ARCHITECTURE

Out of 145 entries from across the world, Malaysian firm Ngiom Partnership bagged the second prize with its highly contextual Dunescape

The Undulating Pattern of Nature proposal in the International Architectural Competition of the Science City. The brief for the international cometition organised by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina was a comprehensive master plan and conceptual design to create the first 21st century science museum, learning and research facility in Egypt.

Desert sands textures and colors are captured through its seamlessness sense of subtlety. Sand cascade along the ground through patterns of wind movement, creating crests of giants sand forming dunes and ripples. These bedforms of diverse shapes, heights and sizes, create undulating wave-llike patterns. The architectural curves of the built form were modelled on the rhetorical analogy of golden sand dunes. The dancing dunes flow like undulating sand waves over the vast desert. Its linear, crescentic, parabolic, and circular motion shapes blends harmoniously with the desert landscape of Cairo, Egypt.

Three series of intersecting dunes rise subtly from the deserts, creating its symbolic reference to its surrounding. Soft, endless, and rhythmic, its eloquent form creates a melodious sequence of folds on its surface, contouring the bare nature. The mirage of curves creates a depth of dune pattern, further enhanced by a rising wave-like shell tower from the series of dune sculpture. As a whole, the metaphorical approach of the sand dune concept blurs the rigid line between urban and architecture, as it unfolds to its environment, where architecture makes a statement while blending into nature.