-Caveat Lector- From http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/532/eg6.htm }}>Begin Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 3 - 9 May 2001 Issue No.532 Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 Current issue | Previous issue | Site map A sense of history A specialised British magazine has awarded the new Library of Alexandria the world construction design prize for the year 2000. Rehab Saad writes An updated version of Alexandria Library, located on the corniche, is already famous for its stylised architecture Civil Engineering, a British engineering and construction magazine, has awarded the Library of Alexandria a prize for the best construction design in the world for the year 2000. The library beat several other giant proje cts that were also nominated, including the tunnel that connects Denmark with Sweden and the biological sciences building in Hong Kong. Egypt's Higher Education Minister Moufid Shehab commented, "This award is not given to a certain engineer, contractor or company. It is given to a whole project. The Alexandria Library is now considered the best construct ion project in the whole world. I believe this international esteem is deserved, especially coming from an international and impartial body. It proves that the project has what it needs to be a success: sound planning and execution by the companies that designed and managed the project. It shows, too, that the consultant engineers, the Egyptian workers and the administration all worked with a team spirit." Consultant engineer Mamdouh Hamza said that the jury was impressed with the high quality of the product, despite its complexity. Egypt can be particularly proud of the award. Egyptian engineers planned the project and Egy ptian contractors carried it out. Hamza explained that Egyptians executed 86 per cent of the project, designed 76 per cent of it and supervised 70 per cent. The new library is built roughly on the site of its ancient predecessor. The former library was burnt some 2000 years ago. Its successor is designed as a simple circle, 160 metres in diameter. It goes from 15.8 metres und erground to 37 metres above ground. This circle, inclined towards the sea, is partly submerged under a pool of water. This circular design is meant as a symbol of the rising Egyptian cultural sun that will "illuminate the world and human civilisation." An inclined roof allows indirect daylight and a clear view of the sea. The building is surrounded by a wall clad in Aswan granite inscribed with calligraphy representing world civilisations . Library officials said that these texts symbolise the region's heritage and the library's purpose: to illuminate the world with culture again. According to site engineer Tamer Saffieddin, the project was given the award not only because of the quality of construction but also for its use of modern technology. "The building is near the sea and there are four unde rground floors which required special construction. Modern technology enabled us to establish a building that could resist sea-water pressure. The sea is eight metres higher than the building and there was difficulty digg ing in the area," Saffieddin told Al Ahram Weekly, explaining the technical accomplishment. He added that the engineers used a special concrete as well as machined steel wedges that resist water pressure and can survive i n the coastal soil. "The building is designed to survive for 200 years," Saffieddin said. According to library officials, about 98 per cent of the landscaping is complete, including the floors, the cladding of the roof and the plantations of palm and olive trees. The landscape also includes a moat that surroun ds a major part of the building and serves, instead of fences, as a border to the library. Most of the furniture, including book shelves and desks, is in place. Pilot operations of the library and testing systems and equi pment, are under way. The project includes three main buildings; the library is one of them. The other two are a conference centre (built in 1992) and a spherical planetarium built of steel, concrete and fibre glass to protect it from the sea weather. In the planetarium, 100 people can sit and enjoy scientific films on astronomy. A special museum for underwater monuments discovered in the eastern harbour has been built under the planetarium. A special law, No1 for 2001 was passed by the People's Assembly on February 11, making the library an affiliate of the Presidency of the Republic. Library officials view this as a way of escaping red tape. The idea for the new library emerged in the 1970s. The professors of Alexandria University wanted to have a library up to international standards. In the 1980s, the idea grew. The Egyptian government, in close cooperation with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) decided to develop Alexandria as a centre of culture, education and science. In 1988, UNESCO appealed to governments, organisations and i ndividuals around the world to support the project. After the appeal, President Hosni Mubarak laid the foundation stone of the library. This was followed by a meeting in Aswan on February 12, 1990, of members of the International Honorary Commission for the library. The commission included heads of state and world dignitaries. At the meeting, the commissi on signed the Aswan Declaration for the revival of the ancient Library of Alexandria. A mere 24 hours after, Arab countries donated $65 million to the project. Ismail Osman, chairman of the Arab Contractors Company (which is executing the project), said that construction work started on May 15, 1995 and ended on December 31, 1999. The project has cost US$212 million. Like the ancient library, built in the 4th century BC by Ptolemy Soter, and boasting such scholars as Euclid, Erastosthenes, Heron and Archimedes, the new library is intended, as officials put it, to be "the university of all universities." The ancient library stored about 700,000 volumes. The new one will have 500,000 volumes. That number will increase to 8 million in the first five years. The library will also have 50,000 maps, 100,000 manuscripts, 30 data bases, 10,000 rare books, 100 CD Rom titles, 200,000 audio tapes and 50,000 video tapes. The library consists of 11 floors, four underground and seven above. Its books cover Egyptian and Mediterranean civilisation, humanities, arts, energy, science and technology, religion, socio-economics and other topics. M ost of the books were either bought by the library or donated by governments, organisations and individuals. Italy, through UNESCO, has established a special laboratory for the restoration of books and manuscripts. Ismail Serageddin, manager of the Library of Alexandria, said that the library will also have a special cultural programme. International figures will be invited to the library to lecture on all fields of human endeavour. Recommend this page Related stories: Plain Talk 18 - 24 January 2001 A very bookish phoenix 21 - 27 December 2000 Too close for comfort? 22 - 28 July 1999 Related links: Alexandria library Alexandria 2000 � Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved [EMAIL PROTECTED] End<{{ &&&&&&& From http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/534/op3.htm }}>Begin Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 17 - 23 May 2001 Issue No.534 Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 Current issue | Previous issue | Site map The Alexandria library For the new Alexandria library to deserve being regarded as a successor to its ancient namesake, Mohamed Sid-Ahmed believes given conditions must be met The revival of the Alexandria library is of deep cultural significance in that it is an ambitious attempt to recreate a glorious chapter in Egypt's history as the cultural capital of the world. But any connection between the modern Alexandria library and the famous ancient one can only be purely symbolic. The original library was a repository of all the knowledge available to the civilised world in ancient times, its status recognised by all as the dynamic hub of cultural life for close on seven hundred years. For the new library to earn recognition as a worthy successor of the first, it will have to establish its credentials as an innovative experiment in the here and now. While any attempt to preserve and build on a legacy is commendable, the new Alexandria library will have to be future-oriented, not a mere continuation of what its namesake was in a distant past. A library is not just a receptacle to store information, but reflects a societal need for a certain level of information. The need arises when society reaches a stage of cultural maturity that can only be sustained and developed through a symbiotic relationship with the available information on the basis of which knowledge is built. The ancient Alexandria library was not only a storehouse housing manuscripts gathered throughout ancient times, from 400 BC to 300 AD, it was the intellectual centre of Hellenistic culture. The port of Alexandria was a favoured destination for ships from all over the civilised world. The authorities would visit the ships, borrow whatever documents or manuscripts they carried, copy the data they contained by hand and give the original texts back. The library thus accumulated all available information that could be accessed at the time and scholars flocked to work on the manuscripts collected from all parts of the then known world. However, at a time when literacy was the privilege of limited elites, the library was more of a museum than a library open to the ordinary layman. What it contained was seen as rare masterpieces rather than as repositories of knowledge accessible to the wide public. Nobody knows exactly when or how the Alexandria library disappeared, although it is commonly believed to have burnt down. But what is certain is that, with the disappearance of the library, the Hellenistic civilisation suffered a serious setback sometime before the advent of Islam. Actually, civilisation as a whole witnessed a 'cultural discontinuity' because no other library at the time sheltered anything comparable to the Alexandria library. History lost its memory. A great effort was needed by Islamic scholars to restore it. But however admirable the efforts they furnished to preserve or reproduce the works of great thinkers of ancient civilisations -- while adding their own valuable contribution to humanity's common cultural legacy -- the Alexandria library remains a unique phenomenon that is impossible to recreate integrally. The Alexandria library had a specific function, which was to collect, classify (its catalogues were among the earliest examples of bibliography) and preserve human knowledge, culture and civilisation in a variety of fields and guarantee their transmission to future generations. Painstakingly copied out on parchment, the library's collection of volumes was necessarily limited in number and vulnerable to fire and other natural -- or man-made -- disasters. This is in fact what happened to the Alexandria library, which disappeared completely, its invaluable collection of volumes irretrievably lost. The situation changed radically with the invention in 1434 by Gutenberg in Germany of the printing press and the replacement of parchment by paper. The printed book meant that knowledge was no longer limited to a privilege elite. The dissemination of knowledge and culture became possible. The printing press paved the way to the Renaissance, then to the age of Enlightenment. Libraries were no longer museums, but springboards for the propagation of the knowledge that stands at the heart of modern civilisation. The revival of the Alexandria library will be meaningless if it is to be nothing more than one more of the millions of libraries established after the invention of printing which deal essentially with the printed book. The new Alexandria library must aspire to be more than a revival of the ancient library or a replica of any other pre- or post-Gutenberg library. At a time when our very understanding of knowledge is evolving, it should set its sights on becoming a trend-setter for libraries in the new millennium. Books will have neither the function they had before the first millennium nor what they have had since the middle of the second millennium, but what they promise to become in the third millennium; a means of transmitting information side by side with other audio-visual tools, like television, radio, computers etc. In the age of the information revolution, a book will have to become an interactive medium capable of integrating new data all the time. In a word, the time has come to launch the interactive book of the communication age, which will not have one specific author only, but will be constantly enriched by new contributions all the time. All the ingredients for such a book already exist. Stored in a computer's memory, its paper format is only a moment in its indefinite development, the moment where the book is available to be read, but which will never be its definitive form. Books of this kind will never suffer the fate of the volumes housed in the ancient Alexandria library. If the Alexandria library becomes associated with the launching of the "interactive" book, which would personify the product of collective thinking, and therefore of a higher level of intelligence, understanding, culture and civilisation, the new Alexandria library will have introduced something new. This could make Alexandria, once the cultural capital of Hellenistic civilisation, the cultural capital of contemporary Mediterranean civilisation. But it will also have to face very serious challenges. First and foremost, it will have to face the challenge that Israel represents. A library is a long-term project. It cannot be visualised as an issue of the present day only. It will have to face the cultural, scientific and social challenges that Israel embodies, in a context where it is not war but peaceful rivalry that will determine which of the competitors is more worthy of becoming the leading culture and civilisation. This type of challenge makes the library not a luxury, but an indispensable necessity for future identity and cultural survival, especially in a globalist environment in which demarcation lines are bound to erode. Another expression of this type of challenge is the ability of the library to sponsor dialogues between civilisations and not allow these dialogues to degenerate into clashes. Reviving the Alexandria library along the lines we mentioned would provide it with the means to undertake such a momentous task. The fulfillment of the task requires nothing less than a cultural revolution, which in turn requires the eradication of illiteracy, not only of the classical, established, type of illiteracy, namely, the inability to read and write, but also present-day illiteracy, that is, computer-illiteracy. We have seen how India, which, like Egypt, is an ancient civilisation with many of the problems faced by a developing country, made amazing strides forward in the field of computer software. Today, India competes with Silicon Valley in California, the world's most advanced centre for the development of computer sciences. This is proof that not only India but other ancient civilisations carry within them the seeds of a new awakening, and that, in the right climate and with sufficient determination, these seeds can yield fruit. Recommend this page Related stories: Reviving the future 10 - 16 May 2001 A sense of history 3 - 9 May 2001 A very bookish phoenix 21 - 27 December 2000 � Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. 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