The Khayamiya Centre aims to transcend attitudes of monumentalism and permanence toward built heritage. By addressing the integration of time as an approach for rejuvenating deteriorating built heritage, the design moves through themes of mutability, transience and redaction to arrive at an intervention that opposes contemporary conservation methodologies and practices in Egypt.

The project is sited in Radwan Bey Palace in Historic Cairo. It addresses challenges faced by the absence of a sustainable and comprehensive methodology for handling historic urban fabric and the survival of the traditional craft of tentmaking within Egypt, some of which takes place on Cairo’s only surviving covered street, Khayamiya.

Responding to current discussions about how temporary architecture can be a precedent-setting tool for the transient modification of values, the project questions how a reinterpretation and resuscitation of craft as living heritage can be employed to revitalise historic buildings. The Khayamiya street tent renders a theatrical environment which swiftly fades in and out, scoring a poetic performance through a time-based architecture that offers a fluid and dynamic stage for sociability.