My Muhammad Ali

Cairo's skyline has one silhouette everybody recognises, and this is it: the great Ottoman-style mosque raised on the Citadel by Muhammad Ali Pasha in the early nineteenth century, still known to visitors as the Alabaster Mosque. The model works from that building's stacked geometry, the broad central dome ringed by descending half-domes and cupolas, the squared mass of the prayer hall beneath it, and the two needle-thin minarets that give the profile its vertical snap. It is an architectural scale piece rather than a plaything, so it belongs with a landmarks shelf, a world-buildings collection, or a diorama that needs a monumental piece of Islamic architecture holding the high ground. The arcaded courtyard walls and tiered ranks of window openings are what separate it from generic mosque-shaped scenery, and they are the features a viewer uses to name the building at a glance. One for anyone modelling Egypt, or collecting the buildings they have stood in front of.