The Secrets of Arabic Calligraphy in Modern Architecture: When the Letter Left the Page

For centuries the Arabic letter lived on paper, in the Qur’an, in manuscripts and around the domes and doorways of mosques; here it leaves the page and enters the body of the building. The opening chapters read the Great Umayyad Mosque as a page of stone, take the dot as a unit of measure and Ibn Muqla as the hidden architect of proportion, and see geometry in Kufic, motion in Thuluth and a minaret or tower in the upright alif. The book then moves through Dubai’s Museum of the Future, designed by Shaun Killa with a calligraphic façade bound to the name of Mattar bin Lahej, through Doha with Jean Nouvel, the mashrabiya rising up Doha Tower and I. M. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art, and through the work of Zaha Hadid, Hassan Massoudy, eL Seed and Tadao Ando. It warns against lettering sprayed like perfume or makeup over an anonymous global building, and imagines the letter as a shading façade, a bridge, a tower, the entrance a child walks through in a library and a reminder of a mother’s voice for an Arab immigrant in New York. The closing chapters let the calligrapher and the architect speak to each other, insist that Damascus does not need to become Dubai, and end with a calligrapher in a city of the future, still bent over a sheet of paper, while the letter waits for architecture to read it.