Reviving the Historic Sabils of Cairo
Student Presenter(s): Yousef Ismail
Faculty Mentor: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa
Department: Architecture and Design
School/College: School of Architecture and Design, New York City
Sabil wa kuttab (n): a charitable public water dispenser and school/library. Water is an essential element of life and an integral part of Islamic beliefs. Sabils are one of the emerging Islamic architectures under the rule of the mamluks in Egypt where they are usually accompanied by a Kuttab on the upper floor. Through the research on the humanist and religious aspects of Islam, in which access to water in deserts is currently paralleled to access to knowledge in the form of public libraries. Following Borges’ “library of babel” as a reading reference, this cultural heritage project has been integrating human necessity to nourish the body in the arid areas with water, with the nourishing of the intellect and access to knowledge. Contemplating alternative expansive real-time emergent virtual spaces by retrieving physical books 3d scanned from existing physical libraries activating 3d Photogrammetry Big Data Survey at the level of the built environment, the historical building heritage and the physical books. Through API data gathering and unsupervised Machine Learning, a user would be able to enter a virtual world where all books are written by a GTP-2 Artificial Intelligence semantic model informed by previous users, and contribute with their own text creating an endless ever-growing library."