Cairo’s Safe Sanctuary

This project centres a women’s shelter in Cairo, in Talaat Harb Street. This site’s notoriety is marked by various international reports of large groups of men having attacked women in the street. These events informed the project framing of a responsive architecture that reacts to the threat or harm to women on the street of Talaat Harb. The project prototypes (or speculates) the architectural realm of a safe sanctuary and the archetypes that govern the thresholds of access (visual and physical) and supervision into this shelter. Additionally, the project aims to protect women through acts of spatially revealing and concealing, performed by the archetypes of the door, the window and the facade.