2 - 8 August 2001
Issue No.545
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 August 2001 Issue No.545 |
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Between pillar and post
They are black, shiny -- one might imagine, from a distance, polished basalt but in reality something a little more plasticised -- and boast a gold coloured metal trim. Polished brass, probably. And they ascend two and a half stories. This is the portico to, of all things, a petrol station. It is the new face of something or other. It is declamatory, a kind of architectural oratorical flourish that when you stop to think about doesn't add up to anything at all.
When Charles Jencks, the architectural historian, ushered in that handy little phrase posmodernism, he could have little known that a bastardised Ionic portico would sprout, three decades later, on a cooperative petrol station in Cairo. And why should he? Architectural postmodernism, in its Jencksian incarnation, was always going to be a First World phenomena, an escape for those who had done modernism, well and truly, to death.
Yet the magpie approach to decorative motifs, the mix and match (or not) of completely non-structural elements, never quite fell out of vogue in Cairo. For a century at least, the rhetorical flourish has been going strong. It rings hollow, more often than not, and quite literally so: I pass a set of Medusa heads, precariously attached to a building on Ramses street, every day on my way to the office, and two of them are broken, revealing the hollow space around which the stucco supports have been shaped. Nothing could be further removed from the specific density, the oh too solid granite flesh of ancient sculpture, of those endless colossi that are in no danger of melting. Stucco, though, is a less durable material, if easier to work. The Medusa heads, with locks of writhing snakes, may threaten to petrify the innocent passer-by, but they do so idly. They are themselves such unconvincing stone that the mythology begins to look a little shaky. These are Medusas mediated via pre- Raphaelite androgynes, Simeon Solomon swooners, a belated bit of fin de siècle decadence now struggling against exhaust fumes. Something so obviously fake is never going to turn anything to stone.
Look, of course, and suddenly such heads are everywhere. They sprout in the most unlikely places. There are a surprising number in Abbasiya, on dusty facades of once grand houses that fell into a shocking state of disrepair several decades ago. And still they stare at you, through the dust of the years, balefully, clinging onto broken plaster work for dear life.
Glance through the doors of grand old apartment buildings and caryatids will be supporting bits of the hallway ceiling. Only they are not quite supporting anything: structurally superfluous, the weight of the eight storeys above merely appears to be pressing on their heads. In niches the occasional statue remains, broken, a sad parody of antique originals. These are architectural conceits, and at best they can be fun. In terms of structure, however, they are no more significant than the bas relief pilasters that climb up the facades of new apartment buildings in a vain attempt to provide some sense of articulation, some sense of synergising flow. It is all quite mad.
At its most extreme the decorative scheme can completely overrun any structural element. The most striking recent example of such excess is the new Constitutional Court building that sits beside the Nile on the Corniche to Maadi. This is Disneyland territory, a piece of set dressing that steps beyond rhetoric and into the realms of bombast. Its function -- this is, after all, the Constitutional Court -- means that there was never really any possibility of fun. Yet in its reworkings of Pharaonic motifs -- lotus columns that do absolutely nothing, and which, one might surmise, could easily be hollow, vast, blind expanses of faux dressed stone -- it is more suited to the theme park than anything so august as a constitution. Deprived of any structural function, the window dressing of so many buildings becomes, inevitably, the subject of metaphorical interpretations, which renders the form of the Constitutional Court peculiarly depressing. What is good for the gander may well be perfectly OK for the goose. What is good for a cooperative petrol station, however, is patently not OK for the constitution.
What, one wonders, will future generations make of these structures? They are intended, after all, to be around for some time, though it is perfectly possible that in the end they will prove as gerry built as much of the city's last century of development. Dust, fortunately, has a neutralising effect on even the most pompous of conceits, and there is no shortage of dust to overlay these brash new facades. Would it be too optimistic to surmise that all those pointless little ledges and hollows and crannies were actually conceived as dust traps, to better allow for the accumulation of the stuff and its eventual subversion, its shrouding, of the overweening rhetoric.
So shamelessly theatrical, and so unconsciously so, has new public building become, that it has ended, quite by chance, in the court of camp. And the thing about camp is that it can never be knowingly so: real camp -- the more florid examples of art deco, for example, many operas and ballets (the two art forms that lend themselves to camp most frequently) -- requires vaunting ambition without the means for its achievement.
Which is, it could be argued, the case of that court building, and a great many other institutional edifices, be they connected to civil organisations (the new Lawyers Syndicate building springs to mind) or part of the religious hierarchy -- Al- Azhar's new administrative, book-shaped headquarters. Quite what our children and grandchildren are going to construct from this glut of kitsch would be difficult to predict in any detail. The rough outlines of their interpretations, though, are sadly all too obvious.
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