Annihilation and Perpetual Existence
Lead Architect: Waleed Arafa
Partner and Senior Architect: Haidy Wael
Stone Work: Al Motassem-Zein
Photos: The GS Studio by Georges and Samuel Mohsen
Year
2026
Location
Doha, Qatar.
Scope
Design and Build
Status
Completed
Conceptual Statement
A creative person’s greatest creative output is their own becoming.
An ongoing process of questioning, arriving at temporal answers, applying these answers to a given intersection between time, space, people and states of being, as well as bearing the consequences of it all.
Enduring these passions is what shapes one’s form and distills one’s essence.
This understanding of creativity expands its definition beyond the currently dominant presumptions of what defines a designer, artist, craftsman or artisan. It also renders invalid nuances that separate them.
It could be seen as an elitist and exclusivist understanding; resulting in perceiving acts and products, accepted as works of design or art, as uncreative and unartistic.
Creativity may be as subtle as everyday actions of simple people in a place like Cairo; a street-sweeper, baker, teacher, parent or a little school girl. Or overwhelmingly vivid, such as the awe-inspiring, courageous and life-treasuring actions of people facing genocide in Gaza, where matter and corporeality are violently shattered, yet manifesting stronger forms of existence.
Both are creatively navigating grand existential questions by merely living life. They are all creatives and their perpetual becoming is their ultimate opus.
Conceptual Statement
Human strife is a transcendental timeless reality, yet such timelessness is experienced in realtime.
Graphite and diamond are both carbon, chemically identical yet physically -and one may argue metaphysically- contrasting. Graphite is soft and opaque and diamond is the hardest and most transparent material on earth. The passions of high temperature and pressure gives the latter an incredibly creative geometrical crystalline order making it rarer, nobler and incomparably precious.
Humans and rock are earthly constitutions, endowed with an ability of transformation. They may come from different points of departure and through infinitely different routes, nonetheless they are all capable of journeying, each in their own time and intention.
They are all creatives, mapping a background that is simultaneously the foreground.
This journey is represented by the physical diminishing of different types of rock; opaque, translucent and transparent, all situated according to the geometrical grid that begets the 28 letter-beings of the Arabic language; alluding to the infinitely-diverse potential meanings that could become.
“…for, behold, there are rocks from which streams gush forth; and, behold, there are some from which, when they are cleft, water issues; and, behold, there are some that fall down for awe of God…” The Heifer, verse 74
