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Course Adoption. Contact Form. It was by sheer accident that I came across the topic at the origin and core of the present book.
As an architectural historian interested in the working of modernity in pre-Nasserist Egypt, in the early s I was fortuitously given access to an unprecedented resource on the making of Khedivial Cairo: the private papers of French architect Ambroise Baudry β , who had been active in the city from to For the first time ever, the architectural fashioning of modern Cairo could be viewed and experienced through primary sources, instead of secondary, and mostly indirect, ones.
Most remaining pieces were dispersed in and The notion of salvage in modern Europe is typically embedded in post-revolutionary France, when eccentric amateurs [art lovers] endeavoured to transport to safety any fragment rescued from confiscated church property at risk of destruction or dilapidation; 5 it infused museum display with the idea of the period room, and inspired historicist architecture for decades afterwards, particularly in France. Repurposing them in modern residences in France and elsewhere became a worldwide line of decorative work during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth one.
The patrons for which Baudry designed houses which incorporated salvage were themselves Islamic art collectors. The purpose was to reconstruct immersive environments for their artworks. The spoils repurposed consisted of entire ceilings, marble floors and dados, fountains, tiles and mashrabiyas β in short anything that could be detached from historic buildings for future recycling. To be sure, spolia in itself is hardly terra incognita for historians; 8 it is basic material to any archaeologist and medievalist around the world.
