📸 To the Department of Architecture at Fine Arts Cairo | Returning to Thank the Professors Who Formed Us

This photo was taken in 2013, when I returned to the Department of Architecture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University in Cairo after completing my PhD abroad. I came back for a simple reason: to thank the professors who shaped us.

Looking at this image today reminds me of how fortunate I was to begin my academic journey surrounded by a remarkable generation of professors and teachers. These were not only architects, urban designers, and academics. They were intellectuals with deep cultural grounding, strong ethical values, and a profound belief that architecture was a civilizational responsibility.

Architectural education at Fine Arts was, and thankfully remains in Egypt, a rigorous five-year formation rooted in studio culture, long-duration mentorship, and disciplinary immersion. The studio culture was demanding. Long nights, difficult juries, hand drawing, theory, urbanism, structures, and composition were inseparable parts of the architect’s formation. And yes, many of us failed courses—especially the studio.

I still remember the strange dark humor after difficult juries. We would take our drafting boards wrapped with Canson paper and, with the help of Uncle Lotfy and Uncle Saied, organize symbolic mourning ceremonies for failed studio projects, almost like architectural funeral tents. Looking back today, it sounds surreal. But those moments created something powerful: solidarity, humility, resilience, friendship, and collective identity.

We were not isolated individuals optimizing personal satisfaction. We belonged to a generation that grew together through shared struggle, criticism, long nights, and collective pressure. The studio was not only a place of production. It was a social and intellectual community.

We were educated in a system that believed architecture could not be learned through comfort, continuous reassurance, or transactional educational relationships. Students were expected to struggle, fail, repeat studios, accept difficult criticism, and grow through discipline and resilience. Respect for professors did not emerge from fear alone, but from recognition that knowledge, experience, and culture required humility before mastery. We did not enter the studio as clients seeking satisfaction. We entered as apprentices, being formed into architects.

What made that generation of professors exceptional was also its true international intellectual diversity. Many had studied in France, Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. Different architectural cultures coexisted inside the department. It was genuine internationalization rooted in intellectual exchange, not institutional self-reproduction.

Most importantly, they believed in values larger than themselves: • architecture as culture • education as mentorship • rigor over popularity • discipline with humanity • transmission across generations

Grateful to: Prof. Mohamed Tawfik Abdelgawad, Prof. Ahmed Helal, Prof. Mahmoud Teelab, Prof. Talat El @Dali, Prof. Ahmed Radwan, Prof. Elghazali Kesseiba, Prof. Aly Al Arrousi, Prof. Sadek Shash, Prof. Moshira El Rafey, @Prof. Mohamed Magdy Abulnour, Prof. Yehia El Zeiny, and Prof. Ahmed Anani.

And also remembering colleagues and friends from that formative period: Mahmoud Ghoneem, Alia Amer, Amin Amin, and Eman Abdelazem.

Looking back today, I realize that much of what shaped me academically did not come only from courses themselves, but from the seriousness of the educational culture surrounding them. Academic institutions are ultimately remembered through people, values, friendship, struggle, and intellectual atmosphere, not only buildings or rankings.

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