Looking at the great body of work she has produced, including buildings on AUC’s new campus, award-winning designs, and a bid for the Grand Egyptian Museum, you would never guess that Shahira H. Fahmy, is a young 32-year-old still trying to define her signature style.
“When you’re young you’re still trying to establish your own style, your own language. It can take years of experimenting. You get to know yourself through the projects, says Fahmy, who presides over her own architectural firm.
That is not to say that Fahmy doesn’t already have years of experimenting behind her.
Many of her earlier works incorporated elements of Egyptian heritage, though that heritage itself is varied, including Coptic, Pharoanic, Classic, and Fahmy’s favorite style, Islamic.
She is now struggling with the question of whether her work needs to incorporate historical cultural elements. “I think design should reflect your own time; the present, not the future and not the past.
Even when she does include historical elements, her interpretations are modernized to such an extent that they are hardly recognizable, as with her latest product designs which entered Milan’s Salone Satellite last month.
Salone Satellite is a prestigious avant-garde wing of Milan’s annual furniture fair, meant to showcase young designers’ works to expose them to global manufacturers. Fahmy was Egypt’s first to be invited to the exhibition, which is in its tenth year.
One of Fahmy’s products was the trio set of “Tik & Tak bar stools, designed by molding plasticine, hand made in wood, and spray painted in gilt, copper and dark brown with gold leaf decoration. Each stool is different in appearance and in function, each one molded to a different way of leaning or sitting on.
Another entry was the Tableya table and accompanying box seats, supposedly inspired by Arabic traditional tableya tables but clearly designed for the young, modern type – asymmetric, undulating, and unornamented forms.
Both were described in the Financial Times as being a “perfect marriage of contemporary and classic style equally, suitable for a penthouse or a palace.
The inside-out tea set, on the other hand, does not claim to be based on any heritage. Fahmy says to redesign a simple tea set she had to look at the conventional mug with fresh eyes. “Does a mug have to look like this? What’s the purpose of a cup? What are the forces exerted on it? To produce the set, Fahmy’s team used cutting edge technology called 3-D rapid prototype printing, which does what you would expect but the “printing is on polymer.
Still, Fahmy would not label her work “modern, producing warm and simple but not minimalistic works herself. Technically, she explains, the “modern age has passed, as has the post-modern, and we are in a period that is yet unlabeled.
With product and furniture design, Fahmy says “anything can inspire me, even a trashcan. “What’s important is to see . to look for it.
On the other hand, architectural design is more bound by the client’s needs.
Fahmy and her team spend a lot of time researching to understand the cultural, climactic, and personal context in order to bring “a lot of identity to each project.
Fahmy has seen success in urban scale architecture, interiors, products, and furniture, while also involved with teaching and research. She won the Bibliotheca Alexandria Architectural competition for young architects for her design of a residential project in Cairo in 2005 and the Medina Design Excellence award for furniture design in 2000.
