Cairo Modern showcases works by Egyptian modernists from the 1920s to the 1970s, half a century of rich architectural production that complicates our present understanding of global modernism. The exhibition introduces audiences to key architects from the period, such as Sayed Karim, as well as examples of their works commissioned by the state and the city’s burgeoning bourgeoisie. Modernism in Cairo reflected the aspirations of the new classes that formed after Egypt’s 1919 Revolution and which embraced the contemporary house or apartment as the materialization of new notions of class, identity, and modernity.