Housing Cairo review on world-architects.com

Early this year Ruby Press published Housing Cairo: The Informal Response by Marc Angélil and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes in collaboration with Something Fantastic and CLUSTER, which explores the architecture of informality in the Egyptian capital. Since it was published, research from the book has been shown at Arc En Rêve-Centre d’Architecture in Bordeaux and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Now seems a fitting time then to reflect upon Housing Cairo’s investigations and world-architects.com have just published a review of the book:

“This is ostensibly a book about architecture and urbanism. But in a sense it is fitting to describe it as first and foremost a book about language. In recent years it is the language of the informal – both in architectural form and linguistic expression – which has come to dominate discourse on future city-making across the globe […]

It is a mistake to see informal and formal as binary opposites. When the distinction between the two is taken as simply as this, the informal becomes a means of fueling neoliberal manifestations of the formal. More appropriate is editor Charlotte Malterre-Barthes’ choice of language on this point: she uses the analogy of a thermometer to discuss the gradient that exists between and thus joins up the two.”

You can read the review it in full here and order your own copy of Housing Cairo: The Informal Response direct from Ruby Press, here.