VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
Do you hear music when you see certain buildings? Do you see facades when you listen to a track? Was Goethe, the 18th century German writer and statesman who described the relationship between both as “Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music” crazy? Days when Architectural Styles were studied via hundreds of slides, drawings and plans has lost its impact with a modern generation whose attention span is a fraction of a minute and who believe all the knowledge is at their fingertips. This paper documents the findings of 12 years evolution in teaching historical styles through mixtures of drama and music. The recipe lead not only higher retention rates, but increased cognitive, analytical and design skills than the traditional approach. This third phase of research focuses on the association between historical styles and melodic flows. It asks three basic questions; Is there a relationship between an architectural style and melody? Can students detect an architectural style simply by listening to a pre-composed track that mimics specific musical features? Which of the identified musical features was actually more important in correctly identifying the association between a style and a melody? The approach is based on statistically correlating pairs of Archi/Musical measures to associate visual and audible forms of art, namely; Scale/Tonality, Texture/ Timbre, Rhythm/ Tempo, Forms/ Dynamic and Intended Mood. The process is applied on 7 architectural styles whose correlation with 7 musical melodies is tested through Kendall’s tau-b (τb) correlation coefficient. The findings and conclusions reveal the extent of the relation as well as which measure is more instrumental in the abstract recognition of the melody
Prof. Ismail is a professor of Environmental Planning and Design. He is a Fulbright scholar with a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University, the USA in 1998 and holds two Masters, one from UCL in 1991 and the other from OSU. He is a certified planner of the American Institute of Certified Planners. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Architectural Engineering from Cairo University. Before coming to NGU he served as the Chairperson at Fayoum University and Program Director at Nile University. His global teaching experience included CAAD (College of Architecture, Arts and Design) at the AUS.
BSc: MUST University (2018) Rank 1st; MSc: Cairo University (in progress) in using music as an innovative design approach for enhancing a creativity
Before joining NGU: TA at MUST, CHI, and Nile University. GP at ArchiPrix International Architectural Competition Chile 2019. Awarded third place by Tamyouz in 2021 for a Girls Sanctuary in Iraq and 2nd Place by in 2022 for a Rehabilitation Centre for Victims of Terrorist Attacks. ACCESS scholarship program for a two-year full study at AUC, Active board member in iEARN, ENACTUS, E-Youth, and ASAP. Research: Ensure creativity, innovation, and professional practice inside the studio