Ramy Maher

The new museum for the Nationalgalerie's collection of twentieth-century art completes Berlin's Kulturforum. It stands on the last open site of the ensemble, between Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie, Hans Scharoun's Philharmonie and the Church of St. Matthew.

Under a single wide pitched roof, with façades of open brickwork, the building is conceived as a covered piece of the city. Two passages cross inside it and connect it to the streets and squares on every side, so that art is met on the building's edges as much as in its galleries. Beside the Nationalgalerie's holdings it will show the Marx, Pietzsch and Marzona collections, and a tunnel links it underground to the Neue Nationalgalerie.

An infrastructure giant is taking shape beneath the city of Oktoberfest, while life above carries on at full pace. The Zweite Stammstrecke is Munich's second S-Bahn line through the city centre, with new stations deep below the Hauptbahnhof, Marienhof and Ostbahnhof. With Atelier 4d, I worked on the interiors of the stations underground.

All of it is built while the trains of the main station keep running, and that structure was the challenge that drew me in. The station is built from the top down. The ground is dug out and a floor slab is poured; beneath it, the next level is excavated and propped on temporary columns before its own slab is poured, and so on, nine levels deep. Only then are the permanent columns cast and the temporary ones removed.

A new residential quarter on the site of a former electrical converter station between Gebersdorfer Straße and Bibertstraße in Nuremberg. Besides housing, the brief called for a daycare centre, senior apartments and a neighbourhood grocery store.

The winning scheme lines up terraced houses along a green promenade that crosses the site, with play lawns, a playground and an oval daycare pavilion along its length. Four-storey apartment buildings face Gebersdorfer Straße and shelter the quarter from traffic, while the senior housing, the grocery store and a café frame a small square. A forest path follows the western edge, and a wildflower meadow doubles as rainwater storage.

Mannheim's new technical town hall brings around 700 city employees under one roof in the Glücksteinquartier, beside the main station. Designed by schneider + schumacher and carried out by ATP as the executing architects, it was built by Implenia as general contractor in two and a half years, from May 2017 to December 2020.

A thirteen-storey tower rises from a long, low block on one of the city's main traffic arteries. Behind glass façades framed in gold lie offices, meeting halls, a staff restaurant and a company kindergarten, in a building meant to be open to the citizens it serves. It meets the KfW Efficiency House 55 standard and saves about 157 tonnes of CO2 a year. At ATP, I worked in the execution team on the working drawings.

A conference hotel with 398 rooms and suites in Munich's Westend, on Landsberger Straße, where the railway runs into the main station. Above a glazed ground floor on slender columns, light façades with tall, narrow windows step back in several wings. Inside are about 2,400 m² of meeting and event space with a ballroom of some 900 m², and a rooftop terrace that looks out over the city to the Alps. It opened in September 2023, with interiors by Studio Lux.

One of the biggest challenges was the sound insulation: the hotel stands directly beside the tracks of Deutsche Bahn. On that side, the rooms have double windows with triple glazing, so they stay quiet while the trains pass. At ATP, I worked from the design to the working drawings, in coordination with Studio Lux, the interior architects, and the building services engineers (MEP, HKLS in German).

A competition entry for Egypt's national pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. The pavilion is a passage through three phases of Egypt. The past, where visitors read about Egypt's architecture and its architects. The present: Egypt in 2016, in the middle of a turbulent time, as a labyrinth of dimly lit spaces and images of the suffering Egyptians had grown used to. And the future, Elysium: the bright room the passage finally leads to, where a large physical model of the city has an empty part on the map, and visitors use augmented reality to build Egypt's future.

The design for that future unfolds in three phases. The first keeps the architecture of the existing city, with more green and public space. The second follows the city's main axes: buildings rise taller along them, and where they stay low, they make room for more green space. The third is a business district, to strengthen the city's chances of becoming a financial capital of North Africa and the Middle East.

Extended Threads joins a philosophical reading of architecture with technology. It takes apart what architecture means, who builds, where and how, and puts it back together as a game. It is an inquiry into where architecture ends and design begins, stripping architecture down and dismantling it back to single syllables. Its result is a tool for building vernacularly, without professionally trained architects.

In a gesture-based video game played in virtual reality, players use their hands to control robots at a distance. The robots build by sintering, fusing loose material layer by layer into solid form, across a lunar landscape. The game runs on a computer and on a phone in a VR headset, and many players can build together from anywhere.

Building 8 is an educational building at the university, and its entrance leads people to the main hall. I programmed a motion sensor in Processing on an ordinary laptop camera: if the change in a pixel's RGB values exceeded a threshold, measured as √(x² + y² + z²) with x, y and z the changes in red, green and blue, the sensor understood there was motion in that pixel. I then placed the camera on the bridge shown in the render below to capture the motion of everyone passing on their way to the hall, and their trails built up the space for the furniture.

I then flattened that motion onto the floor plan of the room. In the empty spaces, where no one walked, I designed a piece of furniture made of 2 cm boards, pressed and glued: a bar for a party, standing exactly where it is in nobody's way.

An outdoor spiral staircase for a café in Berlin, with a landing after three steps. The view on the way up mattered most: the stair had to open up and show more of its surroundings as you climb, rather than shut you in between walls.

The top edge of its curved outer wall is written as an equation. Parallel to the stair it stays closed; a sine opens it but meets the parapet with a kink; a smoother curve opens it and flows into the parapet. In the interactive model you change the curve and watch the wall change, in 3D and unrolled.