GIZA: Tuesday evening witnessed the birth of a modern monument in the shadow of the Pyramids as guests gathered on the Giza plateau to celebrate the inauguration of the Stone Towers development. The new project, a business park incorporating offices, retail space, a luxury hotel and apartments, was designed by world-renowned Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid and is being developed by the Rooya Group, and Egyptian real estate developers. Set to be located within the new Stone Park residential compound in New Cairo's Fifth Settlement area, which is currently under construction, the project will cover 170,000 square meters and include 18 business towers and 1,400 residential units. Stone Tower will be the first project in Egypt for 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Hadid, who is one of the world's leading architects with major projects in the works around the world. Hadid's most famous buildings include the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rheim, Germany and the Bridge Pavililion in Zaragoza, Spain. She is currently working on designs for the Aquatics Center for London, one of the venues for the 2012 summer Olympics. Tuesday's inauguration welcomed Zaha Hadid to Egypt in high style. The event brought together figures from the local and international design and real estate circles against the stunning backdrop of Egypt's most timeless monument to architecture. Distinguished guests included Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, CEO of Rooya Group Hisham Shoukri and Patrik Schumacher, an architecture theorist and partner at Zaha Hadid Architects. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Hadid expressed her excitement about undertaking a project in Egypt. "I am delighted to be working in Cairo. I have visited Egypt many times and I have always been fascinated by the mathematics and arts of the Arab world. In our office we have always researched the formal concepts of geometry, which relates a great deal to the region s art traditions and sciences in terms of algebra, geometry and mathematics. These 30 years of research are evident in the design for Stone Towers, she said. Shoukri welcomed guests in his opening speech, which underlined the importance of the Stone Towers project as a cultural undertaking for posterity. We gather tonight in a landmark, the pyramids, built by our forefathers: the first developers of the world. We are all proud of it, and our duty as developers is to make our grandchildren proud of what we will achieve, and we hope that Stone Towers can be among them, he said. Explaining the choice of Zaha Hadid as the architect for the project, Shoukri underscored the architect's unique qualifications. Stone Towers needed an architect with daring ideas, innovation, international expertise and renowned excellence, and most of all with an imprint that has created a school in architecture. It needed Zaha Hadid. In her remarks, Hadid detailed her vision for the project. With a large-scale project such as the Stone Towers, care must be taken to balance a necessary requirement for repetitive elements whilst avoiding an uncompromising repetition of static building masses. "The architecture of Stone Towers pursues a geometric rhythm of similar, interlocking, yet individually differentiated building forms that creates a cohesive composition, she said. Work on Stone Towers will begin within the year, with a projected construction period of three to five years. Rooya Group for Real Estate Development has more than $2 billion invested in real estate projects and a paid capital of over $124 million.
