PORTFOLIO
SHERINE ZEIN - ARCHITECT & URBANIST
CONTENT
PROFESSIONAL
QUARTIER BRAZZA
- BORDEAUX, FRANCE
- 600,000m² - PROJECT MANAGER
YOUSSEF TOHME ARCHITECTS & ASSOCIATES (YTAA)
NOUVEL R
- PARIS, FRANCE
- 25,000m²
- COLLABORATING ARCHITECT
ILOT SUR PARC
- MARSEILLES, FRANCE
- 7,000m²
- COLLABORATING ARCHITECT
EF-PROJECT
- ABIDJAN, IVORY COAST
- 790m²
- HEAD ARCHITECT
BLF DISASTER CENTER
- GHAZIR, LEBANON
- 7,850m²
- COLLABORATING ARCHITECT
COLLECTIVE MICROGRID THESIS PROJECT
- MUMBAI, INDIA
THE ROBOTIC CITY
- BARCELONA, SPAIN
THE SELF-SUFFICIENT NEIGHBORHOOD
- BARCELONA, SPAIN
FISHERMEN’S HUB FINAL YEAR PROJECT
- TYRE, LEBANON
MASTER’S CITY & TECHNOLOGY INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED A RCITECTURE OF CATALONIA (IAAC)
BACHELOR’S ARCHITECTURE LEBANESE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY (LAU)
PROFESSIONAL
YOUSSEF TOHME ARCHITECTS & ASSOCIATES QUARTIER BRAZZA-BORDEAUX, FRANCE HEAD ARCHITECT
In its present state, the Brazza-Nord area poses a fundamental challenge to the contemporary city. Its growth, its relationship to the landscape and the possibility it embodies, stimulate thinking about a kind of urban development that would encourage the evolution and cultivation of a real identity. We believe that working with the vectors of freedom makes for a powerful potential in urban planning. This approach leads toward an urbanism that is liberal and worldly, that favors continuity, appropriation, activity and thus growth through the desires it arouses and permits. The future of a city derives from the opportunities it makes available to each and every citizen, from the privileged contacts it engenders and the invention of new uses that it stimulates. This is the condition required for the desire to live, to work, and to exchange to develop freely. This is a dream about building a society. Brazza’s situation permits us to reflect on the openness and tolerance that a city today can engender through its protocols. A lack of flexibility does not invite one to linger - rather it is an obstacle to evolution. We believe that contemporary urbanism should offer this flexibility and these possibilities. It must be agile and inventive to resist commoditization and homogenization. Urbanism should be applied to the interpretation and use of its own limits and to its ability to question the intelligence of its capacities. Boundaries need to be porous and borders must be opened, depending on needs and opportunities.
PROFESSIONAL YOUSSEF TOHME ARCHITECTS & ASSOCIATES NOUVEL R- PARIS, FRANCE COLLABORATING ARCHITECT
YTAA is among the four agencies retained by the City of Paris and Semapa to create a new district in the southeastern confines of Paris along with Hardel Le Bihan, Adjaye Associates and Buzzo Spinelli. The group will be in charge of the development of an area located on the banks of the Seine. The sector,according to the City of Paris, is"an urban neglect so far confiscated by the road network, will now see its status evolve." The reconfiguration of the entrance and exit ramps of the highway will allow to free the land necessary for its urbanization and connect Paris to Ivry-sur-Seine. In view of this operation, the project alternates high-rise buildings and low-rise buildings, and offers a variety of habitats, but also commercial and office spaces, and a large hall that will host a food market and a free space and versatile expression of cultures. In the continuity of Jean Nouvel's Duo towers, YTAA has designed a housing tower of 180 meters. The higher a building is, the more it is energy-consuming: however the Nouvel R group is high on environmental research with the goal of carbon neutrality and the use of renewable energies. %65 of the energy consumed will be renewable or recovered, of which %50 will be produced in situ. The goal is to make the district self-contained with a square meter of photovoltaic panels for 12 m2 built. The carbon footprint of a resident of Bruneseau will be divided by five compared to the Paris average. The project is full of green spaces, on the ground, on terraces and roofs. For example, 11 terraces will be open to the public in the buildings of the site, including four in the tower of 180 meters, where each home will also have its winter garden. This glazed structure serves as insulation in winter and opens in the summer on the inside. The new district will be "generous by its programming and the space it leaves to appropriation. It is open to a real social and economic mix ". Its architecture is not an addition of objects. We fade when necessary, we assert ourselves, we respond to the territory. We are in the specific while responding to a vision, an atmosphere, and leaving more room for use.
PROFESSIONAL YOUSSEF TOHME ARCHITECTS & ASSOCIATES ILOT SUR LE PARC-MARSEILLE, FRANCE COLLABORATING ARCHITECT
Officially selected in April 2019 among four projects, the winning team including Cogedim, Melt, Urban Prod and project leader YTAA was able to meet the desire of EPAEM to give priority to innovative and tailor-made programming aimed at the inhabitants of the neighborhood, students from the new urban campus and new assets with shared services dedicated to welcoming tourists and visitors. A new generation urban living space open to the neighborhood offering shared services such as outdoor spaces (rooftop terraces, shared garden...), a café or restaurant, a shared kitchen, a launderette, modular rooms (events / training), a library, bicycle garages... for an area of 3500 m². A third place offering shared activity spaces open to all, with a particular focus on students, young professionals and creative people: workshops, gym, café, nursery, artist residencies, exhibition venue for an area of approximately 1500 m². A crib of 42 cradles on a single plateau on the ground floor, outdoor spaces preserved in the heart of the island, with independent access from the Avenue du General Leclerc and direct connection with the park, for a surface of 1000 m².
PROFESSIONAL YOUSSEF TOHME ARCHITECTS & ASSOCIATES EF PROJECT-ABIDJAN, IVORY COAST HEAD ARCHITECT
YTAA was commissioned to design the headquarters of the company Eurofind in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. This two story building has been deisgned with inspirations from african structures using concrete like wood. An example would be the truss system in the ceiling that resembles african wood structures that is actually made of concrete. The same concept applies for the curved rooftop. We have allowed the trees to make their way into the building in order for it to merge with the landscape. The skylight allows natural light to penetrate the atrium with a program that is distributed all around it, allowing for transparency and openess to dominate the interior of the building.
PROFESSIONAL YOUSSEF TOHME ARCHITECTS & ASSOCIATES BLF DISASTER CENTER-GHAZIR, LEBANON COLLABORATING ARCHITECT
An emergency data processing bunker for one of Lebanon’s leading banks, where the duality between a brutal exterior and the inviting common interior essence reflects our rethinking around a contemporary disaster center. The project, for Banque Libano-Française, includes four underground levels, a data processing center and four stories above ground. Upper floors are devoted to management offices and open spaces that would be used only in the case of a disaster. We studied the principal of the bunker because of its ‘brutalist’ heaviness, coldness and the inevitable closure to its site of this facility located on a main road near Ghazir, a mountain village thirty kilometers north of Beirut. By way of contrast we sought to create an unexpected lightness inside. The interior was thus conceived as a kind of photographic negative of the exterior. The main elements of the program are concentrated in a main structure with a central circulation space with stairways and generous overhead lighting. This architecture, which gives as much importance to social aspects as spatial considerations, participates in the definition of a new type of urbanism. The bunker allows a rethinking of the concept of unity within the discontinuity of the city. The central, undivided void and its ramps encourage the free movement of users and encourages their receptivity to participation in a calm, collective activity.
MASTER’S DEGREE
CITY & TECHNOLOGY - INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE OF CATALONIA
COLLECTIVE MICROGRID - MUMBAI, INDIA
YTAA
COLLECTIVE MICROGRID - MUMBAI, INDIA
Collective Microgrid is an urban redevelopment masterplan strategy for the BDD Chawls of Worli in Mumbai, Youssef Tohme Architects and Associates India. There are sever- chawls clusters in the city, the biggest with 23 hectares is located in Worli. These clusters are a working class housing typology developed during the British rule for temporary cotton mill workers coming from rural areas to the city. Through time, the tenancy of the units has been passed down from generation to generation, creating a strong and unified community. However, due to the bad state of the buildings the government plans to demolish all the existing units and redevelop the site. This scheme includes giving the inhabitants of the chawls free bigger housing units, yet to do so, they must raise the occupation index of the site to allow more units to be built and which can be sold to finance the construction of the free units. After a field work developed with the community of the chawls and taking into account the privileged location of the site, it becomes obvious that the Worli Chawls call for an innovative and sustainable masterplan that questions the current redevelop- ment scheme. Thus, the aim of the project is to propose a new housing scheme for the neighborhood without sacrificing the social dynamics yet improving the conditions of the inhabitants. To achieve this, the project Collective Microgrid aims to involve citizens' participation in the redevelopment by including them in an energy productive ecosystem. This will allow the energy infrastructures to generate income for the citizens to finance their new housing. The project is based on a research of energy production methods and their scale. This generates the possibility of using the inputs and outputs of each of the systems to retrofit each other and guarantee minimum loss of energy. The main strategies of the project are: to use the unbuilt spaces in the existing space for centralized energy infrastructure as starting points of the project, then to generate participative housing to empower citizens by including their actions in the energy production and finally to develop the masterplan through time generating phases. This project can be a model for new energy self-sufficient and pro- ductive neighborhoods because it becomes productive by processing a burden like waste and gives back clean water and energy to the city.
YTAA Youss
COLLECTIVE MICROGRID - MUMBAI, INDIA
COLLECTIVE MICROGRID - MUMBAI, INDIA
COLLECTIVE MICROGRID - MUMBAI, INDIA
THE ROBOTIC CITY - BARCELONA, SPAIN
The Robotic City seminar was developed as collaboration between The Why Factory, TU Delft and IAAC. 29 students from the two institutions came together for 5 days to develop a research about the future of robotics in the city. The Library of Robotic Speculations was created to imagine the future of technologies and how those could change the planet and the way we inhabit our cities because we believe that technology is an important component in the future of humanity and urban planning. From pop culture to scientific research and applications, we have mapped the evolution and advances of robotic technologies and the place they take in our cities in order to develop a library of speculations. This library is composed of future potential scenarios from utopian to dystopian, from near to far future, from auto-, robo-, nano- and geno-. We have produced a series of design visions exploring what are the potentials and spatial implications of the robotic city in order to develop unique and cutting edge narratives and future urban scenarios. We have tested those scenarios on existing situations. How they change the form of the streets, infrastructure, houses, urban blocks, neighbor- hoods, landscapes? How do they redefine built forms, leisure, mobility, public space?
THE ROBOTIC CITY - BARCELONA, SPAIN
THE SELF SUFFICIENT NEIGHBORHOOD - BARCELONA, SPAIN
Throughout history, cities have been put under the scope; its conditions and components have undergone an excessive study. However, nowadays the availability of information and methods of obtaining data have enabled all types of agents from the most diverse backgrounds to study cities. Architects and urbanists are not an exception because of the big role they play on the materialization of the city. In the occasion of the first Master of City and Technology in IAAC, the Studio posed an even bigger question: can a city be self-sufficient? To answer this, we examined the city as living organism. Starting from its anatomical systems, a deep research was developed around the main systems that keep the city functioning: water, energy, matter and mobility. This was backed up by studies centered on urban fabrics and the distributions of public spaces, facilities, housing and tertiary activities inside the city. The aim of this was to understand how the supply chain works for each cycle and how it affects the behavior and physical composition of the city. Thus, giving us insights about how by changing the metabolic processes of these cycles, we would be able to invert relations and make the city more autonomous but also more efficient in terms of resource management. The results of the research were applied to an area of 1 square kilometer which could be replicated many times to make up a city. The proposal for the self-sufficient neighborhood was not developed in a specific place, and although some variables from Barcelona were used (mainly environmental: weather, rainfall, radiation, etc.) the aim was to be as abstract as possible. This allowed us to approach every layer without the constrains of culture or economy in order to obtain guidelines that could be applied in any city in the world.
THE SELF SUFFICIENT NEIGHBORHOOD - BARCELONA, SPAIN
THE SELF SUFFICIENT NEIGHBORHOOD - BARCELONA, SPAIN
BACHELOR’S DEGREE
ARCHITECTURE - FINAL YEAR PROJECT
FISHERMEN’S HUB - TYRE, LEBANON
FISHERMEN’S HUB - TYRE, LEBANON
URBAN ANALYSIS The old city of Tyre is an area located next to the port. It was mostly developed during the ottoman occupation yielding a very irregu- lar planning mixed with churches, mosques, khans and a souk. The old city is divided into three parts being a result of political and religious segregation. The two religious districts are clearly sepa- rated by the Rivoli street where our site is located but is also linked by the third part: the souk. The irregularities in the urban planning has led to non- conforming streets. However, of interest is the fact that all streets lead to the sea. SOCIAL ANALYSIS The fishing industry in Tyre used to be very important, but nowadays fishermen are the poorest people. Two main factors have played a major role in the fishing industry’s defeat: The pollution and the fishing methodology. The pollution became a major factor for different reasons: the discovery of 150 barrels of chemicals in 1988, the indonesian tsunami bringing new types of poisonous fish, the sewage dumped in the sea without treatment, etc. The second factor is the fishing methodology which is very harmful for the sea life and destroys it whether they are consumable or not. For instance, fishing with dynamite destroys all life surrounding it. Also, fishing nets being used have small openings and there- fore not allowing smaller fish to escape. All of the above facts are creating their poverty and desperate times leading to desperate and illegal measures so as to get bigger fishes. In our project we propose the deep sea fish farming methods with geodesic domes in order to be able to farm in an efficient way our fishes and allow for sea life to regenerate itself. This fact will be an ecological solution for the city of Tyre. PROJECT PROPOSAL Deep sea fish farming is not an architectural solution but will be providing work opportunities for the fishermen. Museum is for public awareness, where information about the problematics and fish farming will be exhibited. Diving center and small hotel is for the public to receive lessons on diving by the fishermen and eventually be able to five on their own in the existing submerged old egyptian port of Tyre. The small hotel will be added for organized groups. Workshops are for boat fixing and product making for the fishermen. Research center for the marine pollution where the scientists and fishermen can work together to learn how to be sensitive to sea life and fishing methodologies.
FISHERMEN’S HUB - TYRE, LEBANON