VIRTUAL London Heritages Conference

Abstract

Despite its diverse cultural, historical, and modern-day societal facets, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has much in common from a geographic and even geological perspective, falling mostly within what is considered an arid desert climatic zone. Accordingly, the historical roots of many of the peoples living within this region are reflected in the remaining archaeological sites throughout, with many of the most outstanding sites with universal value for all located within the region’s deserts. However, this harsh climatic reality highlights the necessity of providing supporting services and facilities to modern-day visitors, upon which there are varying levels of economic reliance; a need which has been met with many architectural proposals, which in turn undertook different approaches to their design process, and present different typological and stylistic decisions even with this common environmental ground across the region. In this paper, several chosen architectural projects at or near archaeological sites from across the region (including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and more) will be compared to understand why they may differ in design choices even when under very similar climatic, geological, and perhaps even cultural conditions.