The Musical Architect - A RiadArchitecture Story

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In July of 2018, RiadArchitecture has been selected among a small group of designers by the Egyptian design film festival Film My Design (FMD) to tell the story of our Design Director (Mahmoud M M Riad)'s inception of the "Al Masmaa Project", which was Riad's master thesis at the School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning at the University of Maryland, and dealt with the relationship between Arabic Music & Architecture. This thesis has since won the Dean's Thesis Prize in 2009, AIA Maryland's Graduate Design Award in 2009, and the Cairo Design Award in 2017, and has been published as "Al Masmaa': The Place for Listening" which can be purchased through most online retailers including Amazon.com (link here).

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FMD has paired RiadArchitecture with up n coming filmmakers Rewind N' Play (Ally Eid & Peter Magdy). For the next few months, Rewind N' Play spent countless hours with Riad, interviewing and shooting footage of RiadArchitecture Generation 03. Rather than focus solely on Riad's research, they found a story they wanted to tell about an architect that had to leave his hometown in order to truly discover what it means to be Egyptian.

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The Musical Architect is a 26 minute documentary that includes interviews with the legendary musician Omar Khairat (telling the story of his uncle, Architect Abu Bakr Khairat, who was another Egyptian Architect who was fascinated with the coloration between music and architecture), and breakthrough Artist Hadir Akabawi (Music Visualized) - check out the FMD trailer here. It first premiered at the Zawya Cinema in Cairo on the 14th of February, 2019, and was published on youtube (link here) on the 8th of November, 2019.