مختارات من عمارة العالم العربي 1914-2014 (ص 30)

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مختارات من عمارة العالم العربي 1914-2014 (ص 30)

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The Misr textile group, a holding created in 1927 to encourage Egyptian
industry, started building large company towns during World War
Two, at Mahalla al-Kubra (in two phases, 1941- 47, and 1946 - 51,
the latter on designs by Ali Labib Gabr) and Kafr al-Dawwar (near
Alexandria, 1943 - 44, Mahmoud Riad, arch.). Considered as “out-
standing examples of housing for industrial workers" and the “last
word of modernity,” these self-contained schemes included all
modern amenities: central restaurants and hospitals, markets and
coffee shops, an open-air cinema, welfare centers, sporting fields,
bathhouses, and automated laundry facilities. (It is no accident that
unionism grew stronger in such comnunities, ultimately contribut-
ing decades later to the 2011 revolution). By 1950, twenty two other
enterprises had erected dwellings for their employees.
As social reformers raised their voices louder in the 1930s, slum
clearance and the provision of healthy dwellings in urban and rural
areas came to the forefront. The largest share of the population
(75 percent in 1927) lived in the countryside in appalling conditions.
Anumber of initiatives were developed to provide sanitization for
the Egyptian village. Regulations were passed in 1933 and model vil-
lages were built by progressive landowners and model designs were
disseminated through publications and industrial fairs. A Ministry of
Social Affairs was established in 1939, with a department devoted
to the Peasant (fellah) and embarked upon model village construc-
tion. It was in this context that Hassan Fathy started experimenting
with what would go on to make him internationally acclaimed: mud
brick architecture for a model village at Bahtim (1940), following the
idea that adobe was commonly used for censtruction in Arizona and
California, two regions with climates resembling that of Egypt. After
trial and error, essays in mud for roofing, using Nubian techniques,
proved successful, and Fathy started building New Gourna, a self-
sufficient pilot community (1947 - 1953) in Upper Egypt, his most
iconic achievement. In 1949, reformer Ahmed Husayn and architect
Mahmoud Riad were entrusted with the task of designing a scheme
to provide housing for groups with limited income (Machru' li-taw-
fir al-sakan lil-tabagat al-mahdudat al-dakhl fi misr), A number of
measures followed, including the creation in 1950 of a department
of Popular Housing at the Ministry of Social Affairs with Riad at its
head. In 1951 the Parliament passed a law on subsidized housing,
drafted after consulting German and American experts, and adopted
an ambitious Social Housing scheme that started to be implemented
in 1953 with the building of four thousand units in suburban Cairo.
Experiments with new materials and techniques, both result-
ing from wartime research in Europe, were conducted in parallel:
foam concrete construction was carried out in 1951 using “Betocel,”
a porous cement-type material invented in 1944 by French engineer
René Fays; pilot projects in standardized housing were conducted by
a German specialist, architect Hans Spiegel, in 1951-1953.
These early attempts at coping with poverty and housing short-
ages show that many projects commonly associated with the new
regime of the Free Officers that came to power in 1952 - including
the monumental Mugamma’ on Midan al-Tahrir—had in fact started
much earlier, and were deeply rooted in the reforming and progres~-
sive ethos of Egypt's early steps towards independence.
Architecture in Egypt 1954-2000
Mohamed El Shahed
The ‏و1950‎ in Egypt are often defined by the 1952 coup d'état, which
was preceded by mass protests and calls for revolution from the end
of the 1940s. In fact, when it comes to the history of Egyptian archi-
tecture during the 20th century, a great deal of emphasis is placed
on key political events as having direct impact on styles, aesthetics,
and the processes of shaping the built environment, Although partly
true, there are other factors that defined the architectural produc-
tion of the period, namely architects’ attempts to continue to gain
commissions, despite immense political transformations.
Asuitable starting point for discussing post-1952 architecture — if
we are to accept this as a major turning point in Egyptian design
practice — would be to return to 1945 and the end of World War Two.
After years of uncertainty, the end of the war was a time for projects
already planned before the war, and halted due to lack of resources
and materials, to be resumed. For others, perhaps more imaginative
and visionary architects, such as Sayed Karim, the end of the war was
atime to start anew. In an article he published in 1945 in the popular
magazine al-Hilal, Karim lamented Cairo's survival during the war and
wished for its destruction. The staunch modernist sought a tabula
rasa to map onto it his vision for a future Egyptian city. Karim's tabula
rasa was not desired as a way to reject the past or tradition. Rather,
it was the architect's way to reflect on the poor urban condition
of greater Cairo, which had resulted from the lack of an overall
master plan. Cairo, he wrote, using a biological metaphor, was an
infected city.
The relation between modernism and tradition in Karim's dis-
course was not oppositional. Karim, as well as others, such as Tawfiq
Abdel Gawad and Muhammad Hammad, who both worked with him
closely in his office and in al-‘Imara, Egypt's premier architectural
journal (1939 - 59), presented Egyptian modernism as a modest
evolution of accumulated traditions. Karim and his colleagues were
not iconoclasts; they did not claim to have produced architecture
devoid of a historical point of reference. Architects working in Egypt
at the time, mostly graduates of Cairo University, saw their work in
conversation with international professional developments as well
as local socio-political transformations. For them, the architecture
that defined the middle decades of the 20th century in Egypt was
not merely derivative from European originals nor was it aestheti-
cally referential via a fixed notion of tradition. Karim did not see the
history of architecture as a progression of styles; rather, he viewed
architectural development primarily through a materialist reading
of history, in which available technologies and materials, along with
social and economic constraints, determine building design. For
Egypt's modernists, there was not a fixed design idiom, a manifesto,
or what could be called a movement. There were, however, multiple
aesthetic practices, the most dominant of which, during the 1950s
and 1960s, was what could be categorized as the International Style.
Sayed Karim’s Ouzonian Building and Zamalek Tower were
designed and built on the eve of the 1952 coup/revolution. Both are
monolithic concrete blocks with brise soleil as a prominent fagade fea-
ture. The Zamalek Tower consists of duplexes topped by a penthouse
with a roof garden, while the multi-use Ouzonian Building has offices,
apartments, a hotel, and duplexes. Visually, these buildings belong
to an already global architectural moment, when similar structures
were built by local professionals in places as varied as Latin America,
Africa, and Asia. In Egypt, Sayed Karim's international style was partly
inspired by a global zeitgeist, but was also inspired by local politics
and culture. Both the Zamalek Tower and the Ouzonian Building
are located in districts dominated by the architecture of foreign
architects from an earlier generation. The seemingly international
style of Karim’s generation of buildings was less determined by fixed
stylistic maneuvers and more by the expression of national modern-
ism without reverting to pastiche. Beyond their aesthetics however,
modernist designs were still relatively elite structures for the privi-
leged; modernist design did not necessarily signify doing away with
class hierarchy.
Perhaps the best example of the emphasis on materiality for the
expression of modernism is the work of Naoum Chebib, an archi-
tect and structural engineer responsible for Nasserist Cairo’s most
prominent landmark, the Cairo Tower. Chebib also designed Cairo's
first and second residential high-rises in 1954 and 1958, His buildings
were expressions of concrete versatility. Ornamental patterns cast in
concrete are common features in these buildings. The Cairo Tower
structure recalls the lotus flower, while the first tall residential tower,
in downtown Cairo, features precast screens/ brise soleil reminiscent
of the mashrabiyya, a wooden screen structure found in historic Cairo.
These individual building commissions represent the minority of
the built environment. However, the role of the state as patron was
rapidly growing, and several building programs were underway as part
of a developmental vision, paralleled in many newly independent or
العمارة في مصر )1908 = ++
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مختارات من عمارة العالم العربي 1914-2014

تاريخ

2014

المنشئ

جورج عربيد