Hossam Abdel-Rahman, on a building watched from a balcony.
Construction-history journalist, Giza, twenty-six years on the trade beat.
My beat
I am a trade journalist. For twenty-six years I have written for the Egyptian construction and infrastructure press — the weekly papers, the monthly trade magazines, the occasional commissioned report for the Ministry of Housing. My beat is buildings as they go up, not buildings as they stand. I write about cladding contractors and shop-drawing revisions and concrete pours at three in the morning.
Where I live
I live in a sixth-floor flat in west Giza, about a kilometre from the GEM site, on the desert road. From my balcony, for fifteen of the twenty-three years of the project, I could see the cladding going on, course by course. The chronicle that follows is, in part, a chronicle written from that balcony.
Why this chronicle
The GEM is the largest single building project undertaken in Egypt since the High Dam. The trade-press coverage of the project has been steady but scattered — a paragraph here, a notice there, an annual progress report. Nobody, as far as I have been able to find, has yet written a continuous construction history of the building. The chronicle is my attempt at that history.
Sources
The chronicle is written from three principal sources: the trade press of the period (a complete run of which I keep at home), the official communiqués of the Ministry of Antiquities and its successors, and conversations on the site itself with engineers and tradesmen I have known for the length of the project. None of the conversations are attributed by name.
What this is not
It is not an architectural review. The architecture is handled, in this small world of GEM-writing, by Yousef Mansour in Alexandria, far more capably than I could. The chronicle is about how the building was built, not about how it works as architecture.
On the long timescale
Twenty-three years is a long time for a single building. For comparison: the High Dam took eleven, the new administrative capital is at thirteen and counting, the Cairo metro line three has been under works for nineteen. The GEM is, in the long run of modern Egyptian public works, neither unusually fast nor unusually slow.
From my balcony, for fifteen of the twenty-three years of the project, I could see the cladding going on, course by course. The chronicle is, in part, a chronicle written from that balcony.
— H. A.-R., West Giza