To the south of the Maspero and the Foreign Ministry stands a third skyscraper of roughly-equal heig

To the south of the Maspero and the Foreign Ministry stands a third skyscraper of roughly-equal height, not a government bureaucracy but a mega-hotel: the Ramses Hilton, a 770-room monument to the arrival of mass tourism in Egypt—the first of what is today more than a dozen massive hotel towers that line either side of the Nile and form many of the most recognizable landmarks of the skyline.Somewhat akin of Riska Sekerinski’s 1963 Karaburma building in Belgrade which frequently makes the rounds on Instagram as the “Toblerone Tower” —Ramses Hilton, more than twice as lrage, is itself triangular, rather than hexagonal in plan, and lacks the pointed edges, which have been lopped off in an arrangement of trapezoidal appendages holding stacks of balcony suites.The resulting effect is quite monolithic and severe, akin to those spiritless, overbearing works of late Brutalism when the movement had become completely unmoored from its philosophical strivings and veered into mostly-unsuccessful experimentations in brick and slab stone. The Hilton is especially reminiscent of Davis, Brody & Associates’ 1975 Harlem River Towers in the Bronx, whose immense, flat-brick exterior is broken up into jutting protrusions. This affinity is further enforced by the Hilton’s clay-like dull pink hue, a curious tone which fails to soften the building, except that the paint is meant to match the block-sized Egyptian Museum across the 6th of October overpass, which the massive hotel towers over and manages to make miniscule.Ramses Hilton, Warner, Burns, Toan & Lunde with Ali Nour al-Din Nassar, architects, 1976-79. Photos March 2020 Bauzeitgeist. -- source link

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