The architects of XXA, the office of Xross-Xultural Architecture believe that architecture is the art of good story telling. They believe that a successful building can be essentially read as a narrative that proposes vision. They design each project as a statement that describes both the conditions of the site and the development scenario that transforms the vision into reality.
XXA with offices in both Berkeley, California, U.S.A, and Cairo, Egypt has recently produced some good projects. But the proposal of Architect Nezar AlSayyad, and collaborating planner Dr. Tarek AbuZekry for the Four Sails Resort, South of Hurghada on the Red Sea promises to be a major achievement, and a test of their narrative vision.
The project brief of the Egyptian Bank of Exports (EBE) called for a four phased development to include a 200 room hotel, 140 vacation houses (70 villas and 70 time-share town houses), and a commercial center with shops and restaurants on a 170 acre hilly site that sloped down around 70 meters to a 500 meter long beach.
The architects were inspired by Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities. They used one of the short essays on a city situated between the desert and the sea from that book. For the sailor on a ship, the city resembles a camel, and for the desert traveler on a camel, it resembles a docking ship. The design of the Four Sails resort tried to capture the spirit of this city.
XXA's design called for a cable lift system that connected the highest and lowest points on the site, serving as visitors entrance and beach front respectively.
The form of the lift itself was inspired by the Papyrus boat, which has served as the official logo of EBE, for some time. The Four towers that carried the cables were designed as tall triangular- like structures.
From the point of entry, they can be seen as four boat sails descending the slope.
The architects capitalized on these towers as the most visible landmark within the site, and called their project "The Four Sails Resort". They placed the hotel between the sea and the artificial lake they created within the beach area. Loosely projecting out of the hotel is a spine of small buildings containing shops and restaurants which divides the site into two equal parts with very different topographies. The architects called the relatively flat lower part, the Valley Village, while the site with the more steep sloped site was named Hill Town.
This part of the project seems inspired by the architecture of Mediterranean hill towns with its irregular forms, domed rooms, small squarish windows and its white washed color.
Most of the units in the Valley Village appear to have been designed as detached large villas, each with its own swimming pool. They all appear as scattered on green landscaped garden. The most interesting part of the project is the elegant design of the basic unit in the Village. It resembles a box that has been split by a Sail boat-like atrium void. On one side, the atrium serves as an entrance and on the other as a covered pool, which can be fully contained within the air, conditioned enclosure of the unit by the movement of two curved sliding glass panels. More than anything in the project, this unique design captures the spirit of the "Four Sails" idea.
