In the presence of His Excellency Sheikh Abdul Rahman bin Hamad Al Thani, the Minister of Culture, the Ministry of Culture held yesterday evening the fourth event of the 2023 seminar season, in its second season, which took place under the title “Architecture in Our Culture”, in which the Arab and international architect Dr. Abdul Wahid Al-Wakeel.
The symposium was presented by Ahmed Abdullah, who confirmed that the symposium is an invitation to explore the mutual impact between culture as a carrier of the spirit of peoples and architecture as a creative manifestation of that spirit. He said that: We consider that architecture is a reflection of the culture of any society, and therefore it becomes a kind of expression of the requirements of any society and the change and development it is witnessing.
The symposium was attended by a group of personalities interested in architecture and culture, as the symposium revolved around them, during which the architect Abdul Wahed Al-Wakil gave a presentation of many architectural models that he had accomplished in various Arab countries, as well as the countries of the world. The lecturer did not neglect to talk about the importance of identity, and the importance of its presence in the heart of architectural buildings, in addition to his emphasis on the need to take into account the Arab self in architectural establishments, in light of the tendency to construct modern buildings, as he called for the necessity for it to be expressive of the Arab self, on the one hand, and that Touching the Arab and Islamic architectural style on the other hand. In his lecture, he concluded that the absence of architectural constants for buildings shocks the residents, and that parking lots crowded the spaces of buildings, and the disappearance of pedestrian areas distorted the general view of cities, pointing out that the city of Lusail lacks the specifications of Arab architecture. He believed that urban architects wasted the aesthetics of buildings, and that the absence of simplicity in them caused them a disaster. He criticized the absence of Islamic architecture from Arab universities. Considering that ugliness is closer to the faculties of fine arts.