Arabesque Thresholds : Artwork 12

The Mashrabiya screen was a building material with a philosophy embedded in it. In Mamluk and Ottoman domestic architecture, the carved wooden lattice screen did four things simultaneously: it allowed air through, it diffused harsh sunlight into a softer interior light, it permitted people inside to see out without being seen, and it created a pattern of shadow inside the room that shifted through the day. It was a threshold object — mediating between inside and outside, public and private, the visible and the unseen — and the three-bay format reproduces the modular construction logic of the original: identical units connected to span a wider surface, each independently structural, the whole wall a repeating argument about the same set of relationships. The rhythm of three bays is also the rhythm of the classical arcade — the architectural form that defines the entry to a mosque, a palace, or a caravanserai.