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"Sharing and Building Modernities: Egyptian Architects in Kuwait 1950s-1990s"
Essays, Arguments & Interviews on Modern Architecture Kuwait, eds. Ricardo Camacho, Sara Saragoça Soares and Roberto Fabbri, Niggli, Zurich, CH, 2017
This chapter charts Kuwait’s early embrace of modernism through Egyptian architects Sayed Karim, Mahmoud Riad, Hassan Fathy, and Said Abdel-Moneim, who in the 1950s–80s carried Cairo’s avant-garde language to a fledgling Gulf capital. Their concrete cinemas, schools, and master plans often collided with Kuwait’s search for a home-grown voice, producing a charged friction between imported modernity and local meaning. As oil wealth re-defined the region in the 1970s–90s, the current reversed: Kuwait’s petro-powered skyline became the new model shaping Egyptian aspirations. The essay unpacks this two-way exchange to show how architecture maps shifting power and identity across the Arab world.
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