; painted stucco (36 centimeter hollow walls), simple concrete, corrugated aluminum, asphalt sheets, and standard windows and skylights. In some places the concrete ceiling has what looks like an interesting yellow 'design' from the nails rusting in the rain while the concrete was being cured. A wall left unfinished has calculations and dates written on the exposed brick traces of the people that worked on the building. "Children should know it is hard work", Hecker says

Heinz Galinski School.

New Gourna Village

The village of New Gourna, which was partially built between 1945 and 1948, is possibly the most well known of all of Fathy's projects because of the international popularity of his book, "Architecture for the Poor", published nearly twenty years after the experience and concentrating primarily on the ultimately tragic history of this single village. While the architect's explanations offered in the book are extremely compelling and ultimately persuasive, New Gourna is still most significant for the questions it raises rather than the problems it tried to solve, and these questions still await a thorough, objective analysis.

New Gourna Village.

The idea for the village was launched by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities as a potentially cost-effective solution to the problem of relocating an entire entrenched community of entrepreneurial excavators that had established itself over the royal necropolis in Luxor. The village of New Gourna also seemed to offer Fathy a perfect opportunity to finally test the ideas unveiled at Mansouria on a large scale and to see if they really could offer a viable solution to the rural housing problem in Egypt. The Village was meant to be a prototype but rather than subscribing to the current idea of using a limited number of unit types, Fathy took the unprecedented approach of seeking to satisfy the individual needs of each family in the design. As he said in Architecture for the Poor, In Nature, no two men are alike. Even if they are twins and physically identical, they will differ in their dreams. The architecture of the house emerges from the dream; this is why in villages built by their inhabitants we will find no two houses identical

. This variety grew naturally as men designed and built their many thousands of dwellings through the millennia. But when the architect is faced with the job of designing a thousand houses at one time, rather than dream for the thousand whom he must shelter, he designs one house and puts three zeros to its right, denying creativity to himself and humanity to man. As if he were a portraitist with a thousand commissions and painted only one picture and made nine hundred and ninety nine photocopies. But the architect has at his command the prosaic stuff of dreams. He can consider the family size, the wealth, the social status, the profession, the climate, and at last, the hopes and aspirations of those he shall house. As he cannot hold a thousand individuals in his mind at one time, let him begin with the comprehensible, with a handful of people or a natural group of families which will bring the design within his power. Once he is dealing with a manageable group of say twenty or thirty families, then the desired variety will naturally and logically follow in the housing.