UPDATE Wed. Dec 29, 2010:The Supreme Council for Antiquities announced today that building housing the Abbaseyya Psychiatric Hospital will be listed as an Islamic heritage site.

UPDATE Mon. Apr 18, 2010:
The designs changed on Zaha's website to include the hospital. Thanks to Luiz for the tip.

Original post:

Award winning Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid will help the Egyptian government destroy Egypt's largest mental health hospital, the Abassia hospital situated in the middle of Cairo, to build something called Cairo Expo City.

Opened in 1883, after a fire consumed a number of royal palaces except for one that was painted yellow and named the Yellow Palace (el-Saray el-Safra) it became Egypt's first modern hospital for the mentally ill.

Now it's in an area of 28 hectares and has around 3000 beds, offers almost all major psychiatric sub-specialities and an outpatient and emergency psychiatry services. The hospital serves around 60,000 patients each year.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina is hosting an interesting site called Memory of Modern Egypt which contains scans of photographs, documents and maps from 1800 till now.

They have a low resolution scan of a map of Cairo from 1800 in French. The city is the darker area. Notice the flood basin surrounding the Nile and how the Zamalek island looks weird compared to the Roda island (Manial) which looks almost like what it really looks like.

Overlaying it on Google Earth was simple but not perfect. Perhaps the old map doesn't match the precision of a satellite photograph. The dark area is what was inhabited back then compared to what's enclosed by the faint yellow ring road surrounding the modern city. Cairo was 4.5 km by 2.5 km 210 years ago and now Cairo and Giza are 35 by 13 kilometers (if you consider 6th of October and all the new developments it's 65 kilometers across).

Click on the image to open a larger version in a new window.

Interestingly, you can see that some of the old streets overlap with the faint yellow streets of today. Especially Port Said street which ran in the middle of the old town. Does anyone know what was it's name back then?

UPDATE: Read Sarah's post she has more details.

Woke up this morning to learn from Twitter and text messages that early this morning at 2am, Per Björklund was stopped by the Cairo Airport security and wasn't allowed entrance to the country. He is to be deported back to Prague.

3arabawy sent a twitter message saying that Per was told the reason for stopping him is because they have his name on their computer. Nothing more.

Per is a foreign journalist and blogger. He covers strikes, protests and stories related to human rights abuses.

This may be linked to Travis Randall's ordeal early this month. He is an American free style writer for a lifestyle magazine, who was also detained in the airport for several hours and sent back to London on his own expenses. Randall participated in a pro-Gaza march in February this year, in which Philip Rizk was kidnapped and detained by the state security. Per covered this protest.

Per is a brave journalist and his writing is almost always highly informative. He is a nice guy. This is both outrageous and depressing. I wonder if this stupid government is trying to reduce the number of foreign journalists in anticipation of the next two politically intense years.

The architect Frank Lloyd Wright covered some of his buildings with patterned concrete blocks. He named these blocks "textile." May be because he took the concept from textile designers who use argyll, houndstooth or paisley to decorate your socks, jacket and tie.

To me, I was thunderstruck to notice that a hospital in the middle of Cairo is covered with the same blocks – exactly the same blocks – that covered the building that was the living quarters of Harrison Ford in Blade Runner.

Today is probably the worst and the most polluted day ever. I have never seen Cairo so polluted, smoggy and with such a choking stench.