Delta Strikes Back:

Nine Projects for El Haraneyah

Stills
Excerpts from 1 minute movies made on site

CAIRO BETWEEN NO LONGER

AND NOT YET; DELTA MEGALOPOLIS 1
Lada Hršak, Holger Gladys, Jana Crepon

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READING AND WRITING CAIRO 25

Billy Nolan

8 Stories 27

Colophon 30
CAIRO BETWEEN NO LONGER AND NOT YET;
DELTA MEGALOPOLIS

Lada Hršak, Jana Crepon, Billy Nolan, Holger Gladys

The studio will be run in parallel between Amsterdam Academy

of Architecture and the German University Cairo (GUC), with
a collective workshop and study-trip in Cairo from 15 to 22
September 2017. Dutch and Egyptian students will work on
resetting the current nature-urban divide. They will be asked
to rediscover the potential of nature as co-creator for the new
metropolitan developments.

The case study centres on the peri-urban landscape of Al

Haraneyah at the southern edge of Giza, an area that rapid
urbanization could turn into just another massive housing
district. Peri-urban areas are typically unplanned, emerging
constellations with little or no integration of infrastructure and
population, and growing environmental and social problems.
Without wanting to appear indifferent to the problematic reality
of the metropolitan edge, we could view the rural-urban fringe
as a landscape in its own right, a place to forge new coalitions
between ‘nature and culture’ as part of
the urban realm. This cross-section of the site indicates possible
conditions, stretching from the desert, across the Delta fringes
into the urban tissue.

Key questions include: How can nature and culture reconnect

and co-exist to add new layers of practice to the contemporary
megalopolis? How can the delta nature be used to shape new
settlement patterns and become a cocreator of a new metropolis
where architecture and landscape act as equal partners, allowing
new spaces and growth patterns? As the studio will investigate
the maximum range of scales, from delta to detail, what are the
climate conditions at the scale of the delta, the green corridor,
and the neighbourhood?
fig. 1, project area
READING AND WRITING CAIRO

Billy Nolan

Architecture has always been as much about generating ideas and

texts as it has about constructing buildings and cities.
Architectural ideas are communicated not only through buildings
and images, but also through words.

Because designing, making, researching and writing can all

enhance one another, reading and writing Cairo will run in
tandem with the project. This enables students to ref lect on
and support their design work through research, reading and
writing. They will explore different methods of inquiry, conduct
fundamental writing tasks, and develop analyses of words and
images. The aim of the tast is to strengthen and refine skills
in research, documentation, critical analysis, and written
communication.

Classes take the form of seminars and hands-on workshops.

Students are therefore expected to actively contribute and
lead the discussion, and to formulate a subject in consultation
with the tutor. The first three-weeks involve close interaction
between the writing and the project to ensure a clear and
coherent relationship between the two. This phase culminates
in a one-minute pitch by each student in which they define their
area of interest.

In the next phase, students research and write a paper that

explores the core question developed during the first phase.
Students formulate a thesis, construct a sentence outline, compile
a bibliography, and learn how to compose an insightful and well-
written paper.