page_title: Max Herz
section_title: Conservation of monuments
hierarchical_section_title: Max Herz / Activities / Conservation of monuments
caption_attribution_description: English: Pulpit in Sultan Barquq’s mosque. Analogical reconstruction by Herz, because no information was available on its original shape. Period photograph.
context_page_description: Max Herz Hungarian architect, conservator, museum director and architectural historian, active in Egypt.
context_section_description: In the 19th century, the state of preservation of Arab-Islamic monuments in Egypt deteriorated rapidly. In order to counteract this process, Khedive Tawfīq founded the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l'Art Arabe in 1881. In it Max Herz inherited the seat of the retiring Franz Pasha in 1887 and from 1890 filled the post of chief architect, which was expressly created for him. The Comité's president was ex officio the waqf minister; however, the actual direction of affairs lay in the hands of the chief architect. Decisions were taken collectively in the sessions of the Comité, which consisted partly of Egyptian and partly of European members. However, on account of his qualification, experience, the devotion to his job, his capacity for work and last but not least his position, Herz played a decisive role in the Comité, which soon extended the sphere of its activities to monuments of Coptic architecture too. (The preservation of monuments of ancient Egyptian [pharaonic] architecture was the task of a different government agency.) Max Herz filled this post for a quarter of a century (1890–1914), and in this capacity he played an outstanding role in the preservation of monuments of Arab-Islamic and Coptic architecture. We are indebted to him for the survival of a number of monuments, while in the case of restored monuments it was he who more or less determined the form in which they appear today. His outstanding achievements along with his amiable personality won him general recognition; his activities are regarded as exemplary to this very day. Herz followed the method of "stylistic restoration". It meant ridding a monument of later additions of low quality and restoring it to its original, most splendid, even ideal shape, "which may never have existed at any given time" (Viollet-le-Duc). The other extreme approach to architectural preservation demanded the avoidance of any sort of restoration or reconstruction; only the preservation of the monument in its actually existing shape was permitted, without any additions. Herz was a believer in stylistic restoration but practised it with moderation, good taste and common sense. This approach was determined in part by the chronic lack of funds at the Comité's disposal, which did not allow complete restoration on a large scale. At a very early stage the Comité decided that its foremost task was to secure the survival of the greatest possible number of monuments, which children of a happier and richer age would subject to complete restoration.
  In Herz's practice "stylistic purity" meant that in the case of periods whose architecture was well known owing to the existence of numerous monuments, he regarded as permissible the analogical reconstruction of structures whose original shape was unknown. This was the case with the mosques from the Late or Circassian Mamluk period, which was represented with numerous splendid mosques in Cairo, the exquisite minarets of which, for instance, were in many cases damaged on account of their fragility. On the other hand, the architecture of the Fatimid period was little known, therefore he left the ugly late replacement of the original minaret of the Aqmar Mosque (519/1125) untouched when he restored it, because he had no information regarding its original shape and knew very little about Fatimid minarets in general.  (His successors exercised considerably less self-restraint in the reconstruction of the Fatimid mosque of al-Salih Talai (555/1160), about the original shape of which they possessed only very scanty information.)  The replacement of missing structures (e.g., fountain, pulpit) as required by "stylistic restoration" was an urgent necessity from a practical viewpoint in the case of mosques, irrespective of whether their original shape was known or not, because religious observation was to be resumed in them after the completion of restoration by the Comité.
  There is a continuous debate going on about the theory and practice of architectural conservation all over the world, in which various, widely differing views and standpoints
caption: Pulpit in Sultan Barquq's mosque.
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