Connect Create Cairo - 2012

Exhibition / Workshop (2012) -Worked on this challenging exhibition project with York Professor Zulfikar Hirji , and Sneha Sumanth. Using 3D printing process to engage in historical understanding of Cairo city fabric, and the architectural design process. The participants were high school teachers and students. This event was set at the Ismaili Centre in Toronto. The event was then turned into a travelling exhibition/workshops for other cities also.

Explore Cairo through an exhibition showcasing the city's historical urban landscape and architectural heritage. Join a 3D printing workshop to design and build a model house that you can place in the exhibition's centre piece - an architectural model of Cairo's historical Islamic quarter. Take a journey into a city's past to think creatively about cities and urban futures, wherever you live. The workshops were held at the Ismaili Centre , Toronto, on Sundays, starting in mid-March to November 2015.

Having travelled, lived and worked in Cairo, in 2009, on a day to day basis for several months, it was important to provide adequate context and day to day understanding for students participating in the workshops - the conventional sequence of an architect’s design process is always based making things as tangible as possible while also allowing thougth process to develop in a more abstract way if needed. Chosing a physical site - in the vicinity of Alzhar Park and the Citadel - provided a reference point to a ‘real place’ in this exploration. We started the process by developing a set of prototype buildings models which would be based in reality, but given the timeframe allotted for students to learn the software and to think about some design ideas, and the time required for the 3D printing process, a set of typical residential building model typologies were prepared. At the outset the models seemed contrived but we soon found ways to simplify them and making them more abstract and thus more generic in their shape and form and adaptable to the context. Given the number of participants anticipated to attend, we would have over a hundred modeled variations would be printed. The scale for the site model and the individual models prepared by the participants posed a significant challenge at first. But this was overcome by a trial and error process during the printing of each model. A based model (CNC prototyping model) represented a portion of Cairo as a physical setting for the more individualized responses - the specific site would be chosen by the participant. The models could be manipulated and morphed into more personalized responses by each participant. The end result was a relatively organic process by which the models were developed and positioned on the base model giving a organic representation of how a city develops over time. Participating students and teachers, with no background in architecture, nor any understanding of a formal design process, designed their objects based purely on intuition.