Egyptian construction fails

Over four thousand years ago Egyptians had advanced to the point of being able to produce some of the most iconic structures the world has ever known, some of which are still standing today. So, you would have thought that their ancestors living today should be able to knock up an apartment block without too much trouble. After all, they’ve had four millennia to perfect their craft. Although there are indeed many buildings that would, at least at first glance, satisfy the pharonic eye of approval, it would seem that many Egyptian builders have not inherited the illustrious skills of their forefathers. Egyptian construction fails a bit too often.

Far too many have failed to grasp some very basic concepts that were common knowledge in the time of their forefathers. A long, long time ago Egyptians worked out that to irrigate their crops from the Nile required an understanding of one essential rule: water tends to flow downhill. The mastery of this rule fuelled millennia of Egyptian civilisation by growing crops to feed the masses and gain wealth from exporting the surplus. Maybe it’s the divorce from agricultural realities that modern life brings to much of the population is what has caused many to forget this rule, particularly in the construction sector.

It’s long been accepted elsewhere that if you want to remove water from a surface like a road it’s preferable to put a drain at the lowest point, rather than finding means of coaxing the water up to it. Water is a bit troubling in this respect, no matter how many times you say please and politely insist on going uphill, it has an obstinate habit of doing the opposite.  Consequently after any heavy rain in my current adopted home of Alexandria it is best to ditch your car in favour of a canoe in many parts of the city.

This innate inability to grasp the horizontal nature of water is equalled only by a similar failure with the concept of the vertical. When applied to taller buildings, the occupants usually are rather keen on living somewhere that is not just vertical to start with but remains that way. They get especially upset if the building decides to move to a horizontal posture, particularly if they are in it at the time of the transition between the two.

Here we can see, with the varying definitions of vertical, that at various points in the construction process someone forgot to bring a level or a plumb line to work but they soldiered on bravely without them. You can also see the great dedication to minimalism in Egyptian construction by virtue of the fact that this is actually a finished building.

Although the builders of this edifice below may have got the hang of horizontal and vertical at the beginning of the work, it was only afterwards that someone realised that foundations might have been a good idea if they wanted to keep it pointing in a more determined skyward direction. At least the money saved on concrete more than offset the cost of the cash payments to government inspectors to spend a nice week on the beach at Sharm el Sheikh during the period when they could have been creating foundations for the property. Within a short walk of where I am living there are literally dozens of buildings leaning at various angles, if not quite as extreme as this one, at least for the moment.

Although the tenants of this tower block had always been on good terms with their neighbours opposite, they didn’t really feel it was necessary to suddenly gain direct access to them via their 10th floor balcony.

At times even the most fundamental aspects of structural engineering elude some Egyptian builders and the individual elements which make up the building decide that they would rather organise themselves into a different order to what the architect intended.

Sadly this is a bit of a common occurrence: I’ve heard of three collapses in the six months I’ve been here. Wisely, the President has decided that it’s probably best to limit the number of citizens reformatted by several tons of rubble and has initiated a clamp down on the corruption and shoddy workmanship that contribute to the problem.  Being a military man I’m sure President Sisi has some very persuasive means at his disposal to ensure that the guilty parties see the error in their ways. I can only wish him good luck in this task.