6th October Mall

A pre-concept study for a small retail-and-office building — site analysis, three area studies, a massing concept, a material palette and a leasing strategy — with the build priced and checked for buildability before the concept was fixed.

Location: Hadayek October, 6th of October City
Programme: Retail, food & beverage, offices
Plot: 1,232 m²
Height: Three storeys over basement parking
Stage: Pre-concept report, Rev B
Issued: September 2026

The site

A long plot with one street.

The plot is narrow and deep, with road frontage on one short edge only, a blind party wall on the west, and afternoon sun and prevailing dust arriving from opposite sides. Every later decision answers one of these constraints — the study records them first so the concept can be checked against them.

The catchment is a five-to-fifteen-minute walk of neighbourhood housing: a building for the people already there, not a destination.

Site location plan in the style of an Ordnance Survey extract — building blocks in grey, roads in white, the plot in ember with a 400-metre walking ring — beside a panel of what each face of the plot receives, a wind rose, and four climate figures. — Site location plan, with orientation and climate — what each face of the plot receives, and what the design does about it.

Design development

Three ways to fill the plot.

Before a form was chosen, three ways of occupying the plot were drawn and measured against the same yardsticks: lettable area, efficiency, glazed frontage, how many units get daylight, and which way the entrance faces.

A deep block with a corridor turns its back on the road. Four masses around an open court give an outdoor space that is unusable in an Egyptian summer. A ring of units around a covered atrium puts the entrance on the street, gives every unit two faces, and daylights all of them. It was chosen for those reasons, which the diagram shows.

Three area studies side by side — a deep block with corridor, four masses around an open court, and a ring around a covered atrium — each with footprint, net lettable area, efficiency, frontage and daylight figures. — Three options, one set of measures. Option C is the proposal.

The concept

From mass to place.

Four operations take the plot envelope to the proposal, and each answers a constraint recorded on the site page: the envelope is the licence setback; the carve is the daylight a long plot cannot get from its edges; the split gives every unit a second face; the shifts open the terraces and set the plant back.

01 Envelope
02 Carve the spine
03 Split into four
04 Shift and settle

The programme

Convenience below, a reason to go upstairs.

Ground floor: fourteen shops around the atrium and an entrance hall on the road — convenience, food and services, the things a neighbourhood uses daily. First floor: the day-out floor. Second floor: fourteen office suites and a small clinic-and-studio hub. Parking below.

The plan is drawn from one metre-based model; plates are at true proportion and the areas in the report were measured from it.

Exploded programme stack: basement parking, ground-floor shops around an atrium, first-floor shops around the gallery, second-floor office suites, and a glazed atrium roof. — The programme stack.

Ground floor plan: a ring of shop units around a covered atrium with the entrance hall on the road frontage. — Ground floor.

Realistic from day one

Three firms, at pre-concept.

Most pre-concept work is a designer’s document; cost and buildability arrive later and reshape it. Here all three CUBIT firms worked on the study, so the concept the client received already had a material palette that can be produced, a construction estimate, and a buildability review behind it.

Studio S+RK

Design

Site analysis, the area studies, the massing concept, plans, sections and facade.
NASROC Global Egypt

Material selection

The material palette — limestone, bronze, terrazzo and the glazed roof — chosen for what can be produced and installed to specification in Egypt, not just what renders well.
Capital for Contracting

Cost & buildability

Construction estimate pricing, and a buildability and construction-feasibility review of the concept, so it carries a cost and a construction method from the start.

Limestone
Bronze
Terrazzo
Glazed roof

The material palette, selected by NASROC for production and installation in Egypt.

Commercial strategy

A leasing strategy, at pre-concept.

The study sizes the tenant mix to the walk-in catchment — convenience and food first, services second, fashion as the reason to come upstairs — and checks the mix against the trading day, so that something in the building is busy in every part of it.

This is unusual at pre-concept stage, and it is why the massing has a covered atrium and terraces rather than an open court: the commercial argument and the architectural one were made together.