Exploring the Boundaries between In and Out.

Shahira Fahmy is an architect, urbanist, and creative researcher,who was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, she is the Founder andPrincipal of SFA, Shahira Fahmy Architects (2005) in Cairo, the same year she was awarded the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Young Architect Award, and now splits her time between Cairo & London.
She is a three-time recipient of Harvard’s post-doctoral fellowships for her ground-breaking and award-winning work: a LOEB fellow at the Graduate School of Design (2015); a Hutchins Fellowat W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2016); and a Berkman Klein fellow at Harvard’s Law School, (also 2016). In 2019, she was a recipient of “Tamayouz Excellence Award, for the Near East and North Africa”.

As adjunct Associate Professor, she has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and as Associate Professor of Practice, at the American University of Cairo, School of Sciences and Engineering Architectural Department.

Fahmy has served as a board member of the International Community of the Red Cross, Egypt (2010-2013), and her work has been widely published and reviewed in the Financial Times, the Architectural Record, the Architectural Review, the New York Times T Magazine, Wallpapers, and many other notable journals.She has been a speaker, lecturer, and visiting critic at venues including: The Royal Academy of Arts, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Columbia GSAPP, Cooper Union, City College of New York, The Royal Institute of British Architects, The Architectural Association, and TEDx.

In 2021, Fahmy served as a UNESCO Jury member for the International Design Competition of Al-Nouri Mosque Complex in Mosul, Iraq; and served as a Jury member for the Prix Pictet,the Global Award in Photography and Sustainability, on its ninth cycle.

Fahmy has delivered many projects in the Middle East, London,and Europe, and has been hailed by Phaidon Press (2011), as one of the “Architects building the Arab Future”. Two of her built projects are featured in the book Cairo Since 1900 – An Architectural Guide, an archive of the Egyptian Capital’s modern architectural landscape.

Other projects include the Delfina Foundation, London, where she worked in collaboration with Studio Octopi; the winning design of the Master Plan for ‘Andermatt Swiss Alps’ ski resort competition phases II & III; the Wooster Group Theatre Restoration Scheme, New York; and the ‘Mask Architects Project’ for the United Nations Environment Programme UNEP, and the Climate Change Conference COP22. She is involved in an affordable housing project part of the development of a Garden Village on 500 acres of residential and mixed uses of an eco-community in Mid-Cornwall, UK, and interior work such as the Lucinda rooftop restaurant and lounge in Cairo.

Her work explores the boundaries between in and out, the layers between the deep inside and the far outside, the solid and the void, the public and the private, people and space along with the house and the urban fabric. In schemes that balance new spatial concepts within its existing context, culture, climate, and urban morphology, and transgresses from the urban scale to interiors, furniture, and product design.
Most recently Fahmy has been involved and working with the Royal Commission for AlUla (KSA) and all parties involved in the restoration, preservation and rehabilitation project of Old Town AlUla, a 12th Century Islamic city ruin – completion of phase one is due in 2024. Her scope includes a series of private residences, a boutique hotel at Dar Tantoura, and mixed-use activities to be introduced to the mud brick-built fabric of Old Town.

Fahmy has won “The Architects in Residence -100 Architects for 100 Houses”, an International Design Competition in AlUla, by RCU, 2022- 2023 where she worked with the SFA team leader Arian Saghafifa and Jad Moura, Ali Sader, Marwan Ali, Nour Elbery, Abdullah AlRifai, Rashid Modibbo, and Mohamed Fakhry. “For thousands of years, AlUla in North-Western Saudi Arabia has sat on an ancient crossroads between three continents serving as a “place of respite” for traders, travellers, and Nabataean tribe, allowing a rest along a journey, a moment of pause in a middle of movement, offering its freshwater springs and its megalithic mountains as a place of refuge. AlUla as it bridges between here and elsewhere, instils in you a sense of belonging – of being at “home”, both at a personal level, or at the scale of the eternal and the infinite.

AlUla from Hegra, to Dadan, to Old Town, Nabatean and beyond, encompasses an extraordinary archive of land, and a built environment, which asks us to rethink and reimagine ways of holding knowledge. AlUla Once stood for exchanging goods, today stands for exchanging hands, ideas, rituals, tradition, hospitality, culture, innovative research, and practices”

For Fahmy this landscape of striking contrasts truly is a place where she feels energised from the contextual inspiration that innovatively drives her designs.