New Cairo
— — a city poured straight onto the sand.
Not only on a wall.
“A planned satellite city laid out east of Cairo in the year 2000, built up the slope from the Ring Road onto the open desert. Wide boulevards, gated compounds, malls, and the new American University campus that opened in 2008. The air is dustier than the river city it answers to, and the light at the end of the day comes in long and orange across the flat ground. from the studio
New Cairo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
New Cairo is a planned city in the eastern Cairo Governorate, established by presidential decree in 2000 and built on the desert plateau east of the Ring Road. It covers roughly 70,000 acres and is one of several satellite cities created to relieve population pressure on central Cairo. The current population is well over half a million and growing. Districts include First, Third, and Fifth Settlements; the last is the commercial spine, home to the relocated American University in Cairo campus.
The American University in Cairo opened its 260-acre New Cairo campus in 2008, designed by Boston firm Sasaki Associates with limestone walls referencing Islamic and Mediterranean traditions. Around it the city's architecture runs to gated compounds, glass-fronted shopping malls such as Cairo Festival City and Point 90, and low-rise housing built quickly into the desert grid. The street pattern is wide and right-angled, in deliberate contrast to the old city's medieval tangle.
New Cairo is best reached from central Cairo by car along the Ring Road or the Cairo-Suez road, around 30 to 45 minutes from downtown depending on traffic. The metro does not yet reach the new districts; ride-share covers most of the gap. Visitors usually come for the AUC campus, the malls, or the residential compounds where many international families live. The newer Administrative Capital lies further east along the same desert axis.