The Epistemic Space: Designing the Cairo City Museum as a Palimpsest of Urban Heritage

Old Cairo represents one of the most stratified urban palimpsests in the Mediterranean, where the archaeological remains of Fustat, the first inhabited nucleus after the Roman infrastructure, known as the “Babylon” fortress, coexist with Fatimid mosques, Mamluk caravanserais, and Ottoman courtyard houses. This multi-layered morphology formed the basis of Design Studio V at the German University in Cairo in both academic years 2023/24 and 2024/25, which explored the conception of a Cairo City Museum as an “epistemic space” to interpret and activate the city’s heritage. The student projects aimed to read Old Cairo’s underlying forms and transform them into contemporary design strategies. Typologies such as the courtyard and the caravanserai, or wikalas, were reinterpreted as both climatic devices and cultural mediators, linking archaeological traces with present-day public spaces. Through mapping, typological redrawing, and site-specific proposals, the studio tested how adaptive reuse and urban archaeology might converge to foster renewal in one of Cairo’s most delicate urban environments. The paper argues that Old Cairo can be conceived as a living archaeological area, where morphological continuity provides a framework for congruent and adequate transformation. By situating the design of a museum within this historical context, the research underscores the role of architectural education in exploring strategies that balance continuity, memory, and renewal in the contemporary metropolis. Finally, the study presents a selection of proposals developed by the students to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the applied compositional methodology.