Designing one’s own modernity

Hay Mohammadi was once celebrated as “a laboratory for industrial and housing innovation during the colonial period, but was also famous for playing a crucial role in the anti-colonial struggle”. Strava, 3 It also became a site for protest and contestation against the post-colonial regime, housing an infamous underground detention center.

Thus, while the architecture represents ideas of ‘modernity’ during the colonial period, the lived experiences within this building and neighborhood simultaneously show how these colonial ideas of modernity are taken and reinterpreted, appropriated, and contested, just as the life stories of Afghani, Nasser, and Qutb do.