Wahba Apartment and Office Building

Notes

A competition was launched in 1949 for the design of this building. Salah Zeitoun and Mustafa Shawky participated alongside Abd el Salam Qanawi and Kamal Sabri Shheib with two proposals which won both the first and second prizes. The winning modernist design delineated a departure from the traditional paradigm, starting with full exploitation of the outdoor space as per the building regulations. Additionally, the design of the facades is simple and sobered from ornamentations and uses different treatments to honestly express the various functions within, be them residential, commercial, or administrative.

This building was also remarkable since it was an early expression of the mixed-use trend taking over and transforming the ground floors use of residential buildings in the city center into administrative use. 

A ground floor features a commercial corridor that connects the two entrances across the building. The recession of the upper apartment floors along the regulation requirements aided in providing proper ventilation and lighting for most of the interior spaces.

The building was the first in Egypt that used pile foundations, namely that using cast-in-place concrete piles driven to the ground by a metallic shell which is pulled out as the concrete is poured.

Sources

Ibrahim, Abdelbaki. The Arab Architects: Salah Zeitoun. Center for Architecture and Planning Studies. Masr el-Gidida. 1987, pp.67-80

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