مختارات من عمارة العالم العربي 1914-2014 (ص 29)

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مختارات من عمارة العالم العربي 1914-2014 (ص 29)

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postcolonial nations in the global south. These projects consisted
largely of necessary infrastructure such as drinking water distribution,
sewage, and expansion of road networks and transport. One of the
first newly established institutions following 1952 was a national insti-
tute dedicated to the design of schools across the country. Another
set of institutions were created to respond to the need for housing.
Existing housing developments in the private sector were nationalized
and managed by the same state-run consortium, mentioned above.
These political transformations diminished the place of architects
as serving a bourgeois minority. By 1963, Egypt was home to more
than 18,000 architects and engineers most of whom practiced like
anonymous civil servants, as part of the developmental machine
which produced architecture at an unprecedented pace.
Some exceptional structures from this period include Mahmoud
Riad’s municipality building and the Arab League Headquarters,
both along the Nile in central Cairo. The Arab League building in
particular embodies the politics of the time and the aspirations of
Cairo as the political heart of the region. The building is composed
of a multi-story building, flanked by two volumes for the administra-
tion and the assembly hall. The resulting central court is adorned
with Moorish patterns, reinterpreted with 1950s tiles grafted on the
building's otherwise unadorned fagade.
The 1959 establishment of Nasr City provided Sayed Karim with
the tabula rasa he had wished for in 1945. It was his opportunity to
build an entire city unburdened with Cairo’s complex and decaying
urban fabric. The new city included middle income housing blocks,
villas, and new government buildings. The centerpiece of the new city
was a landmark stadium; a necessary structure for hosting political
rallies, with a capacity of over one hundred thousand spectators. The
stadium was the first structure completed in the new city, along with
a military parade grandstand. Both structures utilized concrete in
functional yet visually stunning ways. The various government offices
in this aspiring new political center, akin te Chandigarh or Brasilia
in its conception, consisted of functional multistory buildings with
horizontal articulations and strip windows. The idea was to move
such offices outside the old heart of Cairo and to house the state
bureaucrats in the new housing blocks. Ateam of architects designed
the apartments with Sayed Karim at the helm. Karim’s distinctive
H-shaped apartment blocks were arranged on a diagonal in relation
to the city's streets, as to create open space in front and in the back
of each block. The apartments were efficient, yet spacious by inter-
national standards for postwar state-built housing, with apartments
consisting of three and four bedrooms, and others consisting of two
floors.
The apartments of Nasr City were, however, inaccessible to the
majority of Egyptians in need of housing. Nasr City was considered
remote in location, discouraging families from relocating, and the
prices were not accessible to the masses. More affordable housing
models were developed across the country to absorb the population
growth. Increasingly the designs of such projects were not credited
to particular architects but rather to the state. By the mid-1960s,
architects became anonymous, save a few exceptions. The 1967 war
and Egyptian military defeat were a final blow to an economy and
development vision that had been economically and politically unsus-
tainable. The architectural profession, having been fully controlled by
the military state through its syndicate, professional meetings, and
publications, never recovered its autonomy.
The functional, modernist designs, which proliferated in the 1950s
and 1960s, evolved from two decades of architectural practice prior
to 1952. However, the close affinity of such practice with a failing
political project put into question the validity of the architecture
produced during that era. The Egyptian state had become increas-
ingly authoritarian, and ultimately, despite some success in expanding
services, failed to deliver on its promises for lasting social equality.
While Egypt experienced national trauma following 1967 and entered
into a national existential crisis recorded in the cinema and literature
of the time, on an international level too, modernism was seen as an
expiring architecture.
The 19705 can be characterized as a decade of search for identity.
While intellectuals and professionals searched for Egypt's true iden-
tity, the majority of the built environment from then on was produced
outside the confines of architecture as a profession. Contractors ren-
dered the architectural profession increasingly irrelevant, and informal
building activity proliferated among poor communities, mostly rural
migrants to cities. Within the besieged architectural profession, calls
to return to basics and to reevaluate the vernacular gained momentum,
as Hassan Fathy entered the canon of western architectural history
books. Fathy’s 1945 New Gourna Village, which was deemed at the time
a social, economic, and practical failure, was rediscovered, and pre-
sented within the Egyptian academy as a model for “architecture for the
poor." Several subsequent projects were commissioned to Fathy such
as the Sadat Resthouse in Kalabsha, Nubia. Fathy's students preached
his message and built careers on building, in his style, country homes
for the urban elite. Architects such as Abdel Wahed al-Wakil built — on
the Hassan Fathy aesthetic — private residences for the affluent seek-
ing modern spaces grounded in a conscious construction of identity
that ambiguously claims to be simultaneously down to earth, Egyptian,
islamic, and Arab.
Perhaps more successful in recuperating some notion of the ver-
nacular without subscribing to absolutism nor fully rejecting modern
practices, Ramses Wissa Wassef's Saint Mary’s Church in Zamalek
exhibits a modern monolithic ribbed structure for its nave, while
introducing elements that recall traditional eastern Christian archi-
tecture. His earlier Mahmoud Mukhtar Museum, also in Zamalek, was
a building that appeared modernist from its exterior with its rectilin-
ear colonnade, however, the entire design was a meditation on space
and fight as an architectural response to the sculptures exhibited in
the museum. Wissa Wassef's engagement with vernacular architec-
ture was grounded in a phenomenological reading of space, unlike
Fathy’s materialist approach to vernacular design, which was fixated
on mud brick and a conscious rejection of modern technology.
The period of political and economic stagnation of the Mubarak
presidency was largely unremarkable architecturally, as architects
struggled to reconfigure their role in society. A few landmark buildings
were erected, namely the 1988 new Cairo Opera House and Mahmoud
El-Hakirn's 1997 Nubian Museum. Both buildings were part of a wave of
large developmental projects - involving international funding — that
were presented by the Mubarak regime as evidence of its moderniza-
tion. The design of such buildings continued to flirt with the notion
of situated modernism, that is, the use of architectural vocabularies
that vaguely point to local traditions (arches, domes, etc). Abdeihalim
ibrahim Abdelhalim's 1990 Children's Cultural Park presented an
assemblage of such architectural elements in a manner reminis-
cent of 19th century garden follies: architecture as a collection of
fragments. By the end of the 1990s, other appropriations of pseudo-
historical motifs emerged in buildings such as the Faisal islamic Bank
Tower, consisting of offices and twenty luxury flats. The building fea-
tures extensive calligraphy cast into screens. The entrance portal is
topped by a muqarnas-inspired decorative element. The dawn of the
new millennium also witnessed a revival of Ancient Egyptian — rather
than Arab or Islamic — pastiche, appearing in key public commissions
such as the Egyptian Supreme Court by Ahmed Mito.

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مختارات من عمارة العالم العربي 1914-2014

تاريخ

2014

المنشئ

جورج عربيد