Every year Hanbury Evans sponsors a firm Design Retreat in conjunction with the Virginia Tech College of Architecture and Urban Studies. This is an incredible opportunity and part of our growing "Legacy Program" that we participate in for many reasons - the first, obviously, to find opportunities to study architecture, but also to create references for future design, to continually seek examples for improving design, to engage in a shared team experience with our fellow colleagues, and finally (and most importantly for me) as a way to fulfill our yearning for nourishment, exploration, and growth, in the spirit of self-renewal professionally as architects and stewards of the built environment that we all live in.
I had this wonderful, amazing and surreal opportunity to travel to Egypt, a place so rich with cultural heritage, a place so mystical and unique that it's almost difficult to grasp the reality of actually being there. We traveled to the dense, raw, chaotic, and gritty yet fantastic city of Cairo, then up the intense Nile Valley from Abu Simbel and Aswan to Luxor, and ended the program in beautiful Alexandria, a gem along the cerulean blue waters of the Mediterranean.
These images that I am sharing with you are very meaningful to me. They have been sort of a reflection of personal observations, a series of photographic essays on culture and people, light and shadow, monumentality and scale, texture and color, religion and faith, contrast from urban landscape to desert valley, and of course, architecture and detail. I hope they tell you stories....and I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I enjoyed taking them.
