a design based research unit/research based design unit with a focus on media,……………………………………………………………. product, interior, & architectural applications.
Adham Youssef, studiostudio partner, just revealed his entry for the Whitehaven Harbour Central Site International Competition.
Magnus Homes Developers, in collaboration with Places Matter!, and Britain’s Energy Coast Cumbria had initiated earlier this year an international competition to design a mixed use development on a 2,600m [0.26Ha] of total built-up area of approx. 12,000 m2 , on a site that occupies a fantastic setting adjacent to Whitehaven Harbour and represents one of the most impressive current development opportunities in Cumbria, UK.
Adham was not among the finalists, though his designs received attention by the jury according to their statement.
Studiostudio partner, Adham Youssef Selim, was invited -among others- to collaborate on a video installation with Dutch artist Hans van den Ban in De Piramide van Ijmuiden exhibition.
In the video, Ouroboros II, Selim tries to investigate more further on the urban sprawl phenomenon in Cairo.
Over the last 20 years Cairo witnessed major shifts, jump cuts, fast forwards on the temporal scale. Globalization, fast assimilation of modern tele-communication -satellite, mobile phones, broad band internet, etc. – speeded up the way events shape and take place.
While on one hand these changes were deeply transformative, widely spreadable, city spaces were lingering in the background, doomed by their rigid physical nature, slow-paced behind these major shifts.
New events were rushing by to invade the old spaces, and they could hardly show any patience for these spaces to evolve naturally, what resulted in a sort of lapse, a gap between space and event evolution processes, what caused the urban experience in Cairo to lose its presence and form, millions of events become to take place in certain city spaces with no connection to these spaces.
This video is a visual representation of this phenomenon, it symbolizes city spaces and event in clay cubes and spheres respectively, showing by the end of the video how city events with close attachment to people’s life are becoming to swallow and amalgamate with the spaces, the equivalent to this in real life might be some extreme examples of satellite dishes over slums, or 3G-mobile phones in houses with no drinking water…!
Ouroboros II is the second episode of Ouroboros, a short video pointing the urban transformation of Cairo from a “City” to an “Un-City”
Friday, May 14th, 2010, the results of the HKBCF (Hong Kong Border Crossing Facilities) international competition were officially declared, according to several newspapers and local TV channels in Hong Kong 5 entries out of more than 160 international designs were chosen to receive prizes total of more than HK$ 1,100,000 ..
Adham (Youssef) Selim: studiostudio partner received a merit for excellence in design ideas, according to the jury members (including Richard Hawkins of Foster+Partners and Hitoshi Abe chair professor of UCLA) Adham showed the best understanding for the site and its relationship with the context among the winning entries, moreover they mentioned that the integrated rain water collection / shading / PV panel device he designed, had received appreciation among other jury members.
It’s worthy of mentioning also that Adham is the only non-Chinese winner between the winning entries with the exclusion of one team led by American architect James Kostaras, a university professor in Boston, however, Kostaras team comprises of Chinese architects based in Boston, what makes Adham’s entry the only foreign design among the winners.
Studiostudio partner Adham Youssef has lately released his portfolio, the portfolio includes a collection of writings, stories, and works Adham had been part in since 2006 till January 2o1o.
The portfolio is a repertoire of Adham’s interventions on a variety of scales, giving reflections on the dynamics of urbanism in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf region, following the sinuous curve of Dubai booming-up then nose-diving with the global financial crisis.
The portfolio is available for download in the link below:
The Pneumatic Structure installation forms part of the design based research “Urban Biology”, by Marwan Fayed.
In 2009 his investigation began to discuss the biological living form dimension in Cairo’s urban fabric.
Marwan placed the 16m long ‘fluctuating’ structure outdoors, using it to trigger the dynamics of the event around it. The work aims to stimulate a new dimention in the visitors’ perception, “remapping” an otherwise plain space through the variations in permiability within the structure itself.
Future iterations of the work will reconfigure the structure itself, dictated by human reaction to it in an enclosed non-descript gallery.
“Ouroboros” is a one minute video by studiostudio partner, Adham Youssef, the video depicts a dialogoue between community and urbanism in Cairo, Egypt, in which the non-stop cycles and activities of the community helps grow the urbanism, but being unplanned, activites, instead of promoting a healthy urbanized city, it produces a fungal formations of urbanism that feed on community rather than adding to it.
Hence came the name “Ouroboros”, a monster snake in Greek myth, that eats itself.. Urbanism eating itself due to the community’s unplanned acivities.
The video was an outcome of the Stranger Festival workshop held in Cairo in March 2009, the video was nominated for the Stranger Festival prize in Amsterdam in October 2009.
The idea behind the Hologram device came for the first time while I was working on the Newark Visitor Center – NVC in New Jersey, during so many experiments to develop a skin for the building that would look different from every shooting angle in the city; I was trying to make a building that has its own visual liveliness.
The early results promised something playful, for I was thinking first about a really super sized moving device, a “Transformer” in the city space, for sure this was bad dreaming!
I dumped the “Transformer” and began thinking about something inherently smart, with low initial cost, almost zero operational cost, and with very low maintenance requirements; moreover it had to be environment friendly, simply a sustainable solution.
This was what led me later to adopt a more humble and technologically passive scheme, built on the very simple idea of the hologram we were playing with when we were kids.
A skin composed of vertical elements, each vertical element graphically has a T-section in plan; what was interesting about the T, was that it has two sides, one side I called “Normal” which is going with the direction of viewing, and the other is “Facing” which is facing the direction of viewing.
Each side of the T-section has a different color; generically I chose red and blue for experiments, so I had a curved array of vertical T-elements with their “Normal” sides colored blue and their “Facing” sides colored red.
The initial tests were amazing; while moving around the building the skin was gradually turning from red to blue and then from blue to red again depending on the point of view, moreover it gave the skin an “amphoteric” quality, that makes it hard to judge whether it’s red or blue at a certain instance, I think it’s a very good idea and it’s still applicable in many other contexts.
