INSIGHT Expedition to Cairo, Egypt
February, 2000

Team members:  Kevin Cain, Philippe Martinez, Jerald Munn.

February, 2000

“Listen to buildings,” was the enigmatic advice from Dr. Nairy Hampikian, Director of the ARCE Bab Zuwayla Conservation Project.  The monument, once a main gateway to the medieval city, is a sprawling and obviously vital piece of Cairo’s history.  The fluid boundaries between the gate and the connected mosque present the impression of a living thing, and the ongoing restoration seems in fact a collaborative effort with the past rather than the dissection of a corpse.  Dr. Hampikian admits that the current surgery on retaining walls is confusing to the Western mind; how can these walls continue to stand?

The unnerving permeability of the structural components makes it absurd to think of the building as stone.  Instead, this seems to be a living system and, in sha’allah, it continues to evolve while retaining within every element its profound DNA.  Even the seemingly blind, destructive hammering on the interior walls feels like an additive process.  Miraculously, the reconstruction seems to compromise neither the aesthetic nor structural integrity of the building.

The continued adaptation of the structure, as in Machu Picchu or other sites, can be seen either as a negation of history or as a form of continuity.  While Peter Frost may be right to attack the reconstruction effort in Peru as a thoughtless act of historical vandalism, Bab Zuwayla is at any rate quite different.  Bab Zuwayla is no dead structure; it is still very much part of the weave of life in the city and its history is still being written.

In the shadow of Bab Zuwayla’s impressive towers, across a busy street, the Zawiya and Sabil of Farag Ibn Barquq is another story.  While cared for enough to be moved during the widening of the road nearly a century ago, the monument’s relatively brief period of disuse has been more destructive than centuries of wear.  Retreated from its original site directly across from the city gate and fronted on its two street faces with stalls, the monument is silent and hidden.  Now shuttered, the building’s direct utility is limited to providing a perch for the streetlights that illuminate a stretch of roadway around the building.  Without special effort, time will erase it entirely.

But within this time capsule there are treasures.  Their current frailty adds a beautiful patina to the monument; the poignancy is in their peril.  Just as the jungle without attention would overtake Machu Picchu, Farag Ibn Barquq is a building in stasis and seems almost consumed by the sheer life of its neighbors.  In front of Bab Zuwayla, it would appear that motion equals life.  Whether Farag Ibn Barquq will be allowed to slumber or be reawakened is, of course, up to its human caretakers.

Bringing laser scanning to Barquq was often a surreal experience.  Recalling the high-speed photography of Dr. Harold Edgerton, laser scanning freezes space at an instant in time.  Apprehended with such clarity, the spatial volume of the structure is seen as a unique slice set against the infinite strata of the structure’s past.  This thin slice of reality, anachronistically liberated from temporal context, can then be deftly placed on the microscope slide for scrutiny like the delicately pinned butterfly in the entomologist's study.  Even as we study this slice, the life of the building continues.

Will Farag Ibn Barquq one day be again used as a Sabil, or as some have suggested, a center for Sufi a Qur’an study?  Like the course of a river over time, urban evolution is constant but resists prediction.  This monument may yet erupt into life.  As the surrounding hurry bears the building into the future, there is a sense that preservation will in fact succeed here.  However different the two structures are, the idea at both Bab Zuwayla and Farag Ibn Barquq is to do what it takes to enable and ensure long futures.

Interior, the Zawiya of Farag Ibn Barquq.

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