Studio 2B
Spring 2022 | WSOA
It could be argued that one of the main objectives of architecture is to offer a new reality; one that challenges our preconceptions of the established and generic built environment that we understand as normal. That is why one of the main ideas that the studio addresses is the concept of reality. There has been a focus in contemporary discourse of the past decade, specifically through Object-Oriented Ontology, on objects and realities. Through an increasing interest in among a group of architects, there has been a discursive shift toward strangeness and weirdness. While this studio tries to keep an open mind towards these developments, it prefers to use “alternative” instead of “strange” or “weird” mainly because of two reasons: overuse of the terms mentioned, and the fact that they seem to be too subjective. Alternative is more objective and does not come with a prejudgement as what might be considered normal and what might be considered strange.
THE MAZE
This project consisted of using historical house precedents and altering their realities by making my own geometry. The precedents used were Beit el sehemy in cairo, Egypt. This project was made in order to try to challenge the traditional organizational idea of space. I reversed the relationship and focus on mass and void, compared to how historical architectures point of focus tends to be the mass. This was a proposal at an attempt to reorganizing and challenging the principles by being critical of the existing traditional architecture.
Bayt Al-Suhaymi
In this project, the floor plan of Bayt Al-Suhaymi in Cairo was used to develop a section drawing. Bayt Al-Suhaymi's floor plan represents an asymmetrical and non-aligned floor plan with non-matching floor thickness. The rooms are arranged in an irregular manner and the floors have varying thicknesses that do not align with each other. The non-uniform layout and floor thickness create challenges in creating symmetry and level transitions between rooms, but it can also result in unique and interesting spaces that reflect the individuality of the building and its occupants.
![rtr [Converted]plan.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60497738c5e16c3f0bf3c87f/7bbb72a2-6901-4111-b879-2abceadd294f/rtr+%5BConverted%5Dplan.jpg)
