Antonio Lasciac (1856–1946) was born in Gorizia, then Austria-Hungary, trained as architect and engineer at the Vienna Polytechnic, and sailed for Egypt to help rebuild Alexandria after the British bombardment of 1882. He stayed sixty years and died in Cairo. Khedive Abbas II made him court architect in 1907; he lost the post in the First World War because of his Austro-Hungarian passport, then came back and worked on, wintering in Egypt and summering in Gorizia. His Alexandrian work is European and eclectic — the Menasce okelle, the Ramleh station, villas for the merchant families. His Cairo work turns increasingly to the Mamluk and Ottoman vocabularies of the old city: the Said Halim Pasha and Tahra palaces, the Aisha Fahmy palace, and the Banque Misr headquarters of 1927.
