The Pulse of Sinai Bedouin Development Center is a design by Aly Ahmed Kamal Soliman that was chosen as an entry into the 2011 Archiprix International graduate design competition. It is meant as a monument and celebration of Bedouin culture in the Egypt and as a means of integration into greater Egyptian culture. Soliman captures the Center’s purpose by drawing a remarkable celebration of Bedouin values in the Center’s architectural form.

The structure of the Pulse of Sinai is based entirely on Bedouin culture and society, and is designed to be a sort of journey through history and towards the future. Separate showrooms for each Bedouin tribe all lead to a plaza, a reference to the Bedouin tradition of gathering in a common meeting place to make societal decisions. This plaza emphasizes Bedouin heritage with exhibits and historical information.

Beyond the plaza, visitors move through a connector over a camel race track towards a development center. The camel race track captures the concept of forward societal movement and Bedouin tradition, the synergy that Soliman sought to encapsulate in form. The development center will hold spaces for workshops and exhibitions with the goal of teaching the Bedouins to integrate into Egyptian society by honing traditional crafts, knowledge and resources. The development center leads skyward into th Tower of Hope, a symbol of hope for Bedouin successes and development in the future.

The Archiprix International graduate design competition has been held since 2001, when the Dutch group invited  architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning design institutes to submit their best designs in context to Rotterdam as a cultural capital of Europe. The competition has been held in that spirit of highlighting the best graduate design projects every 2 years since in Istanbul (03), Glasglow (05), Shanghai (07), and Montevideo (09). The 2011 competition will be the first based stateside and will take place in May at MIT in Cambridge, MA.