West Shali Reimagined: A Decentralized Vision for Cultural Empowerment and Urban Renewal by Carlos Alfonso Cepeda Gómez

West Shali Reimagined: A Decentralized Vision for Cultural Empowerment and Urban Renewal by Carlos Alfonso Cepeda Gómez

At the heart of the Siwa Oasis, one of the most important Saharan settlements of the Silk Road, with an Islamized Berber population, and important architectural and cultural landmarks like Amon’s Oracle and the Fortress of Shali, West Shali is a center of cultural, historical, and environmental intersection and importance. The West Shali Educational Collective is an architecturally decentralized proposal that conceives the reconstruction of dilapidated West Shali as a living organism that grows at once and not because of a silver bullet architectural proposal.

The collective reimagines the concept of the museum as a static, top-down institution into a horizontal, 5-workshop proposal that gives locals license and space to educate their own communities, frequent these spaces, and share their culture with outsiders. The workshops, each centered around a main topic—History and Oral Traditions, Craftsmanship, Vernacular Architecture, Gastronomy, and Oasis Ecosystems—are conceived as architectural interventions as part of a wider urban acupuncture informed by landscape data.

Located at the peripheries of historical West Shali, these workshops act like doors that connect and interact with the wider urban fabric by geographically orienting themselves towards relevant landmarks, resources, and infrastructure. From farms and restaurants for the Gastronomic Workshop to the salt lake and freshwater spring for the Oasis Ecosystem Workshop, each is oriented to relate the proposed urban fabric of reimagining West Shali with the wider Siwa Oasis settlements.

Given the short period to develop the wider project, the urban proposal was established, and a single workshop—the one centered around History and Oral Traditions—was selected as an architectural intervention example of how one of these workshops could possibly look, function, and interact with its surroundings.

Using cultural knowledge and existing architectural precedents, the workshop relied heavily on the concepts of public and private space, communal gathering, and environmental comfort by using and referencing the traditional Islamic home, Malqafs—a type of windcatcher, Mazallahs—local, covered meeting spaces, traditional textiles, and thermal mass among other techniques.

These workshops would be democratic institutions that allow everyone to use them regardless of religion, gender, and cultural background. Not isolating or preventing anyone from learning, making, and being part of the life of the institutions.