Housing Consulting Office

Overlooking the shores of the ancient eastern harbour and in the heart of the Turkish quarters of Medieval Alexandria, stands tall the Mosque and shrine of Abul Abbas El Morsi. Designed and built in the first half of the twentieth century as a colossal Neo-Mamluk expansion to a once much smaller mosque and shrine. Surrounding the mosque are six other smaller structures of comparable importance and value, of which some are still archaic. The seven mosques were surrounded by countless vernacular marketplaces and shapeless open spaces.

An Architectural competition was held to try to redevelop the urban area including and surrounding the mosques as well as add a shopping center and administrative and office spaces.
The first challenge was how to regulate the open spaces and reshape the piazzas. This was done by creating an elevated prayer plaza encompassing all the space between the mosques to form one large regularly shaped urban space that respects its surroundings as well as providing perfect pedestrian circulation and links and paths to all the components of the development, both old and new. As the place was originally used by low-scale marketplaces, the space under the elevated prayer plaza was used as a medieval style market scale with small sized shops to resemble the former shops as well as compensate for the already existing commercial needs of this vital area.

The second challenge was creating large space shaping office buildings that had to respect the surroundings and components of the urban setting, as well as reflect its own personality. Thus they were chosen to be white with abstract references to common elements of islamic Architecture.

The competition was won by the Office and later designed and constructed to reuse and redesign the Seven Mosque Complex of Alexandria. And as mentioned earlier the project comprised several office building blocks as well as a shopping mall and a prayer plaza accommodating 12000 people. The project clearly redefined the shapeless space in between the mosques and created a new urban space paying its tributes and respects to the challenging eclectic styles of the surrounding mosques as well as their surroundings. It remains to be vibrant landmark of The western part of Alexandria.