Misfits’ Guide to ALEXANDRIA
This post isn’t so much a guide or even a travel diary but more of a collection of impressions and images of the city that hosted the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE) conference last month. The choice of Alexandria as host city was regarded as appropriate by some, and no longer appropriate by others. Over two or three thousand years or so, a city’s fortunes are going to rise and fall. Alexandria was once the largest and most important city in the world, before upstart Rome. The theme of the conference was Cosmopolitanism and Tradition and I came away thinking that cosmopolitanism is generally a good thing and, from what I gathered, a facilitator of economic prosperity rather than a result of it.
History: I arrived at my hotel about 10pm and, having missed the conference opening, was looking forward to breakfast. I opened the windows and shutters and saw a statue and the sea beyond. The statue, it turned out, was of Mohamed Ali, who founded Alexandria a second time (circa 1810) after the first by Alexander the Great in 331BC. The statue is located on the same place as the Cleopatra’s Needle from around the same time and that was taken to the US in 1881.
On the former Isle of Pharos in the distance, there’s a citadel – the Citadel of Qaitbaym, since 1477 – at the entrance to the harbour where Pharos Lighthouse once stood. It was, as we know, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World – 138 m high, it’s said. It was built in 279 BC by Ptolemy II and the Greek architect Sostratus and did well to last until an earthquake in 1303 finally did it in. Recorded history is against me, but if the Lighthouse of Alexandria was built to show the way to the harbour, then technically it was a beacon and not a lighthouse. Lighthouses warn of danger.
That’s a lot of history before breakfast. It doesn’t look like there’s going to be that much more if Alexandria really is one of the most vulnerable cities to rising sea levels. It’s more likely that, somewhere between 2030 and 2050, rising aquifer levels will corrode foundations and collapse buildings before the waves reach them. This is probably already understood. There’s not much new building going on.
Cinema: The 1950s were the heyday of Egyptian cinema, in particular 1954, 1955 and 1956, with The Monster and Struggle in the Valley in 1954, Life or Death in 1955 and The Leech by Abu Seif in 1956. Egyptian soap operas are famous across the Arab world.
New buildings: One relatively new one is the Alexandria Conference Centre from 1993. I can’t find the name of its architects. I may be mistaken about that triple pyramid-like device on the side elevation. There’s one on the other side, Sphinx-like, one could say. There, I’ve said it. I don’t mind the papyrus-alluding capitals on the front elevation.
Snøhetta’s winning design for the library was announced in 1989 and the conference centre is there in their competition model [competition website] so it’s design had been completed, even if it wan’t to open until 1993. Construction of Biblioteca Alexandrina began in 1995 and the library opened in 2002. The design of the Biblioteca Alexandrina had to work around the to-be existing conference centre and Snøhetta’s inspired solution was to embrace it and make it part of the design in two ways – one by making the design of the library look like a consequence of the position of the conference centre (which actually, it was) and the second is by designing the planetarium on the sea side of the site as a separate distraction. In contrast, the second prize entry seems to wish the conference centre weren’t there and third prize entry does its best to hide it.
When I visited, the library was inaccessible from the sea side of the public plaza because it had been barricaded off. For our protection.
The inclined drum is a truly great architectural idea. Externally, the building manages to be iconic in the true sense of the word by looking different from anything in sight, and by also having that rare quality of being one of a kind, yet associated with its location (by means of the sun worship allusions) and by its perceived capability of tracking the sun (lending it an air of not being a building). The inclined drum also has a very strong presence inside the building. We complete the cylinder in our heads and are aware of the immensity of its unseen volume. The library is very quiet. The forest of columns is another great idea, possibly because we are used to libraries with many columns. It would be less of a library without them. Snøhetta have managed to make the papyrus capitals appear as the inevitable result of structural concerns.
Roads, Traffic and Vehicles: Even before my taxi arrived at my hotel, I’d become aware of Alexandria’s absence of traffic lights. There didn’t seem to be many road signs of the kind saying NO RIGHT TURN or KEEP LEFT or NO ENTRY. Visually it’s very uncluttered. Most roads seem to be a weird kind of shared space. The conference organizers warned us to be very careful crossing the road, especially to get to the corniche. White lines on roads are merely suggestions.
Possibly because of its sheer novelty, Alexandria’s only pedestrianized street has been a resounding success. The middle photograph below is a rare instance of traffic lights and a pedestrian crosswalk. Alexandria-style shared space doesn’t really work for major roads. There doesn’t seem to have any system of paid on-street parking. The right photograph shows uncontrolled perpendicular parking. Smart people reverse in. Road kerbs are extremely high at 25-30cm but whether this is to prevent vehicles from parking on sidewalks I don’t know.
Walking Tour: I didn’t stay for the post-conference tours to Luxor and Giza but I did join a three hour walking tour one afternoon that basically went the long way from the library to my hotel. The first stop, Shalalat Park had remnants of the original city wall and part of a garden designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Manhattan’s Central Park. Overlooking it were large houses from the 1920’s boom time for Egyptian cotton. We passed some fancy villas, some of which we were asked not to take photographs of. The route had always been part of the heart of the city, with mosques, synagogues and churches built on the locations of former ones.
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Layover: I had a 20-hour layover in Abu Dhabi but all I saw was the airport, the inside of the airport Premier Inn, and the road connecting them. I know I didn’t see the best of Abu Dhabi but I found myself thinking of Alexandria.
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I’m not about to contrive my life so I can go live in Alexandria, but I think it would be very easy to live there if one knew one’s way around and a bit of Egyptian Arabic.
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