The fabulously pharaonic Bank Misr Tower, one of only a few tall commercial office buildings in cent
The fabulously pharaonic Bank Misr Tower, one of only a few tall commercial office buildings in central Cairo—a city which, for much of the 20th century, was dominated by foreign firms and colonial influence. In 1984, the first Egyptian-owned banking institution erected a modern expansion adjacent to its original 1927 6-story headquarters as a proud symbol of the economic liberalization of the post-Camp David Sadat era.The building is formulated in a tripartite, neoclassical arrangement of base, column and capital, rising from a commanding street-level podium, housing a banking hall, clad in red Egyptian granite cut from quarries owned by the bank, which then continues up the corners of the tower above, seeming to hold the office levels in a lithic frame, which angles inward at the shoulder, folding behind a dashing cantilevered visor of the same red stone. While broadly influenced by the postmodernism of the period, when concrete and glass was giving way to stone cladding, the statuesque arrangement of the building seems to reference archaeological figuration: the podium appears to guard the tower like a sphinx, its muscular pilasters almost suggesting a pair of outstretched paws, while the building’s angular crown is slightly reminiscent of a Pharaoh’s «nemes» headcloth with its lateral lappets. It may be somewhat surprising to learn that this stylistic effort is the work of Ove Arup, more renown for engineering experimentation than historicism expressionism. Special thanks to @cairobserver for the information in his excellent Cairo Architecture guidebook. Ove Arup, 1976-84. Photos March 2020 Bauzeitgeist. -- source link
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