Egyptian Plastic Tales by FR Partnership

Why on earth would we build a massive curved wall covered with 10,000 tiles of recycled Egyptian plastic before even launching our studio? It sounds absurd and it might be. But it’s also hopefully ambitious. It’s easy to confuse the two. 

When we embarked on our journey, we hoped the recycling industry would have the right infrastructure for our model. We also hoped designers would find us interesting enough to collaborate. We hoped to link the two industries. They’re both booming separately.

The absurdity, however, was the curved wall being taller than a double-decker bus, wider than a tennis court, and yet somehow thinner than the palm of your hand. It took us a while to realize this wasn’t absurdity. It was ambition expressed through architecture.

Two statements are true about Egyptians. First, they are recyclers. They always have been and always will be. Second, they are designers. They invented graphic design and built baffling structures. Pioneers of both fields.

Our story, encapsulated in our Cairo Design Week debut, stands as testament.

Searching for recycled Egyptian plastic, we expected to find a couple of suppliers at best. Maybe five colors at most. We worried about quality and variety. To our surprise, we found Egyptians recycling plastic at a truly humbling scale.

It came as a surprise because we assume since we have a poor littering culture then we must have a poor recycling culture. This couldn’t be further from the truth or else our studio wouldn’t exist.

We found high quality recycled plastic all over Egypt. From 6th of October City to Kafr El Sheikh. Pelletized like candy in endless shades of blue, red, and yellow. Made from bottle caps, shampoo bottles, ice cream tubs, and the manufacturing of baby diapers. Yes, baby diapers.

This is where their story ends and ours begins. Our goal was to join Egyptian recyclers and complete their circle through design. To turn recycled Egyptian plastic into surfaces, we first had to build machines to melt and squeeze it to its artificial limits.

The result is a 1x1m sheet in thicknesses varying from 0.5cm to 2cm.

Our first sheet was made in Petroleum Green. It was so buttery smooth it almost made three grown men cry. As hard as you’d want a decorative surface to be yet malleable like chocolate.

Little did we know by Cairo Design Week we would have to manually produce over 100 of those exact sheets. That’s where renowned Egyptian architect Ahmad Fayyad entered our story.

Ahmad Fayyad and Malak Rashad’s practice, FR Partnership, sits somewhere between minimalism and formalism. They approach spatial experiences as formalists and express them with minimal restraint. Form becomes an intellectual driver of their design.

Despite the plethora of patterns we discovered using different types and colors of recycled Egyptian plastic, Fayyad singled out the same shade we started our story with only we had no idea what he intended to do with it.

The color spoke to the architect. It was similar to shades frequented in his portfolio only this was different. It had sporadic textures going from rough to smooth. Colors ranged from Greyish Blue to Forest Green, and all the Petroleum in between.

Fayyad would occasionally venture out of his practice to create installations reflecting our environmental realities. The perspectives we’re ignoring. That, paired with his singular approach to architecture, made him our first and, quite frankly, only choice for our debut collaboration.

We presented Fayyad and his team, led by senior architect Mariam Abouelnasr, with ‘The Plan’ hieroglyph. It’s one of five hieroglyphs constructing our studio’s name: Mai-t, Egyptian for ‘The Renewal Space’.

The Plan hieroglyph fit the collaboration because it represents an architect’s plan of a space, also translated as enclosure. A symbol of design.

We expected the architects to conceptualize, abstract, or layer it through their minimalist lens. They did. Then they got philosophical and we love them for it.

When FR Partnership presented Egyptian Plastic Tales, their minimal formalism was crystal clear. It deconstructed the spatial experience, breaking it into four clear lines each acting as an enclosure.

If you look at the plan it’s straightforward. Four lines. One curve. But reality hit us when they walked us through it. Walls were dedicated to different functions such as displays for our launch collections Hand of Fatima by Yasmin Noureldin and The Love Letter by Shosha Kamal, a temple wall for our studio’s hieroglyphs etched in recycled baby diapers, and seating areas.

Then there was the curved wall.

Only Fayyad could draw a curve in the ground for it to become taller than a double-decker bus, wider than a tennis court, and - in a proportional flirt - thinner than the palm of your hand. As if that weren’t compelling enough, it’s covered with 10,000 tiles of recycled Egyptian plastic.

At the time, we were producing only three sheets per day. Do the math. Their design needed 100 sheets cut into 100 tiles each. All of this was to be done by hand in our solar-powered studio. Sheet by sheet. Tile by tile.

When we committed to FR Partnership’s Egyptian Plastic Tales we had produced 20 sheets over three months of testing. We needed to produce 100 in less. None of us had done anything like this before. Here is where ambition can easily blur into absurdity.

A key hieroglyph in Mai-t is the Egyptian Sickle. It symbolizes craft. To make things with your hands. To toil. You can see it piercing through the Egyptian phoenix in our main emblem; a symbol of renewal.

We optimized our workflow like clockwork and were able to produce 15 sheets in 14 hours using one machine. We made the 100 sheets in nine days.

Turning the 100 sheets into 10,000 tiles wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for a Syrian woodworker taking it upon himself to manually cut each single tile. 10,000 times. Wrestle with this in your head.

Enter Cairo Design Week, home to our debut. Over the past couple of years it became the compass of the Egyptian design industry. In 2025, we were positioned in a new location: Merryland Park.

Merryland Park is one of few remaining public parks, a relic of a time when Egyptians from various socio-economic classes met on grass. The park is engraved into the minds of entire generations. Obviously not the younger ones.

This is precisely what makes Cairo Design Week so powerful. It brings Egyptians back to spaces unjustly forgotten. Revisiting our heritage, both the historical and the behavioral. 

Upon visiting the park, Mariam Abouelnasr noticed a towering tree and imagined an architectural gesture engaging with it. From there, Egyptian Plastic Tales was born. After six sleepless nights, the installation was built. Everyone pitched in. Friends turned into painters, assemblers, and sculptors.

In the morning, we all realized the architect’s vision. A monumental wall covered in recycled plastic was humbled only by a decades-old tree. Proof design doesn’t need to shout to be meaningful.

The dogs of Merryland Park, whose home we practically invaded with our recycled plastic, understood our gesture and welcomed us. Real design works with nature.

The first public unveiling of our launch prototypes, Hand of Fatima by Yasmin Noureldin and The Love Letter by Shosha Kamal, presented us with priceless feedback. Conversations gave us insight into how people related to recycled plastic. To the products and their proportions.

Screenings of classic Egyptian film ‘The Lady of the Castle’ featuring Faten Hamama and Omar Sharif made visitors feel the wall had always belonged there. The response confirmed something we deeply believe: when material, place, and intention align, architecture stops feeling temporary. It becomes part of our public domain.

So, was any of this worth it? Oh, yeah. The wonder we saw in people’s eyes became our fuel as we prepared to go live.

Egyptians allowed us to exist. Throughout our journey, we asked so many of them from all walks of life. Designers, architects, artists, blacksmiths, woodworkers, recyclers. We shared our concept and they had every chance to tell us why it wouldn’t work. None of them did. They all believed in what recycled Egyptian plastic can be.

Our story doesn’t belong to us alone. It belongs to them. Our story belongs to Yasmin Noureldin who lent us the Hand of Fatima in 2024 to experiment with. To Shosha Kamal who celebrated our material through The Love Letter. To Ahmad Fayyad who forced us to explore our true potential.

Standing together in front of the wall we asked Fayyad, “Why? Did it have to be this huge?” His answer was as straightforward as the curve, “Don’t you want your studio to succeed?” His charming certainty didn’t sink in at first. It was months later that we realized; it was never about the wall or the tiles.

Like many before us, creative studios often start with a monumental gesture before a product line. Fayyad understood this before it crystallized in our minds. That’s where experience comes in handy. To design among friends.

Now, as we go live, we have that experience under our belt. We know the limits of our material but more importantly the limits of our own potential. If it wasn’t for this wall breaking our backs and our bank, we wouldn’t have known. Tell us how waste can become priceless.

Egyptians never believed in waste. Nothing should be thrown away or dismissed. Everything has a purpose beyond its initial utility. Anything can be renewed.

Mai-t is Egyptian for The Renewal Space.