12 - 18 July 2001
Issue No.542
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542 |
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Views from the balcony
Towers, towers, ever higher. They punctuate the skyline like a series of ever more pompous exclamation marks that remain endlessly intent on declaring their own importance. Such is the enthusiasm of some contractors that, having gained planning permission for a 15 storey block, they continue on for another 15 storeys. Which means that endless legal battles will ensue, while the 30 storey shell remains just that, a shell, for five years, 10 years or more.
Quite what everyone is waiting for is anyone's guess. For a change in municipal administration? For a change in building codes? Meanwhile, at least LE100 million sits idle, a bleakly massive block of grey concrete.
The enthusiastic extra 15 storeys are on Hassan Sabri Street in Zamalek and last weekend I happened to be sitting opposite them, on the balcony of a friend, enjoying a pleasant sundowner. It is not necessary, though, to travel far to see the excesses of such ill- judged speculative building. From my own balcony, in Garden City, I spy daily a 26 storey building, on a prime site fronting the Nile. It has been complete for more than four years yet at night the lights reveal that only four, or at most five, of what must be hundreds of apartments, are occupied. The rest remain empty shells. Another couple of hundred million pounds of capital that might have been usefully financing productive enterprises, tied up in unsaleable real estate.
They stand, these empty buildings, like long, fat fingers, pointing to the sky, admonishments, one would like to believe, against the folly of their own excess. Nor are they isolated occurrences, gothic pointers like the tower of Gormenghast. They are everywhere.
Not that Cairo lacks building regulations. They exist aplenty, though it is hardly letting the cat out of the bag to suggest that they can be circumvented with relative ease. So its up, up and away. Only it is up, up and away to no place in particular.
Nor are these towering monuments to folly particularly attractive. Cairo is never going to transform itself into a Manhattan on the Nile. But then nor should it want to. And though the vanity of a few prestige high rise developments is perfectly understandable, it is less easy to comprehend how so much completely redundant real estate came to be constructed in the first place.
It is, of course, an ongoing problem, and one with serious ramifications. Once constructed, once they have consumed huge amounts of capital that the banks might otherwise have usefully loaned to rather more viable enterprises that could have generated a little bit of much needed employment, they have to be repossessed, as the contractors default on the loans that financed the construction in the first place. And there they sit, listed in the assets column of whichever bank was foolish enough to finance them in the first place, valued according to the square metre and location -- a purely spurious value, unfortunately, since if anyone was willing to pay the price at which they are valued there would have been no need for the banks to repossess them in the first place.
The inanities of finance, though, are not necessarily what concerns this page. Equally shocking is the complete absence of architectural vision. Who on earth designs these things? Are architects employed?
It is not as if there is an absence of distinguished models that might serve as useful blueprints for inner city residential architecture. If the exuberance of Emadeddin's Khedival buildings is no longer practical (they, too, were an exercise in speculative development, though the redundant domes and gilded balconies are hardly likely to pass muster with today's accountancy run architectural practices) surely the elegant austerity of the Immobilia building could offer a few pointers in the benefits of restraint. But no. With expensive low rise developments the aesthetic -- if one can speak of such a thing -- is essentially of the wedding cake variety: stuccoed pilasters and other bits of extraneous mouldings articulate façades whose only other distinction is to be painted a peculiar shade of coral pink. It is hardly a colour suited to Cairene light, though that perhaps is not too much of a worry given that the facades will soon peel and fade, hopefully into that innocuous shade of ochre which is the city's unassuming, real colour.
The same wedding cake fripperies adorn those other bits of real estate folly, the numerous complexes of expensive villas that lie forlorn and empty off the Desert Road to Alexandria. With six figure price tags, these gated communities represent another inexplicable tying-up of capital that Egypt can ill-afford. They represent, too, an exercise in what used to be called, somewhat coyly, ghastly good taste. The colours are muted, generally pastels, though there is often an occasional smattering of aquamarine. It is the palette of holiday village, brochure style, and is just as contrived. The stucco work is often accompanied by wrought iron, black, curvaceous, and probably described in estate agent literature as "hacienda-style."
Such is the bastardised nature of architectural styles currently in vogue. Only they are not quite in vogue, because nobody wants to buy them. Which might suggest, once money becomes available again -- despite optimistic economic statistics, one would not want to put a timetable on when that might be -- that a new direction might be in order. Is it beyond the ken of the city's property developers to spend far less sums on redeveloping the existing housing stock, on revamping older properties that have passed one basic test? They have been inhabited, and stand in areas where people might conceivably want to live.
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