“To build is to create events.” Walter Gropius
Email: Rajaa.bennaoui@gmail.com Phone: 00212 641860141
Nationality: Moroccan
2008-2011 Atlas high school in Rabat 2011-2015 Ecole nationale d'architecture in Rabat
Archicad Autocad Sketchup 3dsmax+Vray
Adobe: Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator Microsoft office
Educational background Awards
Skills Languages Others
2015 Symbiose architecture for 7 months 2016-Now Groupe 3 Architectes
2013 Afrika archi competition 2015 Sports club with Symbiose architecture
French, Arabic, English Fluent Spanish Basic Graphic design Painting Writing Traveling
-3Professional experience
Bennaoui Rajaa
Content
Meander
Five star hotel
Promenade Cultural center
Dual pace Designing through mobility1 2 3 4
The hybrid Collective housing Awards and winning projects
-4-
5
Dual pace
Designing through mobility
-61
"Dual pace" was an entry for the 2015 Schindler award competition launched under the theme of mobility. The site was located in Shenzhen, China, an instant city and rapidly growing metropolis. The intervention for this project was to revitalize an already built urban fabric through mobility.
The proposal to the problem consisted of the implementation of a new central city hub that starts from the area's most important resource: Honghu Park to extend as a footbridge. The duality formed by the hub/footbridge favors a double city pace that uses mobility as a structuring system connecting the area both regionally and locally.
-7-
The footbridge offers a multilayer pedestrian mobility mode that integrates amenities within reasonable distances for walking and cycling.
Metro station Shops and cafés
Picnic park
-8-
Section
Riverfront restaurants
Art gallery Honghu park Performance stage
Art gallery
-9-
Meander Five star hotel
-102
This project was located on the picturesque valley of the Bouregreg River in Salé, Morocco. Its morphology emulates the dynamic movement of the river's meander for integration and landscape continuity concerns.
The design challenge was to set the hotel horizontally, completely open to the view, without jeopardizing the compact functionality system proper to hotels. Thus the strong linearity of the project offers the opportunity to have a full view of the landscape at every point of the hotel.
To optimize circulation while maintaining the building's openness, two vertical blocks distribute laterally all floors allowing services to be directly connected to the rooms.
-11-
Starting from six stacked blocks, the project is pulled towards the river embracing the slope while keeping a lateral superposition that serves as a direct vertical distributor.
-12-
+0.50 -5.00 -10.00
+6.50 -15.00
-13a b
Plans
-14Section a
-15-
Promenade Cultural center
-163
This project was located in front of Bab Rouah, a majestic gate among the five monumental ones in Rabat, Morocco.
Bab Rouah once served as an entrance to the city and is now both a gallery and a tourist attraction. For this reason, the proposal had to solve a contextual question: How to build an attractive cultural center with respect to heritage ?
The center was then designed as a permeable platform that invites for a promenade towards Bab Rouah. The building then becomes a transition rather than a barrier, being itself part of the urban landscape.
Its implementation, functionality and easthetic were all elements taken into account as constraints in the process of contextualized design.
-17-
1.Anchorage+rising
3.Installation of pedestrian roof ramps that embrace the sloped land
2.Enhancement of visual perspective on Bab rouah by implementing half the project underground
4.Optimization of public space and creation of a light well Anchor the building Parking Promenade
A light sequence punctuates the promenade. The width of wood louvers varies generating light interplay. Aesthetically, the wood covers the whole building giving it sobriety and further integration to the surrounding landscape.
Natural ventilation
-18-
+5.40
Ground floor
-3.00
-6.00
a
-19b
c
Section b
Section c
-20Section a
View towards Bab Rouah
-21Interior hall
The hybrid Collective housing
-224
''The hybrid'' is a one façade building located in the residential area of Agdal, Rabat. The difficulty of this project was to rigorously respect the program’s consistency while imagining a dynamic façade.
Because of Rabat’s strict development plan that is excessively optimized, design possibilities significantly narrow. Thus, the challenge was to insure good functionality, a variety of housing typologies and a strong plastic expression on the front façade with minimum intervention.
-23-
Diagonals are traced, ruptures generated, surfaces deform and materials contrast forming a hybrid set.
-24-
Type 1 : Duplex 2 rooms, 1 living room 100 m2
Type 3 : 3 rooms , 1 living room 100 m2
Type 4 : 3 rooms , 2 living rooms 140 m2
Type 2 : 3 rooms , 1 living room 115m2
Type 6 : 3 rooms , 2 living rooms, terrace 100m2
Type 7 : 3 rooms , 2 living rooms, terrace 115m2
Type 5 : 3 rooms , 2 living rooms 125 m2
-25-
Awards and winning projects
-265
Afrikarchi competition 2013
This housing project won the honorable mention for the first edition of Afrikarchi. A competition that encourages sustainable projects in Afrika. The rules stipulated the site to be located in an urban area. Thus, the project was implemented in the old arenas of Casablanca, Morocco’s economic capital and largest city in the Maghreb.
Beyond the historical value of the site in which the bullfight “Corrida” used to take place, the 10.000 square meters land offered the ideal setting to embody a collective housing project that aimed to solve various housing issues in the urban area.
-27-
Professional competition 2015
In 2015, I had the opportunity to actively participate in a professional competition in collaboration with ''Symbiose architecture'' while an intern.
The project’s site was located on the riverbanks of the Bouregreg River in Rabat. The subject was a proposal for a sports cub. In respect of the given context, we designed the project as a transparent, porous strata. This enabled to fully profit from the existing views of the city's monuments (Tour Hassan, and the Mausoleum Mohammed V) as well as blur the In/Out interstices in the club. This project is currently under construction.
-28-
