Pl. 4 in Alphonse Delort de Gléon, L’Architecture arabe des khalifes d’Égypte à l’Exposition Universelle de Paris en 1889, la rue du Caire, 1889. Published in Paris by E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie.
This photograph shows the Rue du Caire at the 1889 world’s fair in Paris. The mashrabiyya (oriel) has a row of six stucco and glass windows on the front and one on each side.

Delort de Gléon’s book consists of a short introduction and a picture section with twenty-eight plates. In the introduction, the engineer first discusses the origin and development of Arab art; this is followed by a summary description of Cairo’s architecture, which also mentions the mashrabiyya with their stucco and glass windows. To gain an impression of the richness of its decoration, Delort de Gléon recommends consulting the book by Jules Bourgoin (IG_88), who made preliminary drawings for the Rue du Caire at the world’s fair of 1889 in Paris (Volait, 2012, pp. 56–59). The author then goes on to discuss his Rue du Caire on the Champ de Mars, emphasizing that there is no such street left in Cairo itself owing to modernization.
Implemented in collaboration with an architect by the name of Lucien Gillet, the Rue du Caire included three monumental gates, two sanctuaries, a sabil-kuttab (school-fountain, a typical Cairo aedicule), stalls, houses, and cafés. The minaret was a direct quotation of the minaret of the Mosque-Mausoleum of Sultan Qaytbay (881 AH /1476 CE), albeit reduced by one storey. According to Delort de Gléon, the ornamental motifs used in the construction were mouldings taken in situ, while all the woodwork in the houses, including the mashrabiyya, was authentic and ancient, brought from Cairo. Their fate after the world’s fair is unknown. As Volait noted (2009, p. 134; 2017, p. 6), some parts of the Rue du Caire were apparently reused in a villa at Arromanches in Normandy that belonged to Delort de Gléon and his wife but which does not survive.
Delort de Gléon not only published the photographs of the book, but also commissioned the French architect and artist Joseph-René Binet to paint ten views of the Rue du Caire in watercolour at the fair (École nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 2091–2100; Volait, 2009, p. 175; Dixon, 2022).