4.615 | Spring 2002 | Undergraduate

The Architecture of Cairo

Lecture Notes

19 - Competing Neo Styles in the Early Twentieth Century

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Concepts**

The Sabil-Kuttab at Bab al-Hadid: An overwrought little complex built ca. 1870 by the Italian architect Ciro Pantanelli.

Dar al-Kutub: Built in 1904 by the Italian architect Alfonso Manescalo in a pure and well-studied neo-Mamluk style.

The Central Railway Station: A neo-classical facade articulated in a Mamluk style done by the British architect Edwin Patsy in 1893.

Awqaf Ministry Building: A clear neo-Mamluk building built in three stages in 1898, 1911, and 1929 by Mahmud Fahmi the chief architect of the waqfs ministry.

Bank Misr: A composition informed by several Mediterranean types, yet heavily “Islamicized” by different motifs from Andalusian (Moorish) to Mamluk, designed by the French architect Antoine Lasciac.

Muslim Youth Association Center: A deliberately “Islamicized” building done in 1935, which nonetheless shows some attempts at symmetry and simplicity, both considered modernizing aspects.

Egyptian Engineers Society: Another neo-Mamluk building built in 1930 by Mustafa Fahmi, chief architect for the royal palaces.

Assicurazioni Generali Trieste Apartment Building: A balanced composition of Mediterranean classical and Islamic styles built by Antoine Lasciac in 1910.

The Coptic Museum: Completed in 1946 by M. Simaika Pasha, an Egyptian architect, it heavily copies the Fatimid style of al-Aqmar mosque, perhaps because of the affinity between the Fatimid and historical Coptic styles.

Mausoleum of Sa`d Zaghlul: The mausoleum of the leader of the 1919 revolution against the British, this is the high point of neo-Pharaonic style, designed by Mustafa Fahmi in 1928 to express an Egyptian identity that unites the Muslims and Copts.

The Heliopolis Company Buildings at `Abbas Street: Built between 1908 and 1910 by the French architect Ernest Jaspar as the commercial and civic center of the new garden-city planned and executed by the Belgian industrialist Baron Empain in this suburb of Cairo for a new, select working class.

The Palace of Baron Empain, Heliopolis: Built by the French architect Alexandre Marcel as an eclectic Hindu palace in an Islamic capital (completed in 1905).

Monuments

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Spring 2002