beautiful room

Just now I was again admiring this classic photo of Oriental Hall, at the Tahrir (downtown) campus of the American University in Cairo.

This gem of a building will not be sold, though other parts of the downtown campus will be, now that we have relocated to the desert. The massive School of Continuing Education will continue to be based downtown, as will the AUC Press.

Oriental Hall is located in Main Building, which literally used to be a palace before the American University was founded in 1919. I gave my first public talk on Tool-Being in this room, in the fall of 2002. In December 2003, Bruno Latour visited Cairo and also spoke in this room, on the topic of “How is the Price of Apricots Determined in Paris?”

Edward Said, Terry Eagleton, and Czech President Vaclav Klaus have also spoken in this room. (Among many others. Those are just the people I’ve seen there personally.)