The Craft of Mashrabiya Making

This vernacular architectural construction requires significant craftsmanship in developing the individually hand-turned parts that work together in the overall assembly. As these craftsmen have become more and more scarce, the architecture has continued to become a caricature, losing much of its cultural value and passive performative functions.

The high cost of manufacturing these constructions and maintaining their performance is simply no longer feasible under the historic model of production (Abdelgelil 2006). Similar to the notion of Undrawable Architecture documented by Dritsas and Yeo (2013, 834), these constructions are “underpinned by tacit tectonic knowledge passed along generations which was never formalized, and a product of artisan craftwork of phenomenal complexity that was manually re-produced but never rationalized.”