Making a Building a Place to be: Redesigning Egypt's New Defense Headquarters

Abstract

With a rapidly growing population and little habitable land remaining, Egypt has been forced to turn to building in the desert to house its citizens. However, the country has also used this as an opportunity to move much of its government body away from Cairo. The construction of the New Administrative Capital, as Egypt calls it, has included many megaprojects, among which is the new defense headquarters, the Octagon. This complex, while large, impressive, and functional, has been criticized for either failing to address or even exacerbating many of the problems Egyptians struggle with. Furthermore, it lacked architectural distinction in many areas. To understand why these problems occurred and how to fix them, I identified the key areas in which Egypt was suffering. Then, to understand why the Octagon has been built the way it has been, I used map data from Google Earth to identify features that, while necessary to maintain the integrity of the complex, were preventing the Octagon from being able to solve these problems. Finally, I constructed an example of a potential new design of the Octagon that both served its original purposes and worked to actively solve these problems.