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Architects: Shahira Fahmy Architects
- Area: 1250 m²
- Year: 2024
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Photographs:Nour El Refai, Farida Bustani
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Manufacturers: Studio39
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Lead Architect: Shahira Fahmy
Text description provided by the architects. The nature of this project is retained to the entertainment industry and located/(anchored in) on a rooftop of a rectangular building informed with a Bauhaus language of architecture, on the western outskirts of Cairo, part of a business/commercial district, an area characterized with swift urbanization. responding to the client's brief to ensure a place of gathering, a hangout, that held people together: a place of meeting, gathering, and belonging. Food has always been an expression of care, a place of assembly, to sit down and eat together around a table, to sit, share and celebrate exchanges that enable new relationships to form, while old ones to bond. Food is at the heart of this project, an invitation to convene, an entreaty to sit, and find a moment of togetherness at odds with the frenetic pace of modern Cairo life.
Once Fahmy stepped foot on this rooftop, her approach was to keep it as a rooftop, to protect its interiority of the experience yet also to expand its views to the exterior, to the light, to the bright sunshine, shadows cast would be one of the highlights. trying to be respectful to its container rectangular building, that envelopes the space, while breaking the iron grid of the building with an emerging heart inside, a heart/center that is organic, human, moving, and malleable, an approach is more like an architecture that is emerging from inside to out. its place that is more about the interiority of the experience, and that doesn't scream loud in its context. Framed within a container of Bauhaus iron grid language Fahmy based her concept on the tension between a forceful existing architecture following very rigid lines with an emergent creature inside that is more likely to be described as a crumpled paper. a kind that emerges from within selecting to bring to the foreground a garden. The space is designed to be experienced in person rather than being a one-liner to be enjoyed in photos, to be able to uncover each layer, it is really a layered and in-depth experience.
Fahmy's architectural practice and research laboratory operate as a creative space generating designs, masterplans, interiors, and installations, with the aim to delve into and explore the spatial tension and dynamics within an urban landscape, investigating the interplay of shifting boundaries and overlapping geographies. creating a platform for discourse and dialogue between human needs and scarce resources. Usually, her approach is to look, observe, and try to understand, then it is about investing in new layers with old existing layers, excavated and brought to the foreground.
the organic amorphous structure is made almost entirely with Jereed ElNakhl, palm leaves/straws, weaved in an unobstructed presence that never clears the space, yet encircling the trees and a long undulating curvy continuous bar that seems like it has emerged from the ground to rest here for a moment. This feature which forms the loci of the project is shifted from the center of the room, like a human being's heart not quite placed in the center. and as it anchors the space, it also forms a gateway to the terrace, linking the outside to the inside, on the horizontal plane and as well the vertical, by its opening up to the sky above. This is where everything occurs, a togetherness around this continuous table like a bar with its offering of food and drinks and a place of respite, grounds us, connecting us, wrapped with this Egyptian date palm straw leave lace, connecting us to the past, heritage, crafts, locality, to facilitate a sense of protection and sense of being at home. the oculus in the roof of this structure, through which natural light filters inside, and the way the sun outside fractures the perforated palm straw lace (jereed ElNakhl) walls. In this rooftop project Fahmy's idea of an architecture that doesn't forget its foundational responsibility, to provide shelter, a roof, an enclosure, a boundedness, maybe even warmth, maybe even a togetherness with serving a bit of food.
With her organic structure, like crumpled papers, which look like a womb, she has provided a third space within the whole context of the room/rooftop, within which people could gather, find refreshment, exchange, share feelings, ideas, and greetings. inviting people to gather, break the ice, rejuvenate, becoming more intimate and presumably entertained. it is rather an intimate space rounded with a top light that feels like a sculpted skylight within a larger whole that existed before her arrival on site, stepping into Fahmy's perimeter, the project feels like opening up, revealing inner space, then a score of further spaces, places rather than spaces for better wording, Navigating those you unravel layers of mysteries, interrupted planes, unsymmetrical, curiously unfinished materiality, with her determinedly gentle structures that own the premise on which it was built. Sustainability directly influenced the choice of materials for the project's construction, reflecting Fahmy's deliberate commitment to environmentally conscious choices and the crafting of a harmonious relationship between form and function and structures. recalibration of priorities, material choices, and synthesis of form and purpose.
Fahmy's methodology is "if you can't find it, create it and produce it, she has long worked with craftsmen, artists, producers, manufacturers, builders, and engineers in the collaborative process, to arrive at a material, or expand and explore a material, to fold in other forms, elements, and structure. This working methodology is a process of ungrounding, in the sense of unearthing what is already there and yet so often buried under the dust, hence a re-interpreting and re-configuring. Egypt, and Cairo, have a wealth of unwavering resources of raw material, in a very raw form, from mud, sand, palms, and glass, with its own specificity and identity, and with an array of colors that is often very warm, starting from its black framing the Nile, once used to refer to Egypt named as 'Kemet' in Pharaoh's times, to desert colors, from red, pinkish, coppery, golden to white sands, offering a very generous palette of sunset colors, with soft pale date palms greens, that covers the vast outskirts of Cairo.
The engineering background particularly gives her a deeper intuition of possibilities, in the potentiality of making and not only design. The pinkish terracotta walls and surfaces resemble poured concrete, giving an unfinished look or a foundational feel, highlighting the boundaries and the perimeter of the space and framing them. The ridged effect on the walls is a mixture of mud, natural color pigments, hay, and local earth hand-combed by artisans working on site from top to bottom, the imperfections in it are also an expression of the hands of the artisans that had crafted it. the clientele's experience of elegant space, a possibility to touch, feel, and contemplate the multiple subtle material variations of textures and colors. palm straws have a natural color, brass and copper, terracotta clay color, and alabaster Egyptian store golden color, glass cooling effect with its tint of patina to give a silvery/champagne color like old mirrors. all these materials and colors were produced and fabricated by the hands of very talented a big group of Artisanal and craftsmanship.
With every project comes a territory, a context, an inquiry, and then a learning process continuously evolving into creative acts, which translates into a collaborative mode of operating, conceived while Fahmy was still a young architect at Cairo University, Faculty of Engineering in her 20s. The approach to detail and buildability of the structure is important, it is about one's memory, about the research, experimentation, trials and errors, and the exploration that has gone into it, about the buildability, the understanding of how each feature and how it is done. one of the key factors and features of this project design in sustainability_ a term often overused and included everywhere merely for compliance or appearance to tick the box of green architecture_ yet in this project and in many in Fahmy's work, has been an integral part of her work, often a sense of urgency or obligation or even of the scarcity of means, to oblige in a way to be resourceful whether this has been an integral part of living in Cairo, which forces you to be resourceful, woven into the very fabric of each endeavor in a project conception or execution. if you were born, raised, and living in Cairo, you know how to be resourceful, you learned if wanted something you needed to create it and produce it, architects, and artist, if you drew an idea on paper and you wanted it physical, you often have to work with your hands in collaborate work to achieve, even though I was born in the 70's in the Sadat era of infitah, you have seen how parents and grandparents operate a whole generation of learning to do it themself if they want to make it happen, so somehow it is transcendent through generations. One's relationship with the context, the ground, the city, both physical and conceptual, originates in one's own lived experience.
Lucida Restaurant, lounge and bar rooftop, designed by Shahira Fahmy, is a physical form to the wistful symmetries of the architect's language oeuvre, the place offers a range from intimate dinners to performances with 500 guests, deliberately and consistently refusing to be reduced to a nebulous 'hospitality.'
