ELHUB

Modern Iraqi monuments.

Reimagining a passageway in downtown Cairo

(Click images and move right to view slide show)

project team: Adham Selim (architect/Egypt) Jakob Fenger (artist/Denmark) Omar Kassab (architectural trainee/Egypt)

Cairo Downtown Passages project aims to develop a pilot urban design and art project in the northern part of downtown Cairo, highlighting existing and emerging initiatives and activating underutilized public spaces. This passageway redevelopment project emerged from a design workshop held in April 2014, exploring art and design interventions in two passageways in Downtown Cairo, the Kodak and Phillips Passageways, organized collaboratively by CLUSTER (Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research) with DEDI (the Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institute) and CKU (the Centre for Culture and Development in Copenhagen). This pilot project seeks to promote a more diverse, inclusive, and accessible public space in these downtown passages. While Cairo is awaiting the formal opening of the project on January 17th, architect Adham Selim (Egypt) and artist Jakob Fenger (Denmark) shared with us their joint proposal for Kodak Passage, originally developed during the Cairo Downtown Passages Workshop in April 2014. Kodak Passageway is a linear space flanked by a U-shape building that is mostly empty. Having an empty space in such prime location is rather unique and dangerous in the mean time. It offers an opportunity to re-program the space almost freely, yet there’s always a looming danger of chaotic appropriation and privatization by street vendors and small shop owner who would much like to expand their businesses at the expense of the diversity the public space can offer. The proposal thinks of space as a contract between a broad range of stakeholders that need to coexist, despite their contradictory interests, in order to keep the space vibrant and interesting. The proposal thrives to create a sustainable ecology of coexistence between conflicting interests in a big city such as Cairo.

An idea project by Jan Ackenhausen, Frederic Karam and George Salameh

Cappadocia, a region in central Turkey is one of the most exciting and impressive places in this country – and this is saying something because Turkey is huge and quite amazing. Cappadocia is especially famous for its natural formed rocks called fairy chimneys or tent rocks, which look exactly how their name would suggest. As the material of these chimneys is soft, people living in this area have been carving them to form houses they can live in. Some of them are used even to this time and the most notable ones are in Goreme village.

There’s another secret of Cappadocia, located in the valleys around Goreme. This area was the site of early Christian activity, where people came to flee Roman persecution. There’s still lots of old, forgotten churches and monasteries, with walls painted with Christian symbols and saints. The faces of some figures have been destroyed during the iconoclast period, which opposed showing people on religious paintings.

Some of the churches are even a thousand years old, now abandoned and used by locals as storerooms. They are literally everywhere in Goreme and you can easily find some to explore.

The most precious buildings are safe though and protected by the Goreme Open-Air Museum. It’s a vast monastic complex, with churches and monasteries built side by side – and all of them carved in rocks. The impressive frescoes and somewhat mysterious atmosphere of these churches is unmissable and must be on your list if you plan to visit Cappadocia.