Salma Abdel-Latif, on a winter of site visits.
Landscape architect, Cairo, on the GEM site as a designed landscape.
My training
I am a landscape architect. I read for my first degree in architecture at Cairo University, then took a master's in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2008, and have been in private practice in Cairo since 2010. My practice handles public-realm work for Cairo institutions and a smaller stream of garden projects for private clients in Heliopolis and Maadi.
Why this notebook
The landscape architecture of the GEM site has, to date, attracted no serious writing in Egypt. The architecture of the building has been thoroughly written about by Yousef Mansour in Alexandria and others; the landscape — the plaza, the obelisk, the gardens, the lighting — has been treated, in the press coverage, as little more than a backdrop. The notebook is an attempt to give the landscape its proper reading.
The hanging obelisk
Of the six readings, the one on the hanging obelisk is the one I expect to be most argued with. The 'hanging' configuration is a genuine innovation — the first time a complete pharaonic obelisk has been installed in such a way that the underside is visible — and I treat it as the landscape's principal design event. Some readers will disagree.
On the gardens
The choice of drought-tolerant Egyptian native planting (acacia, sycamore-fig, tamarisk) is, in my reading, the landscape's quietest but most important design decision. It places the GEM in a different ecological tradition from the nineteenth-century Cairo institutions — the Manial Palace gardens, the Gezira Palace gardens, the older botanical gardens — that overwhelmingly used non-native ornamental species.
Sources
The notebook is written from the published landscape-architectural literature on Egyptian public-realm projects, from the GEM's own published landscape materials, from conversations with three members of the landscape design team (not attributed by name), and from my own site notes from a winter of site visits. The bibliography is available on request.
What this is not
It is not a verdict. I have not written this notebook to say whether the GEM's landscape is 'good' or 'bad' — those judgements are for the longer run, after the gardens have matured and the lighting has been lived with for some years. The notebook is a first reading, of a young designed landscape, by a working landscape architect.
The 'hanging' configuration is a genuine innovation — the first time a complete pharaonic obelisk has been installed in such a way that the underside is visible.
— S. A.-L., Garden City