Croquis design director- founder of Design & More think-tank and Arabesque Islam El Mashtooly is an architect, urbanist and educator, who embraces a design philosophy which has the human condition at its heart. He is committed to architecture that supports and enhances communities, with a philosophy emphasising harmony within context, alongside the climate, culture and traditions of the MENA region. His contribution to urban design has been acknowledged both regionally and internationally. In 2015 Mashtooly was awarded Middle East Young Architect of the Year and the Outstanding Individual in the Middle East Consultant Awards. Twelve months on, his project entitled Uptown Makkah won the title of Residential Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin. The year was rounded off for Mashtooly with an AIA ME Honorable Award for his Egyptian Science City project. The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, held in 2018, saw him curating the Egyptian National Pavilion. Mashtooly has retained his position in the top 50 Most Influential Architects in the Middle East for five consecutive years. He has continually been nominated for regional and international architecture awards, winning the United International Architects Award in Baku, and the Competition entries - Future Projects at World Architecture Festival in Amsterdam for his Baghdad Design Center. His work embodies a sense of the architecture vocabulary that fuses urbanism and design. Ambitious to dive into a contemporary rational interpretation that embraces sensibility, variety and sensitivity, his architectural vernacular has humanity at its heart with community, connectivity and the natural world organically evolving from a base in the personal.