Operation Swiss 2.0

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The Fountainhead

By Rusaila Bazlamit; originally published on Reflect Upon on July, 22, 2008

So finally I have read [The Fountainhead] a novel that I knew many people praising… Once I started reading it I couldn’t stop till I finished it…
The novel is written by Ayn Rand… in the novel Rand chose Architecture as a form of self-expression…

Gary Cooper as Howard Roark; Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

I can’t understand why during my 5 years studying architecture none of my professors recommended the book… It is such a good book and deals with architecture in a new critical way… allowing us to interpret the history of architecture and the modern practices of it in a new way…

Many of the main characters are involved in Architecture whether they are architects like the main character Howard Roark or they are critics of architecture like Ellsworth Toohey…

The Fountainhead; Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead; Ayn Rand

The novel talks about selfishness, egotism and altruism through another perspective which shakes some of the bases of how societies are led to approve or condemn actions that are defined as virtues or sins by other people for whatever agenda…
As you are reading there will be many sections which you forget you are reading a novel but you concentrate on the ideas presented… again gaining more insights about architecture and society.
I liked the way Rand has used architecture as a medium to convey her own philosophies…
The novel is definitely a must-read… especially for architects and architecture students…
The novel had been made into a movie in the 1940s but I’m always disappointed when a novel is turned into a movie… so I recommend the novel… having said that I found this video of Howard Roark’s speech toward the end of the movie… is worth seeing… [ full Howard Roark courtroom speech]

Howard Roark: A building has integrity, just like a man.

The Fountainhead; Ayn Rand

The novel also tackles some of the ideas related to Capitalism and though I’m myself an anti-capitalism to the core… I have to say that I had a new understanding of Capitalism that made me reflect more about some of own ideas related to man, freedom and wealth…
Also the concept of self, self-sacrifice, selfishness made me think about the concept of the self in my own Islamic beliefs which I’ll talk about some other time…

It is a mind opening when we understand the hidden driving forces that shape, create and re-create some of our basic cultural and societal patterns…

The Fountainhead one of my best novels of all times…

“Love Died” on a Wall in Amman!

Written by Khaled Sedki for WAW Al Balad
To be released in WAW’s Issue/8.

And wall said: Khaled, love died!

A wall once told me, as I walked by it, that love died; “Khaled, mat al-hob!”
It knew my name, so I guess it was addressing me personally.
Walls usually tell us a lot of stuff; to vote for the wrong people, to buy things we don’t need or to rent apartments. Some walls gossip about who loves who ‘forever’, what sports-club the kids of the neighborhood are fans of, or simply threatens anyone who attempts to ‘piss’ next to them.
But this wall specifically wanted to let me know that “love is dead”, as if it was a sequel to Nietzsche’s old announcement, yet the latter at least bothered to offer an explanation!
I looked around the wall, even the other side of the wall and all the walls of the neighborhood to find any further details on how, when or why love has died. Whether it was murdered, or simply died of cancer or perhaps aids! But that’s all there is! None of the kids around the area have seen the dying love, or heard about its tragic death, but they all believe it is dead, and none of them seemed to be bothered by that ‘fact’.

Walls talk to us; with our words- I prefer graffiti-sprayed walls to neat bourgeoisie-guarding fences.
Words on the walls are like riddles, solving them is decoding a culture through its own spontaneous, irrational and collective means of expression and reproduction of its self, its values and its symbols.
So try reading walls, writing or even commenting on them! True you can’t post links, videos or pictures on city walls like you do on Facebook walls, but these walls are not virtual, they’re not limited to ‘friends’ and at least they don’t feature Google ads!

Walls are urban canvases that bare our traces, whether carved, designed or built; they are a way of urban communication found by cave-men and lost for the polished image of sexy tourism.
Words spoken on a wall are there to stay, even if painted over; they remain in a wall’s memory, layers of brick, concrete, words and paint. Hammurabi’s codes, anarchist propaganda, Pharaoh’s history and Greek wisdom were all written on walls, and if love truly died, then you first read it on a wall in Amman.

Design as Creative Negotiation; Article on 7iber.com

[article written for and published on 7iber.com]
Interruptions, Khaled Sedki

Interruptions Catatonia Workshop

A pack of tuna was all that’s needed to trigger all the neighborhood’s cats! Though that was supposed to be my own dinner, but at times one prefers nice company to a full stomach! My little room in Lwaibdeh is quite small, but looks and feels more like a storey, just like all the houses in Lwaibdeh and Al-Balad; the case with any human built ‘accommodation’ in places with rough, dominant and phenomenal topography, ‘building’ is just a sequence of diplomatic get-arounds negotiating back-and-forth with the land’s voids, pediments and carves.

Apparently that was the case with these cats around my room! The sofa, the chairs, the empty suitcases, the table and other ‘topography’ created so many possibilities for them to play with and discover!

I curiously started observing while all objects and furniture in my room were brought to life again by hosting varieties of experiences, all items that we have made into rigid types that served standard functions turned out to be much more flexible and adaptable.

This creative diplomacy in re-accommodating objects, spaces, buildings, cities, topography…etc is a skill we lost at one point when humans possessed the tools and the technology allowing them not to bargain for their accommodations but rather enforce them. It’s a point where we lost the creative communication with our surrounding context; not only between built and natural environments, but on all scales; design, politics, economy, development, society… etc

It’s a point where we started seeing wars over oil, state terrorism instead of political and economic imperialism and Jordan Gates towers at the 6th circle replacing a public park!

The image of fully carved hills and bulk inserted buildings became so familiar, washing out neighborhoods to shove in ‘development’ projects and replacing already fitted built areas of well-balanced and well-connected social and economic strata with touristic appealing structures all became the norm of the-so-called regeneration and development of city’s built-urban-environment!

While these acquired powerful tools should’ve increased our creative diplomatic ‘design’ of our cities, buildings, society, politics and economy we find ourselves producing in the last few decades some of the least intelligent and most crude methods of human accommodations!

Design, is a creative diplomatic organizational process responsive to human needs and aware of the politics of its existing context, and is now leveled down to a matter of fulfilling needs in a way that is most similar to paid prostitutes to avoid building complicated relationships!

So cats, have preserved and developed the craft we’ve lost, re-accommodating our city in endless creative ways worthy of observing and reflecting upon our arrogant design language!