Unmatched Cairo
It’s nearly impossible for me to write here. The streets beckon, and I’m a street rat, for sure.
Right this moment, I could be in that bitsy Bab Al Louq café, having my first cup while watching people and traffic swarm by, or I could be on the subway, heading to Al Azbakiyyah, with its thousands of street stands flogging everything. Many have a tiny, tinny speaker looping the same pitch. Layered, they become a minimalist symphony of mutually cancelled come-ons.
Yesterday morning, I poked around Bab El-Wazir, with its centuries-old mosques all magnificent yet decaying. Passing that of Ibn Tulun, completed in 879 thus the oldest in Africa, I marveled at its Tower of Babel-like minaret, but I’m not really drawn to great sights. Small surprises hold me, and there is an infinity of them, for people are so delightfully fresh. At best, we’re here to amuse each other.
Here’s some good news for the local arts scene: Miami-Dade County’s longest-running juried art fair won’t, in fact, let the COVID-19 crisis kill it this year. Instead, the Beaux Arts Festival, an entirely volunteer-driven, women-run event that has warmed up winter in Coral Gables since 1952, returns in virtual fashion this weekend for its 70th edition, which starts tomorrow, January 16.
In what we might kindly refer to as the Before Times, Beaux Arts made for a staple weekend out for families and aspiring art collectors. Even as flashier events have come along (and, in some cases, gone), Beaux Arts has continued to stand out by reminding festival-goers that artists are people and artworks don t have to be a means to shift capital around; they re meant to be appreciated and enjoyed.
Top 10 Interior Design Stories of 2020
January 1, 2021
Interior Design s top 10 stories of 2020.
Gensler’s vibrant design of the company s first American headquarters is housed in a Gensler-designed building in the Culver City sector of Los Angeles. TikTok comes stateside on three floors that incorporate two additional mezzanines to total 120,000 square feet. Naturally, a sense of movement, intrinsic to TikTok’s culture, pervades.
The iconic French interior designer and entrepreneur Christian Liaigre died on September 2. He was 77 years old. Born in La Rochelle, a small coastal town in the West of France, the
Interior Design Hall-of-Famer honed his skills at the Beaux Art and then at the Arts Décoratifs. Simple, sincere, and fluid lines became a common theme of Liaigre s designs, letting the beauty and balance of a piece speak for itself.