Issue No. 598
Culture
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8 - 14 August 2002 Issue No. 598 Culture |
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Fragments out of time
Viewed after dark, and from a slight distance, central Cairo has a remarkably anonymous skyline. There are few real landmarks. The Cairo tower is perhaps the most recognisable, but that this should be the case does not provide any real cause for civic pride. It is an ungainly, spun-sugary tube of a building, a late 20th century folly and a forlorn reminder of the hopes once invested in a technocratic future. Harbinger of a reinforced concrete paradise that never came, it remains, now, a fantastically contrived period piece. Stranded at the side of its tree-lined avenue in Zamalek, it admonishes us all with one supremely upright finger-wag, pointing, in the end, to nowhere in particular. It is peculiarly touching, and oddly camp, at least in as much as its ambitions outran the available means of expression.
What else is there that is immediately recognisable? There is the new(ish) Ministry of Foreign Affairs building on the Corniche, a fairly conventional, rectangular office block with the addition of Islamicising arches to jazz up the lowest storeys and odd, lotus flower designs at the top. It is superficial decoration, a wearing of not altogether convincing signifiers on the sleeve, and they are in any case all but lost in silhouette. Once again it is sad that it should be so prominent. Apart from this there is the Ramsis Hilton, a dour, bunker-like Rubic cube of a building that has all the charm of some Stalinist Ministry of Information, the Television and Radio Centre, a Nasserist ship now beached on the banks of the river, and the curving towers of the new Meridien, a shiny piece of commercial modernism, and the rather less successful wall-like Four Seasons. So as far as the River Nile goes -- and the banks of the river, surely, provide this urban space with one of its most privileged sites -- it is five star hotels and post-revolutionary leftovers that dominate, which may well say something important about the socio-economic conditions of late 20th century Egypt, but which does not add up to a particularly distinguished cityscape.
From other perspectives the Mosque of Mohamed Ali, sitting atop the Citadel, gains in prominence. It is a building about which architectural historians like to be sniffy, denouncing it as a Turkish import, and a crude one at that. True, it cannot hope to come close to the great imperial mosques of Istanbul, and there is no reason why it should. Istanbul was, in the end, the most important city in the world for nigh on a millennium, and for some of that time Cairo merely the centre of one of its provinces. Yet in profile, at night, the Mohamed Ali Mosque remains an attractive feature, and seems perfectly appropriate both for its situation and its original function as a royal mosque. Yet it always seems to receive a negative press which given the competition is a trifle unfair.
In the past Cairo was a city famed for its silhouette, was the city of a thousand minarets at which early travellers would always marvel. Not so today. Modern minarets tend to be dispiriting things, having long ago abandoned elegance in favour of bombast. (Think only of the Mosque of Al-Fateh on Ramsis Street, almost opposite the railway station, with its single, enormous tower and squat domes. It post- dates the Mosque of Al-Rifa'i by less than a century, though in those eight decades the design of monumental religious architecture appears to have gone seriously astray.)
Cairo is not, then, a city that has displayed much interest in fixing its profile, in providing a distinctive image of itself. And while the night is kind to the city, lending it a certain glamour, it is also the kind of overall that hides a thousand sins. Darkness obscures the less appealing sights, it smoothes away the rough edges, lending a happy, electric twinkle to the place. Yet it also draws attention to the absences that mark the skyline of this city of 17 million.
Cairo is not a place, then, that lends itself to long-distance viewing. Its charms, on the whole, lie in details, though the details themselves are often in unlikely places, often obscured by dust, gaining resonance through the obvious signs of neglect, through the attrition time and an exploding population inevitably bring. It is a city of ruined beauty, a city intent on intimating a very different past, though one cannot quite escape the feeling that this was always so. Delve as deep as you like and no picture perfect image will emerge. It is a place that has always provided one or two pieces, and then left gaps. The jigsaw has probably never fitted together.
It is a city that refuses the overview and as a consequence the best way to approach it is on foot, often away from the main thoroughfares. And it is here that small details will begin to make themselves felt: doorways, fanlights, elaborately carved lintels. You will occasionally come across a remarkable set-piece, the Art Nouveau villa, say, that is now home to Al-Helmiya Police Station and in a far from reassuring state of repair but which elsewhere would have had a preservation order slapped on it decades ago and by now would be site of pilgrimage for anyone interested in the architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here, though, where nothing is ever preserved, and certainly not buildings, it stands simply to tantalise the passer-by with its intimations of a different past, its suggestions of a precarious future. The vanities are acknowledged with a nod, then passed over. There is solace in such fragments, though no easy comforts are offered. This is one of the registers of Cairo, one of the city's great discoveries.
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