An Open Project Lab on the Nile

The volume presents the work developed on the occasion of the 18th international architecture exhibition - Venice Biennale 2023 for the Egypt pavilion. NiLab is a laboratory for the knowledge and elaboration of ideas and projects along the Nile River, an emblematic opportunity for reflection on the theme of water in the more general context of climate change. Never as in Egypt, the presence of a waterway has been identified within the history of civilization, in its cultural, scientific, and humanistic aspects. Its extraordinary geographical dimension draws natural and man-made landscapes, feeds cities and productive systems, reserves and agricultural landscapes. Any alteration of the Nile River can cause a destruction of the millennial balance between living species and the historical and natural landscape, especially in an age where major territorial and productive transformations risk disturbing the established natural balance, causing entropy and degradation. The themes, corresponding to six landscape sections – Nature, Agro, Urbe, Infrastructure, Industry, Archaeology – were developed within eighteen areas of design intervention, identified for a common international comparison between Egypt and the planet. Together with Cairo’s Ain-Shams University, Faculty of Engineering (Egypt) and Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria, dArTe Department (Italy), curators of the pavilion who have been collaborating for years in research and teaching activities, 24 international universities are invited to build NiLab, a laboratory in which, students, teachers and researchers discuss possible future scenarios along the river. The aim is to create a reflection on design strategies, as a contribution to major urban and landscape emergencies, in the general context of a contemporaneity that demands new reflections on the tools and languages of architecture from the project.