The Egyptian architect, Ramses Wissa Wassef loved designing buildings in vernacular style, using traditional materials, and favoured the humanist approach. His architecture oeuvre includes domed village houses, private villas, public buildings and churches. His other passion was the stain glass design and pottery. In 1938 he started the architectural department at the College of Fine Arts and taught history of art and architecture.
Background
Artist, architect and pioneer Ramses Wissa Wasef is one of Egypt’s leading humanists.
He came from a family dedicated to the patronage of the arts. His father was a nationalist at a time of turmoil for Egypt under British rule, and Wassef was drawn heavily into the beauty of old Cairo and the architecture of its medieval times. The artist famously drew inspiration from the ability of craftsmen to create beauty from their heritage and their own local character. Admiring and promoting Egyptian local work, Wassef drew attention to these practices.
After high school, Wassef wanted to become a sculptor but changed his mind and studied architecture.
Education
Wassef earned his BA degree from the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1935.
Career
Having studied architecture in France (1935), Wassef returned to Egypt, where he designed villas, schools, churches, banks, and apartment buildings.
In 1938, he with other architects started the architectural department at the College of Fine Arts, Cairo. Ramses taught history of art and architecture. In 1969 he was elected the head of the department till his death in 1974.
In the early 1950s, Ramses Wissa Wassef founded, along with his wife Sophie, the arts centre near the pyramids at Giza as a weaving school. It has since evolved to comprise workshops and showrooms, a pottery and sculpture museum, houses and farm buildings, constructed entirely of mud brick.
He was renowned for the design of stain glass windows which he personally constructed for many of the buildings that he designed or renovated such as the Palestine hotel in Alexandria and the national assembly building in Cairo.
Pottery was another passion of Ramses, he experimented with many local types of clay to produce Stoneware ceramic” for every day house hold use. He also prepared his own glazes from lead free metal oxides and clays.
He recieved the Egyptian National award for the arts in 1961 for his stained-glass window designs for The St. Mary Church, Cairo.
In 1983, the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center won the prestigious Aga Khan award for architecture.
Views
Wassef famously criticised modern society and its focus on adhering to certain norms and frameworks in art. He spoke of the importance of individualism in art and of the place of art as a universal value and a universal language of communication.
Wassef saw that the “modern architectural revolution”, which had hit Cairo, was producing a multiplicity of buildings constructed without any sense of aesthetics but rather for their fast rentability. From this point on, Wassef was firmly resolved to never sacrifice his artistic vision for current trends of construction.
Quotations:
“One cannot separate beauty from utility, the form from the material, the work from its function, man from his creative art.”