Nadia Elokdah

Identity Crisis: Creating a Contemporary Bathhouse in Cairo Nadia Elokdah

Through unearthing and discovering the layers of culture that are both embedded within and definitive of a peoples? past and present, there can exist an architecture that will satisfy multiple conditions of contemporary society. This is where the role of regionalism aligns with culture. Where there are practices that have diminished, there becomes a need to provide spaces for their relief. The bathhouse is this relief. It serves as a space that is both social and spiritual, communal and individual, public and private. Confronting this traditional space with the developments of contemporary society provide an opportunity to understand the spaces of the bathhouse through a more exposed, public context. Through the defining of the bath, of the role of water within a desert landscape and the significance of ritual within the city and the bathhouse, issues of traditionalism and modernity are engaged, a modern regionalism is uncovered.