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Sinai Present And Future - Discovery Centre

Part 1 Project 2012
Dima Al Halaby
Arab Academy of Science & Technology, Cairo Cairo Egypt
Ra Colored Canyon, Sinai, has become a popular safari trek and lies between St. Catherine’s Monastery and Nuweiba. The landforms are diverse and dramatic, including vast sand dunes, massive granite peaks and deep gorges. The deep coloration of rocks gives the canyon walls a smooth prismatic and metallic sheen.

The colour canyon is a path of water-eroded contours forming deep ravine between cliffs that makes you feel nothing but silence and altitude. It goes through the erosion process, water enters the rock cracks and freezes pushing the rocks apart, until breaking the canyons’ walls, known as frost wedging, where wind smoothes the surfaces giving the sculptural shapes. When the sun hits the oxidized surfaces of the canyon, due to the different materials, its reflection creates the spectrum forming colors and rare light beams. Their colours are different according to the material, the height and the amount of sun reflected on the surface. As one ventures into the canyon, the walls narrow in width to just a few feet in some places, giving the channel a secretive and dynamic natural atmosphere.

The Concept was creating a spatial experience through interpreting the context and contours' environment and the erosion process, by using serial planes without overlapping it and through using the colored spectrum’s phenomena by including a glass prism at the center of the expo, as light penetrates the building forming a rainbow through reflections and refractions. As well as placing a mirror on the floor creating an altitude reflective experience as you stand and look up, to feel the canyon’s narrowness and height. By relating the prism’s theory, it generated the triangular units inspired by the layers of the canyons thus using serial planes and experimenting with the conceptual spatial experience through modeling trials according to the triangles’ arrangement and rotation.

As one travels through the space, and starts experiencing the different aspects of colors and lighting phenomena , the traveller feels deeply connected to the canyon through the oddity of the visual experience and its altitude and intimacy, both physically and spiritually, gaining a wider understanding of Sinai's cultural anthropology.

Dima Al Halaby

Dr Ayman Wanas
• Page Hits: 2322         • Entry Date: 11 September 2012         • Last Update: 11 September 2012