While the urban housing block is conceived as a residential, commercial, agricultural, and leisure space it is predominantly used for dwelling. Cairo’s housing crisis is extreme, and includes an astonishingly high rate of informal housing: around 80% of the city’s buildings are provisional structures, built without permits or even legitimate title deeds. The City of the Dead is testament to this, as are the precarious light, wood constructions often found built atop concrete buildings as rooms for newlyweds. Contemporary concrete construction, whether located in the old city or in the new suburbs of Cairo, are all built without any consideration of their spatial relationship with adjoining structures; they are also poorly designed and shoddily constructed. This repetitive construction of singular objects results in a visual monotony and a degraded urban condition. Young couples often bear the brunt of the lack of affordable housing. There is a great deal of tension in public spaces today between young couples and the police. Young couples unable to move into their own apartments become frustrated as they cannot consummate their marriages, resulting in moral crises in public spaces with engaged couples harassed by local police for improper displays of affection.
Diagram of voids in the project, which begin as light wells and ultimately become habitable exterior courtyard spaces.
I decided to treat the Darb al-Ahmar site as a whole; hence the design is of an urban block and not of separate buildings. The conceptual approach is to design an architecture of non-uniform spatial conditions. This is accomplished by defining urban space through gradients – formal, programmatic, tectonic, and material. Any activity – dwelling, market, leisure – can be shaped by this logic of gradients; furthermore, one can even find layered, periodic moments for singular or multiple activities occurring within the same space. For example, dwelling is here defined as a place for more or less permanent habitation, which is further described by hourly or yearly occupation, but never categorized as “housing” (with that term’s implications about what constitutes a family numerically or socially). Furthermore dwelling is not separated from industry or leisure; instead these spatial relationships are dependant upon whether the dwelling is short or long-term, which influences its relationship to such spaces. Short-term dwelling is then directly linked to more public spaces out of need. Similarly, a given civic space may be conceived at certain times as a weekly market; at other times the same space – say, transfigured by water, which has climatic benefits – can shift programmatically into a play space or even an area for ritual cleansing. It is in this way that the project takes issue with the modernist master plan, what with its consideration of program as fixed entities and its de facto assumption of a separation between work, residence, and leisure spaces.
DWELL is an urban housing block that does not accept conventional divisions of property or program. It is neither purely monumental nor purely contextual. Instead, form, program, structure, materiality, circulation and ownership are all considered modulated elements distributed as gradients across the site. The block consists, diagrammatically, of three parts: thin, medium, and deep sections. These in turn correspond to a respective period of duration, degree of publicity and privacy, as well as a specific tectonic and material system. For example, the thinnest portion of the block hosts short-term dwelling, and requires direct access to public spaces due to its inhabitant’s high turnover rate. This also corresponds to a tectonic and cladding system – a cantilevered steel structure whose screened façade is thinly attached. The cantilever creates a shaded civic space below; the lobbies for these rooms are located directly off of this large open space. There is one entrance that is tucked behind a café for more discrete access. The rooms themselves are organized around light wells; the courtyard finds its incarnation here as an aperture; public spaces feed directly into these spaces. The medium parts of the block have direct but more intimate lobby entrances than their thin counterparts; lobbies are also shared but by fewer people and there is less distance traveled between the lobby and a room. By contrast, the deep section, for longer-term occupation, is constructed from load-bearing stone, with thick walls and more restricted private spaces. The façade is less porous, the mashribiyya more sparingly located, the courtyard larger in scale and now functioning as an exterior room.
Mashribiyya/ Screen Studies.
Concrete Wall/ Infill Studies.
Rendering looking at the civic space below the cantilevered hotel rooms of DWELL’s north facade.
Formally, the block is more metropolitan in scale and program on the northern end of the site in dialogue with the institutional building facing it. The deeper volumes at the southernmost end of the block become community spaces that connect the block into the residential fabric around it. Situating itself at the same height as surrounding buildings and allowing multiple paths to thread its mass, the urban housing block defies a singular reading. From the neighborhood perspective the block seems to grow out of its local scale and program, while gradually becoming more monumental, whereas from the institutional side the monumental form seems to pixellate down into the neighborhood scale. The formal language of the block also plays with view and perspective, exemplifying aspects of Cairo’s downtown with its perspectival boulevards as well as the shallower spaces of the old city, with details viewed vertically instead of horizontally, at a close proximity instead of from afar. The project also looks with interest to the appropriation of residual space created by urban infrastructure, epitomized for example by the Friday market (souq al-gumma) taking place underneath the al-Tonssy highway flyover. The space located under the cantilever of the northern end of the urban block takes its cue from this vibrant space, but hopes to populate the space with a daily ebb and flow of inhabitants and activities.
Rendering of waterscape below cantilever. Glass hotel lobbies are visible in the distance.
Rendering looking westward, to the Ayyubid wall showing the civic space below the cantilevered hotel rooms.
In the recent fervor surrounding sustainability as the future of urbanism, designers and planners seem unduly focused upon technological innovation. The power of DWELL’s anisotropic design by contrast derives from its use of gradients: non-uniform in its distribution of program, the organizational structure is dynamic, responsive to evolving relationships between user’s spaces and their needs. The block is animated by an urban vision in which agrarian, commercial, civic, industrial and domestic activities are rhythmically interwoven, defying modernism’s polarity between urban and rural, work and home, leisure and commercial. In counterpoint to today’s techno-rational language of sustainability, DWELL proposes an alternate urbanism of social ecology, orchestrating spatial conditions to promote exchange between distinct social groups at all levels and scales, in the process creating a dynamic, self-sustaining system.
Rendering of glass lobby leading to studio apartments, facing west towards Darb al-Ahmar.
Ground Floor Plan.
Third Floor Plan.
Notes:
(1) Al Azhar Park is listed as one of the world’s greatest parks. See Project for Public Spaces, “60 of the World’s Great Spaces.” 2009.
http://www.pps.org/great_public_spaces/one?public_place_id=812
(2) The Park was a $30 million (USD) project funded by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) as part of its historic cities programme. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, “Al Azhar Park, Cairo and the Revitalization of Darb al-Ahmar.” 2005.
http://www.akdn.org/publications/2007_aktc_egypt.pdf
(3) Dubai’s high rises epitomize this monumental building strategy.
(4) This is also known as ‘critical regionalism’ or ‘vernacular’. The architecture in the Park illustrates a neo-Islamic style that means to fit into its local context, but instead essentializes architectural styles from Cairo’s historic buildings, grafting them onto new structures without a sense of their historicity or their relationship to building construction.
(5) By anisotropic I mean difference that is directionally variant, also described here as a non-uniform spatial distribution.
(6) See my “Cairo: Of Green Spaces,” Bidoun (vol. 3: 2005): xx-xx.
(7) Mark Jarzombek, “Guangming: New Radiant City,” Thresholds 33: Formalisms (Spring 2008): 86-89.
(8) In architecture the word “program” is used as a design guideline and in general refers to types of activities a given space is meant to host. It can be generically defined as residential, commercial, civic, etc. In this essay program is more flexibly defined as “emergent activity” that occurs through the strategic juxtaposition of spatial and functional relationships.
