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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 August 2000 Issue No. 493 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 August 2000 Issue No. 493
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Dream city
By Nigel RyanThe new constitutional court, a piece of pseudo-Pharaonic set dressing that occupies the Corniche towards Maadi, has elicited a great deal of attention. A couple of week's ago its image adorned the front page of this very newspaper -- yet reactions to this singular piece of new-wave neo-Pharaonic revivalism are decidedly mixed. The fashionable position, as usual, is to be sniffy -- kitsch, pastiche are the most common labels, intended to be derogatory in a way that is never applied to the mausoleum of Saad Zaghlul (1928), say, or Hardy and Edrie's 1927 scheme for Cairo's new tribunals, or indeed any of the other extant examples of the first wave of neo-Pharaonic revivalism.
They, like their neo-Islamic equivalents, can be neatly slotted -- almost certainly too neatly -- into a discursive framework that seeks to plot the emergence of a national style in the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet the arguments have always been too prosaic to be entirely convincing. If shoehorning the decorative window dressing of facades behind which lie thoroughly Occidental spatial arrangements into a visual equivalent of the nationalist struggle has proved an irresistible temptation we should not be blinded to the fact that that process remains no more than an historiographic conceit.
To emphasise style is almost inevitably to slight content and in this case it is, literally, in the content of buildings that the most significant meanings lie. As to the adoption of decorative schemes to adorn the facades of buildings that had already made the radical departure from anything that might be construed as non-Western, this need be interpreted as no more than a desire to decorate, a reaction against the cool certainties of international modernism's functional aesthetic. Rather than the all too easily read, historiographically dictated metaphors, is it not more plausible that the blunt angularities of Pharaonic motifs easily dove-tailed with the blunt angularities of a then fashionable Art Deco? And is there really any significant difference in terms of decorative impulse between neo-Islamic embellishments filtered through the unavoidable Ottoman prism and latterly, in Egypt at least, more often than not a rampant exotic Orientalising, and the Italianate and Rococo decorative schemes that dominated so many villas and palaces from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
That no one is attempting to load the lotus columns of the constitutional court building with anything like the metaphorical weight earlier examples of those columns have to bear presents a small paradox -- it is at once a simple reduction of the facade to nothing more than the sum of its purely decorative elements, and a reflection of the promiscuous hi-jacking of decorative motifs made respectable by the increasingly sophisticated readings that have come to inform the practice of architectural post-modernism. And that practice now precludes anything so heavy-handed as the attempt to assign symbolic intentions to the architect who has, in any case, by now joined the morgue to which Roland Barthes long ago consigned the author.
The ideological retreat represented by post-modernism, in all its modalities, has naturally taken its toll on commentators struggling to isolate anything so over-arching as coherent meaning in contemporary architecture. Indeed, in our belated stage of capitalism, this ideological retreat impacts everywhere, strangely vacuum-packaging cultural meanings from anything that might carry the whiff of political-economic conditioning.
Witness the public hand-wringing that accompanies the fate of those Italianate and Rococo late-19th and early-20th villas that have managed to survive to the present day. The very public outcry that often accompanies news of their imminent destruction rarely attempts to make out the case for their preservation in terms of the architectural importance of the buildings, or even their historical significance. Indeed, not many such buildings can be defended on the grounds of architectural distinction, and those that can tend to be in the earliest stopping places of the wealthier classes as they retreated from the Islamic city, in by now déclassé areas such as Helmiya and Abbasiya, which seldom impose on the attention of the chattering classes. It is, after all, far easier to organise a campaign to save the Dutch Embassy in Zamalek.
So what, one might ask, lies behind the concern to preserve, given that it is seldom directed at the most worthy -- architecturally speaking -- buildings?
The impulse, in part, is obviously nostalgic, and like all nostalgia appeals to the recollection of a past that, if it existed at all, certainly did not exist in the form in which it is remembered. Which does not prevent such nostalgia from becoming a heady brew, one that grows, if anything, more intoxicating when mixed with a growing interest in the ancien regime that constructed the villas and palaces in the first place and then spiced with the attractions of low-rise, low-density living. The fact that in the urban environment this latter was always the prerogative of the immensely privileged simply increases the potency of the image, providing, as a spin-off, a ready-made, aspirational visual vocabulary for advertisers.
The fact is, though, that the urban morphology of Cairo today remains a product of the political economy of Nasserism, and will do so for many years to come. Yet the hermetic sealing of the calls for preservation, their vacuum packaging, means they can conveniently ignore the most urgent questions of urban regeneration in favour of focusing attention on not demolishing buildings that were constructed when the population of Cairo was one, rather than 15 million. And such is the terminal nature of the ideological retreat that they can lament the appalling physical condition of those buildings that, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, sequestered or nationalised, became schools, hospitals or other public institutions, without once making any connection to what goes on inside the decrepit shells, many of which are now sadly beyond salvaging. That the two are quite clearly linked is a consideration that is pushed neatly beneath the carpet, an expression of the ultimate triumph of form over content that, the viciousness of the aesthetic twists notwithstanding, might yet make of Cairo the ultimate modernist's dream. The lotus column, it appears, need support nothing more than itself.
