Max Herz was a Hungarian architect who came to Egypt in 1880 and stayed until 1914. He joined the Technical Bureau of the Ministry of Waqf in 1881 and in 1890 was made the primary architect of the Comité. He was the de facto head of the Comité and for about twenty-five years the one responsible for the restoration and conservation of the Islamic monuments in Egypt.

The methodology he used in his restoration and conservation work was to restore those elements that he had accurate historical information on. He also used the single-monument approach, which handled individual monuments instead of several ones in the same vicinity.

Examples of his work

The Rifa‘i Mosque

Museum of Islamic Art (Bab al-Khalq)

More information about Max Herx Pasha and the details of his work can be read in:

Istvan Ormos, “Preservation and Restoration: the Methods of Max Herz Pasha, Chief Architect of the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arabe, 1890-1914,” in Historians in Cairo, ed. Jill Edwards (Cairo, 2002).