05.07.2005 to 25.09.2005
Sir Keppel A. C. Creswell (1879-1974) is considered a founder of Islamic building research. His series of monumental publications on early Islamic, Abbasidian and Mamelukian architecture shows the extraordinary accuracy with which he drew precise plans of sometimes disordered heaps of ruins, as well as the documentary photographs he began to take at the beginning of the 20th century. Creswell's final field of research was Cairo, where he worked into his old age on the continuation of his previous two volumes about the Islamic architecture of Egypt.
Today Creswell's archives are retained by the American University in Cairo, his photographic documentation in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
With the kind permission of the Rare Books and Special Collections Library of the American University in Cairo, the Museum for Islamic Art is showing a selection of unpublished photographs in its exhibition. In parallel with this, the American University has also provided modern views of the same buildings and sites, which documents the painful loss of monuments in a dynamic metropolis.
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