Henry David Ayon

A 2 week journey through the Nile Valley and beyond to Abu Simbel, inspired me to return to the art of hand drawing, a once daily practice which had begun in my childhood. That excursion, which took in 12 sacred sites, proved to be a an architectural, cultural, and artistic odyssey through an antique civilization that remains unlike any other in the world.

Each drawing I completed brought me closer to understanding this culture whose substance is now a legacy of relics, the stunning remains of the accreted layers of over 30 Egyptian dynasties. I came to understand the mythic foundations of their society and its effects on the act of building, and that deeper understanding led me to articulate, in writing, observations on their belief system, the architectural character and substance of each particular monument and the physical traits of the North African, Saharan setting.

At the end of my efforts, I felt the sensation of having traveled once again through the halls of Karnak and Luxor, taken an up-river Nile cruise and walked the, at times, blistering desert sand, but now in a deeper, image rich dimension which I wanted to share with others.

My interest in Ancient Egypt began decades ago as the result of two encounters: the Temple of Dendur and associated installations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and Lous I. Kahn’s evocative travel sketches of Karnak Temple.

As a recent graduate working at the office of Kevin Roche, I was assigned the task of assisting to build a model of the Dendur Temple to be installed in the new wing of the Met. Closer study of this ancient, non-classical style (not Greek or Roman) was an architectural revelation where I was introduced to a new (for me) type of ornamental expression and space making, here based on the potential and limitations of large stone units. Integral to that style was the mystery evoked by hieroglyphic iconography and the sheltering quality of massive stone blocks.

Later, when I discovered the sketches Kahn created in1951 on his own travels through Egypt and Greece, I felt the same phantom aura of mystery in his interpretations: the angular shadows slashing through Karnak’s Hypostyle Hall and same weight of massive stones used in what must have been a powerful space-making. Here one felt the power and “correctness”of structural forces resolved in an architecture of massive presence and

artistic beauty, qualities which he expressed later in his quasi-mystical meditations on the nature of design and then channeled into his own architectural creations, balancing between modernism and a search

for the immutable nature of inspiring space.