Demolitions and the Urgency of Architectural History in Egypt
اتبع الرابط لقراءة هذا المنشور باللغة العربيةIt is impossible to honestly portray Cairo today without representing not only continuous construction but also demolition. In July 2020 bulldozers ripped through a main street running across Cairo’s Northern Cemetery, within the perimeter of the UNESCO-listed Historic Cairo site. Much more extensive demolitions for a highway crossing the Southern Cemetery are already underway. Thus far, monumental Mamluk works (1250-1517) in these cemeteries are not affected by the construction of these highways, which primarily impact twentieth-century mausoleums and tombs, many belonging to nationalist figures, industrialists, writers, members of the Egyptian royal family, intellectuals and artists. The sudden demolitions are clearing the way for a 17.5 km elevated highway link that violates the integrity of this unique historic site.
The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities issued a brief response on its Facebook page on July 20th, 2020, stating that no “registered monuments” will be demolished. However, it is not widely known that the number of registered Islamic monuments in all of Egypt is only 774. This is a gross underrepresentation: the city of Alexandria, for example, is home to only four listed Islamic monuments. In 1951, the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l'Art Arabe (founded 1881, disbanded 1961), had listed 619 Islamic monuments before it was replaced by the Supreme Council of Antiquities and subsequently the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.[1] This means that since independence was proclaimed in 1952, only around 150 Islamic monuments in all of Egypt were added to the list. Despite this, the walls of the violated area of Historic Cairo contain thousands of potential sites that can be listed and protected but continue to disappear due to negligence and poor policy. The ongoing crisis in Cairo puts into sharp relief the problem of defining what is Islamic architecture and who decides its heritage value? How do we label, study and protect the modern architectural productions of Muslim societies in a world in which the “Islamic” and the “modern” are posited as mutually exclusive?
Is the Egyptian state’s refusal to protect twentieth-century heritage an admission that Egyptian society falls outside the history of modernity and therefore there is no need to record and protect the remains of this experience of modernity unless they have touristic currency?
The demolished twentieth-century tombs are regarded as having little historical value. Haphazard demolition of tombs is not only a desecration of the dead (in conflict with Egyptian traditions and Muslim values), but it is also a transgression on private property (figure 1). Tombs affected by the recent demolition housed the remains of novelist Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, industrialist Abbud Pasha (founder of Sugar companies, Khedival post services, and Cairo’s Omnibus company, first Egyptian on the board of directors of the Suez Canal Company), lawyer and former Prime Minister Hassan Sabry Pasha, and historian Ahmed Lutfi El Sayyed. These modern funerary complexes, built alongside tombs of Mamluk sultans and princes, utilize an architecture that belongs to the nationalist ethos that followed the 1919 Revolution. This ongoing and urgent situation highlights a crisis of identity with relation to histories of modernity that remain contested and are often erased. The fate of funerary buildings from the twentieth century mirrors the fates of modern architecture in the city of the living.
Figure 1. A broken marble panel from one of the demolished twentieth-century tombs, it was inscribed with the Quranic verse, “O satisfied soul, return to your Lord wellpleased, wellpleasing. Join My worshipers and enter My Paradise.” Photograph by Alia Nassar, 2020. Reproduced with permission.
The headquarters of the Cairo Municipality, designed by Mahmoud Riad and built along the Nile next to Egyptian Museum in 1959, was demolished in 2015, lasting only 56 years. The long two-story factory of Ideal, a state-owned company established in the 1950s to manufacture and popularize modern kitchens, appliances and metal tubular furniture used in schools and government offices, met a similar fate in 2017. These buildings were not only examples of Cairo’s modernist architecture but also evidence of the Egyptian state’s modernizing project.
Figure 2. Villa Badran in Mohandiseen, designed by the architect, Gamal Bakry, and built in 1971. The design with curvilinear forms and few straight lines rejected the rigid modernist geometry that had become orthodox by the 1960s. The transformation of the villa into a restaurant caused the demolition of sections of the building and the defacement of its exterior. It is now abandoned. Photograph by Hesham Mohamed Hassan, 2018. Reproduced with permission.
Such demolitions have become increasingly common across Egyptian cities as the state liquidates or privatizes its assets and resorts to clearing land for new investment opportunities that are largely funded by Gulf capital and implemented by state entities and affiliated companies. Demolitions have also hit private buildings, particularly residences (figure 2). Numerous structures across the city have been demolished as land value appreciates and heritage laws reduce the significance of modern buildings into a fraction of the value of the property. A landmark event in this trend is the 1980s demolition of the villa commissioned by singer Umm Kulthoum, a decade after her death (figure 3). The building was extant for half a century. It was an eclectic building designed in 1936 by Ali Labib Gabr, first Egyptian dean of the school of architecture at Cairo University, that combined Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, and Modernist elements. An almost-identical copy of the villa built in Baghdad by an Iraqi businessman survived decades of war and sanctions, and yet the original in Cairo lost the battle to the pressures of the market. Even by today’s heritage standards the villa would not be listed as a monument in Cairo.
Figure 3. Villa Umm Kulthoum in the district of Zamalek. This new architecture perfectly represented Kulthoum’s rise from a peasant family to become a member of the bourgeoisie. The architecture allowed new classes to express modernity without referring to the trappings of the aristocracy and as an expression of national modernity. Photograph from Al Emara.
Cairo today is essentially a twentieth-century city. Its expansion and development during the past century surpassed the pace and scope of its growth over the previous millennium.[2] According to the 2009 census of Egypt, the population of Greater Cairo grew from two and a half million inhabitants in 1947 to more than twelve million in 2009.[3] After eighty years of British colonialism that kept the countryside, where the majority of Egyptians lived, from having access to basic services, a massive wave of rural to urban migration commenced after World War II. More people meant more buildings, but the majority of the population built without the services of trained architects.[4] Between 1952 and 1965 over fifteen thousand public housing units were built in Cairo, barely absorbing the city’s growing population in need of affordable housing.[5] Yet, real-estate development boomed around the turn of the century until 1907, and again in the 1930s and 1950s (figure 4).
Figure 4. An example of 1930s architecture in the district of Qubbah Gardens in northern Cairo. The architect and patron of the building are unknown, like much of the architectural production of the era. It appears this is the last remaining structure of the kind in its environs, the rest has long been demolished and replaced with the common real-estate high-density construction. Photograph by Michel Hanna, 2019. Reproduced with permission.
A growing bourgeoisie commissioned architect-designed buildings clustered in newly developed areas of the city, such as Dokki, Mohandiseen, Nasr City, and Heliopolis, that were developed by private companies and the state. Those areas were inhabited by the new classes—effendiyya, bureaucrats, industrialists, and newly urbanized peasants—that formed after the 1919 Revolution. They embraced the modernist house or apartment as the materialization of new notions of class, identity, and modernity (figure 5).[6] Architecture was big business during those decades as real-estate development flourished even if it served a relatively small segment of the overall population. Contractors utilized similar plans, façade designs and details in their constructions in more popular and working-class areas such as Abdeen, Sayeda Zeinab and Imbaba.
Figure 5. Workers’ City Housing in Imbaba, designed by the architect, Ali al-Miligi Masoud, and built in 1950. The project consisted of over 1000 housing units following a garden city model. Two-story concrete buildings, with stone applied to the facades, housed small apartments, some with gardens. All of the buildings have disappeared or been defaced with added floors. An important and rare example of the state’s provision of workers housing is diminished. Photograph by Hesham Mohamed Hassan, 2018. Reproduced with permission.
Architectural production was widespread, and architects often took on the role of contractor. Architects were represented in cinema, they wrote in magazines and delivered public lectures (figure 6). Yet, the legacy of Cairo’s homegrown architects who shaped its urban landscape and visual culture, particularly from the 1920s to the 1970s—a period shaped by liberal, Nahda, anti-colonial and modernist thought—has been effectively forgotten, impacting the ways in which Egyptians view their modern and contemporary histories. The architects are forgotten, much of their works demolished, and their archives lost. This immense gap in knowledge impacts how Egyptians view their modern and contemporary history. Local architectural history is not a required part of architectural education in Egyptian universities, and it is not part of public knowledge, a condition not unique to Egypt but is the case across much of the Arab world. In the last decade, however, individual and collective efforts in Egypt, Lebanon and Kuwait, which remain disconnected, respond to this gap in knowledge. These efforts not only help locals but also a broader audience, including visitors and tourists, to see Cairo and Arab cities in a different light, as spaces where modernity produced a complex set of architectural manifestations that don't fit standardized narratives inherited from Western experiences.
Figure 6. Cinema Al Sharq built in 1947 in the working-class district of Sayeda Zeynep, architect unknown. The Art Deco cinema, strategically located opposite the mosque of Sayeda Zeinab, includes a single hall with a cylindrical tower at the corner and apartments facing the street. It is abandoned. Photograph by Hesham Mohamed Hassan, 2018. Reproduced with permission.
Scholarship on Cairo’s architecture has covered various historical eras with particular attention given to Mamluk, Ottoman and nineteenth-century architecture. However, the twentieth century has been overlooked. The city experienced two revolutions in 1919 and 1952, each with political, social and cultural transformations that left a lasting imprint on the city’s morphology, its architectural landscape, and the way the city is managed. Much of these fast and drastic transformations have not been documented, studied or narrated.
Tawfiq Abdel Gawad, co-editor of Al Emara magazine (1939-59), published the last comprehensive survey of twentieth-century Egyptian architecture in 1989. Writing the history of modern architecture in locations such as Egypt following conventional research methods is made difficult as archives are scattered, nonexistent, lost or inaccessible. Part of the challenge of thinking about architecture from the past century is that Egyptian society has not fully dealt with its colonial and postcolonial histories.
Official narratives of Egypt’s modernity have been de-spatialized and reduced to a fixed account, focusing on a few individuals, particularly presidents. In the 1950s the state distanced itself from the monarchical regime and its buildings became prime targets. Subsequent regimes dealt with architecture in a similar manner: with each president the architectural legacy of his predecessor was suppressed. Egyptian cities have been battlefields in a war of memory and history, with narratives twisted, erased and seldom reclaimed.
“The legacy of Cairo’s homegrown architects who shaped its landscape and culture, particularly from the 1920s to the 1970s, has been effectively forgotten, impacting the ways in which Egyptians view their modern and contemporary histories.”
In a country where the official state narrative stresses the durée of 7,000 years, the significance of the very critical period of the past two centuries is diminished. This temporal framing allowed for the 2018 partial-demolition of the state-managed monumental Continental Hotel built in the 1890s. Plans were announced to complete the demolition only to build a new structure mimicking the old appearance of the building. In this context, what argument can be made for the significance of numerous humbler twentieth-century buildings commissioned by private individuals?
This is further complicated by the paucity and limited capacity of institutions that allow for the public and specialists to have the tools and spaces to explore modern and contemporary histories and their materiality. Museums, universities and architects’ associations are not concerned with the materiality of the present or recent past. Protest is banned, crippling civil society’s capacity to organize and participate in protecting its heritage.
Post-1952 policies (from nationalization to old-rent laws and the expulsion of various communities) have made ownership of most of the notable buildings of the twentieth century a tricky terrain to investigate. Buildings have exchanged hands so many times that we often don't know who built them in the first place. Or on the other extreme, due to complicated inheritance laws, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and disputes between family members, buildings erected during the past century now have tens of owners and often many disputes, making the fate of such structures either complete negligence or intentional damage and demolition in order to profit from the value of the land. Heritage laws and regulations are inconsistent, outdated, and are designed to make owners of buildings listed as heritage by the National Organization of Urban Harmony (NOUH) suffer financially as they are neither able to generate a fair income from the property nor to pay for its maintenance. Within legal definitions in Egypt, a building may be considered for heritage status only after the passing of a century. This means that buildings are being tested to survive immense pressures for a century without protection before they may be considered as heritage. This contradicts the fact that with the fast pace of modernity, the period between the construction of a building and its gaining heritage status is constantly shrinking. An example of this that maybe of interest to authorities in Cairo is the UNAM University Campus in Mexico City, built in the early 1950s and listed as a UNESCO Heritage Site in 2007, while continuing to operate as a lively campus.
As a result, owners are eager to avoid listing their properties and when they can they resort to demolition. A cursory look on the website of NOUH reveals that in nearly all cases, court cases for delisting buildings from heritage lists are filed by building owners. For these and other reasons Cairo is simultaneously a rich architectural landscape and an exceptionally vulnerable one.
In this broader context where similar trends can be found in cities across the region, there is a need, in Cairo as in cities across the Middle East, to popularize architectural history, particularly of modern architecture, and to rely more on regional scholars and curators to inform the inhabitants of Arab cities about the architectures that came out of contested recent histories. What is needed is a complete environment that supports the study and documentation of recent urban and architectural histories, and the realities that produced them. Individual and grassroots efforts will be able to flourish and hopefully question many of the standing conventions regarding the material and architectural patrimony of the past century. Egyptian universities need to train architectural historians and to make local and regional architectural histories a mandatory part of curricula. There is a need to understand these issues in a wider context that considers municipal management and the housing market, which is a primary source of pressure facing heritage preservation.
A regional network of specialists in modern and contemporary architecture with diverse backgrounds from practitioners to historians and curators can give a much-needed jolt of energy to the writing of histories of the modern, to circulating them through exhibitions and publications, and to using this knowledge as a springboard for reinvigorating regional contemporary architecture. Cairo and other cities, particularly the aging cities of the region, desperately need robust preservation policies that are economically viable and involve local expertise and communities to conserve modern buildings and to improve the lives around them. Policy and retraining may help the construction industry alter business practices to focus on conserving existing buildings rather than pursue the current demolish-and-build model regardless how saturated the market.
Buildings are living documents; the city is a living archive. Buildings tell us about not only aesthetic choices by architects and their patrons, but also the economic, political, cultural and municipal conditions that produced them. We don't walk into an archive, take a document from 1950, rip it apart, add sentences and conceal others: that would be at best a forgery, and at worst an annihilation of history. Buildings must not suffer such a fate, particularly in contested and unstable cities. When change is necessary, which often it is, we should keep meticulous records of these alterations, just like the notes on the margins of a historical document.
NOTES
[1] Nicholas Warner, The Monuments of Historic Cairo: A Map and Descriptive Catalogue. (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 87.
[2] The northern part of Cairo “doubled in population over the 1947-60 period to reach 1.6 million inhabitants, over one-third of Cairo’s population,” according to Janet Abu-Lughod. The overall population of the city nearly doubled over the same time span, and entire swaths of formerly agricultural land (800 hectares in total) were developed as new residential districts (Mohandiseen and Agouza). In addition, Nasr City, a vast new urban expansion in the desert, was planned to the east of Cairo. Janet Abu-Lughod, “Tale of Two Cities: The Origins of Modern Cairo,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 8, no. 4 (July 1965): 429-57.
[3] David Sims, Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 83.
[4] As David Sims notes, “In 1950 virtually the whole of Cairo could be considered as formal.” By 2009 63 percent of the city’s inhabitants lived in areas developed informally (initially family-built, small-footprint, medium-rise apartment buildings built illegally on agricultural land initially without access to municipal services, later a parallel real estate market evolved in these areas, the land plots became larger and the buildings taller). See Sims, Understanding Cairo, 46 (quote), 91.
[5] Abu-Lughod, “Tale of Two Cities,” 231.
[6] Architectural modernism in Egypt emerged in tandem with the development of Egyptian social sciences, the emergence of a newly fashioned urban middle class, and increasing national industrialization and consumerism in the interwar period. Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 115.
