Designing a school for 48 degrees
Omar walks through his own studio's design for a primary school in Upper Egypt where summer hits 48 degrees, with the engineer who argued with him about every window.
The mud brick house that outlived the concrete one
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Show notes
The mud brick house that outlived the concrete one
In a village outside Luxor, two houses stand side by side. One is mud brick, built by a master mason in 1952. The other is concrete, built in 1998. Omar spends a day in both and talks to the family who owns them and the mason's grandson.
- How a mud brick vault is built without any formwork
- Why the 1952 house is 8 degrees cooler at 3pm
- What concrete promised, and what it actually delivered
- The grandson who is relearning the craft from photographs
- Why banks will lend on concrete and not on earth
Photographs of both houses, and the vault going up, are on the show page.
Transcript
Hello, I am Omar El-Sherbiny and this is Load Bearing Walls, the show about buildings and the people who make them. Today I want to take you to a village a little north of Luxor, where a family owns two houses that stand next to each other. The first was built in 1952 out of mud brick by a master mason, with vaulted roofs and thick walls. The second was built in 1998 out of reinforced concrete, because concrete was modern and the bank would lend for it. In the first house, at three in the afternoon in August, you can sit comfortably. In the second, you cannot. I spent a day in both, with a thermometer and the mason's grandson, who is trying to relearn his grandfather's craft from old photographs. We talk about vaults, heat, money and what we lost. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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