Street fairs offer up an astonishing diversity of wares, food and entertainment. Less engaging are the ubiquitous tents that spring up like mushrooms. They discreetly (and economically) get the job done, but offer little in the way of spaces that captivate the imagination. The souk, the bazaar, the seaside New England tourist booth, the Coney Island stand – all herald the inexpensive thrill.

In the distance, Heightened Reflection emerges from a sea of white and anonymous tents, in which visitors engage in typical street fair browsing. The project builds on the squat geometries of the tents, but pulls them skyward, creating sweeping interior volumes and dramatic exterior facades that mirror the urban scene around it. Merchants conduct their business adjacent to unique, colorful and soaring cloth ceilings. Customers, who are still able to browse and buy, can also engage with a variety of interior installations: in one, saturated red walls lead to a clerestory; in another, a periscope yields views far down the street. In one scenario a disco ball lazily spins, casting a thousand reflections, and in another Chinese lanterns swarm toward the sky.

The profound interior environments allow the participants a moment of intimacy and a place of personal reflection within the vibrant collective experience that is amplified by the exterior mylar skin.

Method Design Team: Reese J Campbell, Demetrios A Comodromos, Alexander Chu, Ted Davis,  Rachele Louis, Angela Pasquale, Leigh Stewart.

The skyscraper is the ultimate (western) ‘formal typology’ created by the urban booms of the last century and most recently appropriated as the agent of rapid globalization. However, as a means of densifying urban fabric—and consequently reducing sprawl and congestion—it is conspicuously ab­sent from some of the world’s densest cities, particularly those within the Middle East. This project investigates the lack of tower constructions in Cairo’s dense urban and medieval fabric—and ultimate­ly proposes a speculative skyscraper that verticalizes the complex interrelationship of informal social networks and urban/civic form.  For full text  accepted by Journal of Architectural Education, click here.

The proposal from Method Design, which led an international team, attempts to project heavy traffic infrastructure into the future by submerging it underground, affording Cairo the ability to continue and extend the social logics of the highly pedestrian city which already exists. Submerged highways and trains begin to create and fulfill underground networks by connecting to the existing tunnels in place. With high velocity traffic and mass transportation below ground, the surfaces along those routes become fully pedestrianized paths, plazas, parks, markets and open public spaces, all of which are needed to transform the choked megalopolis of Cairo into a projective world city.