Sentimentalism and Contemporary Art in Interpreting Cairo Identity within Interior Design

Abstract

The well-being and satisfaction of citizens and visitors are strongly influenced by the image of a city or place, to which monumental or iconic buildings have a great contribution. Thus, the most familiar way to identify a city is to go through its heritage as historical elements, monuments and famous ornamentation related to the city’s civilization, as well as inspiring from the city’s landmarks and architecture, but manipulating the space to feel the identity of a city through the context of design is a different vision. Without using those defined elements directly to refer to the identity of Cairo, the researchers introduced this different vision about spatial design through the space atmosphere and how could we touch the identity implied through the art and design of space, thus we can achieve emotional interaction between the space and the one dealing within it.1.IntroductionThe city is a powerful source of expressive symbols and signs, People know their location in spaces and differentiate themselves from others through a reading of the elements that make up places. Identity is an important issue because it involves the self-identity has consequences for cognition, affect, and behaviour.Studies have indicated that globalization, despite all the positive effects, has resulted in aloss of identity within a city, as acity develops over time, its identity is envolving as well and may even be lost due to rapid and constant changes it is subjected to.Cairo is not just a city ,it is the capital city,one of the oldest and the most centerilized in Egypt and the crossroad of many civilizations, which consequently leads Cairo to be highly exposed to globalization. In this research ,we –researchers-seek interior design with the spirit of Contemporary Cairo identitiy,but there are some questions have to be answered to achieve this objective. how Contemporary Cairo looks like? What are the main features of Contemporary Cairo ? and does it creates its features from its history or it has been transformed into different characteristics ?.Also, does the interior design should include historical items to express Cairo identity, or could emotions of living people and their vision about the identity do?. For the sake of answering all these questions, we have done a survey to collect data about the vision of Contemporary Cairo identity, so as to prove if this concept is applicable or not.

Keywords

• cairo identity; old cairo; contemporary cairo; contemporary art; indirect inspiration