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March 8, 2005
Marsh Arabs and Gothic Architecture
I'm always interested to read the articles about restoration of the marshes in Iraq, more so when there are photos. This New York Times story has a nice photo essay. Photo six shows the interior of one of the amazing reed buildings of the Marsh Arabs. Some is praying inside it, but the building is decorated as something other than a mosque; the photos I've seen of local mosques from the 1940s and 1960s are much starker -- this looks like domestic space to me (pictures, even of Shiite Imams, are not the thing inside dedicated prayer space).
The lure of organic building material is always present for architectural historians -- I'll look and find Laugier's version of the origins of the primitive hut and some of the imaginative reconstructions of Teutonic-huts-as-primitive-Gothic for you sometime later today. These buildings of reed are beautiful. Go look.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at March 8, 2005 7:29 AM