When Cairo was Modern

In college I did a reckless thing. I wrote my thesis on the potential for a military takeover in Egypt after the (presumably far-off) death of its president, Hosni Mubarak. I got a grant to spend a month in Cairo, seeking out officials and former generals for interviews. It was the summer of 2010. There were few takers. It was dumb luck no one from the government took me.

Within the year, Mubarak was out and a Supreme Council of Armed Forces was in, serving as the self-declared champion of the popular revolution that took flight in January 2011. In many ways, however, the military already ran Egypt, and had since 1952, when Gamal Abdel Nasser led a cohort of military officers in seizing power from a British-backed regime. In contrast to the 2011 revolution, which led to a status-quo-friendly consolidation of military power under officers with huge portfolios spanning key sectors of the Egyptian economy, the military officers who seized power in 1952 hailed from humble backgrounds, with little to keep them from making bold bets that would fundamentally restructure society.

It is those bets that curator and architectural historian Mohamed Elshahed sees reflected in the buildings of that period, a history now on display in the show Cairo Modern, at New York’s Center for Architecture. The show, curated by Elshahed with aid from exhibition designer Rami Abou-Khalil and graphic designer Ahmad Hammoud, will be up until January 22, 2022.

Elshahed also arrived in Cairo in 2010, to start his dissertation research in Egypt for his PhD in the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Department at New York University. His focus was on the connection between architecture and revolution in Egypt, specifically the anti-British uprisings of 1919 and 1945–52. He did not expect to find himself witnessing a revolution — “Here I was writing about revolution in the city as a revolution happened” — but when he did, he took action, and in April 2011 he started a publication, Cairobserver, to share his findings about Cairene architecture and urbanism. What began as a Tumblr (cairobserver.com) went on to spawn five crowdfunded print editions, a robust Instagram following (19.9K), and even a book.

Growing up between Kuwait and Cairo with a draftsman for a father, Elshahed was no stranger to architecture and the Middle East. When he came to study for his master’s at MIT, however, he recalls “the shock of hearing architectural history as a set of conclusions.” Emblematic of this attitude was a book by William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, which Elshahed found “rooted in rather racist notions as to what is modern and what is not.” The book relegated non-Western examples of modern architecture to a thin chapter titled “Universal models, national inflections and regional accents,” dismissing them as pale facsimiles of Western work.

Elshahed holds that to be truly postcolonial, we need to free ourselves from these preconceptions, especially that of style, something he believes to be “completely made up” and contrived by art historians. He advocates understanding buildings as “material evidence of political, economic, cultural forces.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that he took Curtis’s starting point, 1900, for his own book, Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide (AUC Press, 2020). (At the Center for Architecture, that pivotal year anchors a gigantic timeline foregrounding political and economic events as well as the construction dates for the 20 projects on display.)

Today’s political forces have the upper hand against yesterday’s buildings. Buildings Elshahed came to Cairo to study were “implicated” in the events of 2011, becoming symbols of the revolution, and are now being demolished en masse by the counterrevolution. He finds in Egypt a “hunger for this work.” Egypt, home to the first Arabic-language architectural journal (established in 1939), has no equivalent today. This weakened architecture community has real implications for Egypt, where “in the absence of robust preservation laws and presence of a crippled architecture profession,” buildings are defenseless against the state and predatory investment capital. Elshahed minces no words about today’s ongoing demolitions: “It’s a cultural genocide.”

The Giza Solar boat museum shown in this photo — the last image in Elshahed’s book — is no exception. In 1954, soon after the 1952 revolution, archaeologists discovered a perfectly preserved boat sealed in a pit from 2500 BC at the base of the Great Pyramid of Pharaoh Khufu in Giza, disassembled into 1,224 pieces. Reassembly was painstaking (using no nails), and in 1964 it was moved into a museum built directly over the pit. Elshahed notes that despite its location, the building, reflective of the modernist attitudes of the time, refrains from pharaonic historicism.

Last August, the new regime moved the 4,000-year-old boat to a new facility. Its antecedent is currently being demolished, after less than 60 years of use.