AT WORK: Al-Sokray is an engineer by profession and paper artist by passion.        Photos by Umer Nangiana

By Umer Nangiana


Using his natural talent combined with his technical education, he creates huge three-dimensional structures and replicas of important building entirely from paper. Hussain Hassan al-Sokray, the Egyptian artist who is an engineer by profession, has been creating beautiful replica buildings from paper for more than a decade.
Recently, he has employed computer into the designing part of the structures while he still constructs the buildings with his hands, folding and joining different parts of the structure made from paper and designed on computer.
Sitting in the Souq Waqif Art Centre, he displayed two of his most splendid works, the Masjid Al-Haram model and a cathedral. He is also working on making the replica of Walt Disney Castle these days. Hundreds of visitors saw him creating paper buildings at the art centre during the Eid festival.
“I started this when I was college and we were studying design. When I saw different designs of for instance engines, buildings and other craft, I liked them and they stayed with me in my imagination all the time. They in fact inspired me to go for this paper art eventually,” al-Sokray told Community.
“Now, I design buildings and structures first on computer and print the sheets before folding and arranging them into structures. I find these buildings impressive. I search for these structures and other important buildings on the Internet and try to locate as many pictures as possible from different angles and with the help of them, I design my models,” he added referring to the two models he had in front of him.
Al-Sokray said he has mastered this art after his engineering. Though he has been making such structures before completing his engineering degree but it would not come out this good. Engineering has helped him master the angles and employ the structure building techniques scientifically in designing the model buildings.
It takes him three to four days to design the building and then another four days to erect the structure. So basically in a week’s time, he can complete the entire building.
“I use the common available programmes on the computer such as Sketch Up for the purpose of designing the buildings. I always try to keep a particular building look as close to the original as possible, keeping its original colour scheme in tact because I like it in original,” said the artist. However, sometimes he does alter with the colour scheme to give it his own touch and it comes out really nice.
Interestingly it was the word ‘paper’ derives its origin to the country of origin of al-Sokray, Egypt. It comes from papyrus, the name of the ancient material manufactured from beaten reeds in Egypt as far back as the third millennium BC.
The earliest known example of ‘paper folding’ is an ancient Egyptian map, drawn on papyrus and folded into rectangular forms like a modern road map. However, it does not appear that intricate paper folding as an art form became possible until the introduction of wood-pulp based papers in China, where its invention is credited to Cai Lun in the Eastern Han Dynasty, in the 2nd century BC.
It is not known when the earliest use of folded paper as a medium was made, although it likely began shortly after the development of paper itself. The first Japanese origami is dated from the 6th century AD.
Al-Sokray designed and created the replica of the Masjid Al-aram which is also called the Sacred Mosque, and the Grand Mosque Mecca. It is the largest mosque in the world and surrounds Islam’s holiest place, the Ka’aba, in the city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
Muslims face in the direction of the Ka’aba while performing obligatory daily prayers. One of the five pillars of Islam requires every Muslim to perform the Haj pilgrimage at least once in his or her lifetime if able to do so, including circumambulation of the Ka’aba.
The Ka’aba is a cuboid-shaped building in the centre of the Masjid Al-Haram and is one of the most sacred sites in Islam. All Muslims around the world face the Ka’aba during prayers, no matter where they are. The Haj requires pilgrims to walk seven times around the Ka’aba in a counter-clockwise direction. Al-Sokray’s model explicitly shows all that in the grand structure.