The popular exhibitions that displayed the architecture and people of non-Western lands at the world's major expositions have generally been assumed, a priori, to be derogatory representations that served to justify Western colonization. Rarely is their architecture examined on its merits. István Ormos devotes an entire book to a single such exhibition, the immensely successful populated Cairo Street at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, reconstructing both the architecture and the activities it housed, particularly the belly dance.

Ormos aims to provide “comprehensive” documentation and “exhaustive analysis” of the Cairo Street. He is at his best when locating identifying documentation for the individual buildings and some of its protagonists, from the Cairo-based concessionaire who produced the commercial exhibit to particular Egyptian dancers in its theatre and when differentiating between traditions of Middle Eastern dance. He concludes that the stylistic fidelity of the architecture was uncommonly good, well suited to inspire respectful interest in Egypt that could promote tourism. Making the compelling point that, beyond any other exhibit at the fair, the street immersed visitors in an unfamiliar world, stimulating all their senses and offering opportunities for informal interaction with its residents, he argues it served Egyptian interests and cannot be dismissed as simply Orientalist fantasy. Yet much of the detail does not lead the author to a significantly new interpretation of the exhibit, or of this type of exhibit. A single example: Ormos devotes many pages to considering the reasons for cross-cultural ambivalence about sexually provocative dance, only to arrive at the Bakhtinian commonplace that it relieves impulses that could otherwise destabilize the social order. Ormos also provides an excessive amount of basic context (one chapter is titled “Basic facts about the fair”), material that is not directly deployed to develop an argument and is already available in existing scholarship. With its peculiar mixture of scholarly detail, including findings from archives on different continents, and synthetic summary suited to a popular readership, the book's intended audience is a puzzle.

The strongest aspect of the book is its treatment of architecture, the topic this reviewer is best equipped to assess. Ormos, an Arabist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, brings expert knowledge of the Hungarian architect who designed Chicago's Cairo Street, based on his previous monograph, Max Herz Pasha (1856–1919): His Life and Career (Cairo, 2009). Compared to many of the architects entrusted with such exhibits, and despite his European training, Herz was singularly well qualified. When tapped for the job, he had recently been appointed the chief architect of Egypt's Comité de conservation des monuments de l'art arabe, for which he stabilized or restored historic Islamic buildings. He also benefitted from a decade of prior experience attending to the buildings of the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Endowments (Waqf) in Cairo and an interest in Islamic architectural history so keen that he studied Classical Arabic in order to consult manuscript sources on the buildings in his charge, albeit with the aid of experts.

Rather than a replica of a specific Cairo street, Herz designed an artfully irregular assemblage of Cairene building types – dwellings, shops with apartments above housing the shopkeepers or artisans, a wikāla (a fancier two-storey bazaar around a courtyard), two sabīls-kuttābs (public fountains with working schoolrooms upstairs) and a functioning mosque, plus a theatre along the lines of Cairo's contemporaneous music halls for belly dance performances and cafés and a restaurant. At one end, somewhat sequestered, was a pharaonic exhibit, a less skilful evocation of the Temple of Luxor executed by a different entrepreneur with an unknown designer. Ormos painstakingly compares these buildings to the Cairo models identified in a semi-official guide that Herz likely prepared, as well as to additional Islamic buildings, and disproves previous scholarly claims that Herz hacked up a Cairene sabīl-kuttāb to reuse the fragments in Chicago's version. A large, detailed plan of the street from the final official report on the fair, provided in loose-leaf format, is an invaluable companion to the many carefully chosen and captioned illustrations. The labour required simply to establish the accuracy of the abundant iconographical and descriptive material in publications accompanying the fair deserves appreciation. Ormos provides the basis on which architectural historians could more fully interpret the form of the street; for instance, could Herz, who visited Vienna annually, have applied Camillo Sitte's perceptual guide to planning just this kind of streetscape, City Planning According to Artistic Principles (Vienna, 1889)? Ormos does not discuss what the sources might reveal about the practical character of the street: what facilities for cooking and bathing it provided its residents; how it was policed and cleaned; what might Cairenes have made of the novelty of electric lighting?

Among the most rewarding findings is the reciprocal relationship Ormos uncovers between Herz's work for Chicago and for Cairo itself. When Herz modelled his Chicago mosque on the funerary mosque of Sultan Qāyitbāy, the latter had recently lost the octagonal lantern above its courtyard, and there was no known evidence of whether it had had one originally. Chicago's mosque provided a lab for Herz to make a trial reconstruction of a Mamluk lantern; it then became the model for the one he built as part of his restoration of Qāyitbāy's mosque in 1896–1905. A description of the mosque identified much later shows that Herz's hunch about the vanished original was essentially correct. Similarly, Herz reused the portal he gave Chicago's wikāla, modelled on a fine Mamluk gate in Darb al-Labbānna, when remodelling a classical villa in Cairo in neo-Mamluk style for Egypt's leading cigarette manufacturer, Nestor Gianaclis. The villa, featured in Gianaclis's advertisements, survives as the nucleus of the Tahrir Square campus of the American University of Cairo. Ormos suggests that Gianaclis's commercial success was boosted by Herz's design of his shop on Chicago's Cairo Street, if not also his display kiosks in one of the fair's main exhibition buildings; his wares were so well received that he opened a branch factory in the USA.