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The Bottle That Was in Pieces on the Floor
A car bomb left one of the world's great collections of Islamic art in fragments on the floor. What the Museum of Islamic Art chose to do with the repair — mark it, rather than hide it — turns out to be the most quietly radical decision in the building.
Near the entrance of Cairo's Museum of Islamic Art stands an eight-hundred-year-old Syrian glass bottle with a small gold mark on its label. The mark does not mean the bottle is precious, though it is. It means it was broken — shattered on the floor by the 2014 bombing across the street, then patiently glued back into a single shape.
Why North African Cities Turn Inward: The Story of the Courtyard
A courtyard plan far older than Islam turned North African houses — and the medinas built from them — to face inward. Climate and religion only half-explain why, and what finally displaced the courtyard says the rest.
The blank walls and inward courtyards of Fez, Tunis, Algiers and Cairo are usually explained by heat or religion. Both are true; neither is the whole story. The clue is in what eventually pushed the courtyard out of the modern city.
