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Once Upon a Time, a Modernist Building on the Nile
Abstract
In June 2015, Sissi’s authorities demolished the burnt headquarter of the National Democratic Party (NDP) that belonged to Mubarak’s regime. The building was located on the Nile with an intricate history of power and architectural modernism, since 1959. Media and authorities reported the event with multiple messages that played along the notions of the end of Mubarak’s era. But also in an astounding manner, the destruction aimed to remove the material evidence that symbolically referred to people’s resistance to dictatorship on January 28th, 2011. The memory and physical ruins of people setting fire onto the building’s facade was demolished; this moment of revolutionaries’ collective action of anger was erased. The demolition of ruins asserts the rise of Sissi’s power with the promise of a booming economy and prosperity. A year before, the regime destroyed the ruins and burnt architecture of Rab’aa Mosque that stood as a Memorial for the August 14th massacre of 2013. Military engineers quickly destroyed the ruins and restored the Mosque to its previous aesthetics. This paper argues that what we are witnessing today is a model of nation-state building through the destruction of monuments and memory, the adverse classic of nation-state building through the construction of memorials. The paper analyzes the logic of nation-state building in Egypt using the history of Cairo Municipality building project, the NDP. Using archives, architectural drawings, and narratives of the architect Mahmoud Riad, the paper delves into how the different regimes claimed the building in the process of rising powers from Gamal Abdel Nasser who occupied it, hijacked its function and turned it into the headquarter of the Socialist Union, the only political party of its time, to Sadat and Hosni Mubarak who turned it into the NDP, the horrific symbol of hard-fisted politics, then Sissi, who demolished it entirely with its paradoxical history. With every regime since the 1950s, there was a process of submergence and emergence of a new political party for the ruler. Today, there is a process of demolition without a replacement of any party or a physical structure that represents the ruler. The material absence of the ruler’s symbol of Sissi is paralleled with the demolition of ruins that signified people’s moments of collective action is what I argue as characterizing today’s New Egypt and logic of nation-state building.
Discipline
Archaeology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
None