Manshiet Nasser Residential units
Architectural research
Conceptual work
A journey towards Identity, what is identity should be the first question to look for. Identity briefly, Are the characteristics determining who or what a person, a place or a special element. Identity is an exploration of several components that entail visual identity, social identity, cultural identity and humanitarian identity. Identity in Egypt has a special characteristic of focusing on the people, their accent, their cloths, their daily activities, their living pattern, their traditions and their general behavior. Given the special characteristics in each of the explored components, the Egyptian identity is a very unique material to explore and thus gather patterns that ultimately contributes to strategic design solutions. In order to reflect such identities, architecture is one main crucial solution to create a better experience to the reflected identity. Solutions in architecture could be in the forms of: buildings, building materials that are compatible with the surrounding context, or a dominant colors reflecting the identity of a place, whether this place is in a coastal, desert or an urban context. While considering other special environmental & cultural experiences to create: special treatments that accommodate special weather condition, the use of certain motifs to reflect people’s culture, or last but not least, the use of simple design plans in order to cope with people’s traditions such as public and private zones consideration. And in order to properly engage the traced activities of the people, the urban scale identity is a design solution for a certain grid the streets trail or a main activity that people generally participate in. Considering each identity manifestation, each of the latter identities are contributions to create the strategic design solution that only aims for creating a well-researched design process all based on credible and reliable research & development process. A well-researched methodology that builds up to the desired outcome starts with; Site selection. Being the first and main task, finding a place where identity is the main feature of the place was the challenge. The choice came to Manshiet Nasser, Cairo, Egypt, a place in the center of Cairo, between two different urban areas, Mokatam and City of the Dead. In the light of the challenge of exploring the identity of the unique, Manshiet Nasser, the trigger was to further research the theory of Habitus. Theory of habitus is simply referring to the physical embodiment of culture capitals to the different ingrained habits, skills and dispositions. It basically revolves around two main aspects; constant factors which are the objectives, and variable factors which are the subjectives. Breaking the identity components, the constant features reflect the natural environment that cannot be changed such as the topographic features and the touristic/historical building (Samaan El Kharaz monastery), while the variable features focus on the people, their patterns, activities and habits or the built environment in general. Post site selection, comes the application of the mentioned theory to Manshiet Nasser forced us to look closely to the proposed site and observe the people and their activities. Manshiet Nasser turns out to be the place where all the garbage of Cairo is collected, sorted and recycled
