Categories |

Usually representing spirits, ancestors or the primordial couple, these figures were placed in shrines and treated with great respect. Through a wide range of style, scale, belief and function the couples depicted share a timeless, serene equality necessary to the continuity of their societies.

Datum Antique: Sasaki Associates’ Green Lung of Cairo

In 1984, His Highness the Aga Khan announced his decision to finance the creation of a park for the citizens of the Egyptian capital. The only central location that was of suitable scale was the derelict Darassa site, a 30-hectare (74-acre) mound of rubble that had been a debris dump for 500 years. Al-Azhar Park, undertaken by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, has since proven to be both a popula...

Datum Antique: Hassan Fathy's New Barris Village

"No other project dominates this mature phase of the architect's work as much as the village of New Baris, in a way that is comparable to the notoriety of New Gourna twenty years before. There are so many contrasting factors between the two projects that it is beneficial to examine the parallels between them. Discovery of a large water well sixty kilometers south of the Kharga Oasis in 1963, wh...

Datum Antique: Biermann and Theron's Crasulla Duplex Apartments

KwaZulu Natal Institute of architects calls it the ” most provocative building of the decade”, an fluid recipe of well anticipated cuboids and forms that marry each other like they have been in love for years. This is the Crasulla Duplex apartments, an ego boost to the Durban skyline in the 1960s where Biermann and Theron stacked and stepped units in both plan and section.

Datum Antique: Jean Francois Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin's Dakar International Fair Grounds

The Dakar Exhibition centre is a psychedelic 70s baby, a building that perhaps represented a provoking, almost tickling and sparkling idea to the African foray of foreign architects at the time. This was an architectural building that purely and strikingly reveals the political factors that were affecting senegal at the time, and shows a clear depiction of the government's forge of character on...

Datum Antique: Giuseppe Pettazzi's Fiat Tagliero Building

The Tagliero building is at best the eccentric product of a relatively ambitious architect from Italy who sort to visualize the essence of transit architecture. It sits in a quaint street in Asmara, with ambitious spread canopies that extend a ridiculous depth outwards from the main small building, a concept in aviary exaltation.

Datum Antique: Pancho Guedes' Saipal Bakery

Every so often architecture smacks you right in the face and forces you to remember why it is exactly that buildings touch us so deeply. The Amancio Guedes designed Saipal Bakery has more controversy in its use than most other buildings but the architectural trials and triumphs cannot be overstated. Completed in the mid 50s, the space frames that welcome you into the building are so definitive ...