Leonardo's Bridge

I thought I would dedicate this blog post to telling you a little about the background picture of my blog. It is a model, which I made of hazel branches, of a bridge designed by Leonardo da Vinci. A sixteenth century equivalent to the Bailey Bridge, he designed it as a rapid way of crossing a river using simple timber logs to construct a self- supporting arch bridge.

My version of Leonardo's creation is mounted on a cheese board (of which I have made many since living in France for a year in 2000), made from a plank of an old oak wine barrel with two silver metal handles that I bought from IKEA.

I decided to copy it to see if it worked, which it did, and as another use for these lovely long straight hazel branches.



For a more decent picture of Leonardo's original bridge, click here

El Gouna Resort, Red Sea, Egypt

   From an old privately owned village in England to a new privately owned town on the Red Sea, El Gouna is an Integrated Tourist Resort on Egypt's Red Sea Coast, owned and developed by the Sewiris Family. Both are tourist destinations - one recycled, and the other newly built.
   El Gouna, started some 20 years ago, is built around interconnected salt water canals and lagoons dredged out of the desert plain. The development has a population of 18,000 with 5 major hotels, many villas and apartments, two marinas, a downtown area, a golf course, school, library, hospital and a university. The architecture shows variations of Hassan Fathy's vernacular, appropriate and non-intrusive. The striking aspect is the quality of the whole development; the lush landscaping, the pothole free roads, and the general tidiness is in sad contrast to the world of Egypt outside the Gates of the Main Entrance.

See their website here.

Sun rise over the golf course

The Golf course with Red Sea in the distance

Lagoon side villas

The downtown complex

Beach at the Sheraton Hotel, with created island in distance

The only bit of the real world left, a Mangrove 

Movenpick Resort and Spa

However this utopianism has something missing, with its perfect fakeness creating a simulated reality. I feel rather like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, or Patrick McGoohan in that cult TV series The Prisoner. They were both shot in created resorts, the former at Seaside Florida, a master planned community in Florida's panhandle, the latter at Portmeirion in North Wales, a resort created by Clough Williams-Ellis in the 1920's. An example of where reel meets real!