NowCairo

Architecture

Architecture in Cairo

Cairo has been building continuously since the ninth century and rarely demolishes, so the medieval city, the nineteenth-century European quarter and the concrete of the last fifty years are all in use at once. The oldest work is often the best built.

• Grand Egyptian Museum

  ·

  Completed 2025

  Heneghan Peng Architects

  A museum on the Giza plateau for the pharaonic collections, three decades from competition to completion. Heneghan Peng generated the plan from sightlines to the three pyramids, cutting a chamfered triangle into five bands that each point at the plateau, so it is a set of views before it is a set of rooms. An eight-hundred-metre wall of translucent alabaster carries a Sierpinski triangle repeated down to the width of a hand. The pyramids are visible from inside throughout, which settles what the collection is for.

• Cairo Tower

  ·

  Completed 1961

  Naoum Shebib

  A concrete observation tower on Gezira island, built under Nasser as a statement of technical capacity. Shebib cast it as an open latticework that narrows and then flares into a crown, taking the profile from a lotus stalk, and faced the ribs in small mosaic tiles that read as a woven surface. The engineering was well beyond anything else attempted in the region then. It was put up directly opposite the Nile Hilton, and the pairing was the point.

• Baron Empain Palace

  ·

  Completed 1911

  Alexandre Marcel

  A private house in Heliopolis, built for the Belgian industrialist who financed the suburb around it. Marcel modelled it on the Hindu temples of Orissa and on Angkor Wat, covering a concrete structure with Indian dancers, elephants, snakes and deities, and set it on a turntable to follow the sun. It was one of the first concrete buildings in Egypt. A Belgian built a Cambodian temple in a French colonial suburb, which is a fair summary of what Heliopolis was for.

• Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hasan

  ·

  Completed 1363

  Mamluk Cairo

  A mosque, four law schools and a mausoleum in one building below the Citadel, built over seven years and nearly bankrupting the treasury. The plan is a cruciform courtyard with four iwans, each vaulted hall assigned to one of the four Sunni schools of law, with the students' cells stacked in the corners between them. The entrance portal is set at an angle to catch the street. The sultan was murdered before it was finished and never lay in the tomb built for him.

• Mosque of Ibn Tulun

  ·

  Completed 879

  Ahmad ibn Tulun

  The congregational mosque of a capital that no longer exists, in fired brick faced with carved stucco. The plan is a vast courtyard ringed by arcades on rectangular piers rather than columns, with a spiral minaret and external ramp standing outside the sanctuary. The model was the Great Mosque of Samarra, where Ibn Tulun grew up. It is the oldest mosque in Cairo still in its original form, and Pei took the geometry of his Doha museum from a fountain in its courtyard.