The case studies dealt with in this paper imply a variety of strategies in the working of a physical
environment and are, perhaps instructive not only as individual cases but as a whole. Even more,
the entire group as a search for a new architecture appropriate to the present and future Arab world.
Yet one can consider these projects as representative of architectural thinking and activity in the
countries of the Arab world. As opposed to the Arab traditional built environment which is : "An
end product of an interaction between constant elements such as the Charia-Islamic law-, the
climate and variable elements such as economic and industrial means, that is to say a product of a
societal process" 2. The new built environment, product of technologies generated elsewhere has
meant that modernisation came in as a finished piece, rarely filtered through collective experience
within a nation and thus ill adapted to its particular needs. For instance in traditional environments
the architecture of the house and that of the mosque has always been an extension of each other,
modern buildings broke this link. Today’s architecture of the mosque is given a treatment as if it is
something of an other age. It is no use having a mosque that looks as if it was done in the 15th
century era and a modern housing scheme that looks as if it comes from today’s New York,
London, or Paris. The traditional built environment still has valuable lessons for the architects and
planners creating new environments, but the prognosis of its survival is uncertain. The physical
presence of a vast and varied architectural heritage which has not, for the most part, been integrated
into the international language and culture of architecture remains a challenge to all architects
building in the Arab world. The heritage is there to accept, to reject, or to engage in a dialogue by
understanding its concepts and its idioms, and by building upon it. 3