People Who Shaped My Life

• My late father, who instilled in me many of the values and principles that later made my success possible.
• My professors, who taught me what architecture is: the late Ali Labib Gabr, the late Hassan Shafei and the late Sherif Noman.
• My wife, who shared my long professional journey and was a model of sacrifice and generosity. May God envelop her in His mercy.
• The head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Illinois, who helped me persuade the mission supervisor to let me go to San Francisco, California, to complete my practical training after my master's degree.
• The architect Salah Zeitoun, my professional partner and brother from the start of my practice after returning in 1948. Through calm dialogue we achieved together everything we aspired to.
• Dr Ahmed Moharram, who contributed to the success of many projects we worked on together, among them the Benghazi Cultural Centre competition and the Safir Hotel in Dokki.
• The late Dr William Selim Hanna, who gave me the opportunity to join him in preparing the documents for the salvage of the Philae temples and supervising its planning and architectural execution, one of the national projects I worked on.
• Mr Abdel Latif El-Baghdadi, who, as Minister of Municipal Affairs, appointed me director-general of buildings and planning at Cairo Municipality when I was a third-grade engineer at the Buildings Department. He entrusted me with the preliminary and final design, working drawings and supervision of Cairo Stadium, a national project I am very proud of.
• Dr Mohamed Abdel Kader Hatem, general supervisor of the Specialised National Councils. I learned much from him in our discussions about a hotel project when he was Minister of Tourism. The State Incentive Prize I received in 1963 bore his signature as Minister of Culture, and he kindly opened my exhibition of fifty years of work, which helped me win the State Merit Prize in the Arts on 20 June 1990.

Written in Arabic by Mostafa Shawky. English translation.