Architecture and Urbanism in the Middle East

Rabbat...

Headquarters, built in 1930 by Mustafa Fahmi. A counter-style, the
Neo-Pharaonic, was limited to mostly Art-Deco commercial build-
ings, except for the Mausoleum of Sa‘d Zaghlul, the leader of the
1919 revolution against the British, which was designed by Mustafa
Fahmi in 1928 specifically to express an Egyptian identity that united
Muslims and Copts. (Fig. 3)

Another historicist, though less localized, and hence less nationalistic,
style, the neo-Islamic, was adopted for many of the commercial build-
ings in downtown, probably as a means to give the city a special character as a modern metropolis with an “Oriental” geneal-
ogy. This is exemplified by many of the oeuvres of the Slovenian architect Antonio Lasciac, such as the Bank Misr building
(Fig. 4) and the Assicurazioni Generali Trieste Apartment Building. The style dominates the commercial and civic center of
a new suburb, Heliopolis, which was built in the 1910s by the Belgian industrialist Baron Empain as an Oriental garden-city
for a new, select, and mostly foreign professional class.

The Revolution of 1952 that toppled the monarchy gave rise to the
more outspoken categories of modernity, nationalism, and socialism as
framers of the image and the architecture of the recently independent
republic. The new framework engendered some important modern-
ist civic projects ranging from entire new satellite cities, such as Nasr
City, planned by Sayyid Kuraim in the 1960s, to government offices,
factories, hospitals, schools, and
public housing projects. Simul-
taneously, and somewhat in op-
position to the modernist emphasis, a number of outstanding architects, such as
Hassan Fathy and Ramses Wissa Wasef, advanced vernacular architecture as the
most authentic representation of the people’s architecture of Egypt. Their buildings,
such as New Gourna village (1948-1961) by the former and Harraniyya village (Fig.
5) by the latter (1957-74), cast the vernacular through a mixture of objective social
and environmental experiments and lyrical interpretations of traditions. Their fol-
lowers continued to use their formal language but did not develop its socioeconomic
content. Instead they brandished it as a kind of indigenous post-modern response to
the blandness of modernist architecture and, in some cases, such as the work of ‘Abd
al-Wahid al-Wakil in Saudi Arabia, exported it as an expressive regional style.

The last three decades have witnessed the resurgence of the discourse on Islam as a cultural identity, which translated in
architecture into a massive revivalist movement. Sincerely at times, but opportunistically at others, many architects en-

Fig. 2: Dar al-Kutub

Fig. 3: Mausoleum of Sa‘d Zaghlul

Fig. 4: Bank Misr