In the frame of her teaching activities at ETH Zurich, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes curated, with Something Fantastic, ‘Ard-el-Lewa Homes: Designs by Young Architects‘, an exhibition of students’s works during the MAS Urban Design at the Chair of Marc Angélil. The exhibition’s intention is to bring back, after years of research and design, the proposal for alternatives designs to the inhabitants of informal areas of Cairo. The underlying agenda is to put these on the city map, and in the scope of architects as places that deserve design attention.

After investigating the architecture of informal settlements, selected projects show how different housing layouts and rearranging existing building components can lead to new urban forms that allow public spaces to emerge. By altering the typology of informal housing via a simple recombination of existing architectural and structural elements, the projects aim to enhance the living quality of single units and establish collective urban formations that ultimately improve entire districts. 

In collaboration with Artellewa and CLUSTER.