who
Hassan
Fathy
Egypt’s best known architect since Imhotep
Alexandria 1900 - Cairo 1989
cosmopolitan
trilingual
professor
engineer
architect
amateur musician
dramatist
inventor
Fathy
devoted himself to housing the poor in developing nations and deserves
study
by anyone involved in rural improvement. Fathy worked to create an
indigenous
environment at a minimal cost, and in so doing to improve the economy
and the
standard of living in rural areas. Fathy utilized ancient design
methods and
materials. He integrated a knowledge of the rural Egyptian economic
situation
with a wide knowledge of ancient architectural and town design
techniques. He
trained local inhabitants to make their own materials and build their
own
buildings. Climatic conditions, public health considerations, and
ancient
craft skills also affected his design decisions.
what
book
projects
almost 160 separate projects
(from modest country retreats to
fully planned communities)
"The
village of New Gourna, which was partially built between 1945 and
1948, is
possibly the most well known of all of Fathy's projects because of the
international popularity of his book, "Architecture for the Poor",
published nearly twenty years after the experience and concentrating
primarily on the ultimately tragic history of this single village.
While the
architect's explanations offered in the book are extremely compelling
and
ultimately persuasive, New Gourna is still most significant for the
questions
it raises rather than the problems it tried to solve, and these
questions
still await a thorough, objective analysis.
The idea for the village
was launched by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities as a
potentially
cost-effective solution to the problem of relocating an entire
entrenched
community of entrepreneurial excavators that had established itself
over the
royal necropolis in Luxor. The village of New Gourna also seemed to
offer
Fathy a perfect opportunity to finally test the ideas unveiled at
Mansouria
on a large scale and to see if they really could offer a viable
solution to
the rural housing problem in Egypt.
The Village was meant to
be a prototype but rather than subscribing to the current idea of
using a
limited number of unit types, Fathy took the unprecedented approach of
seeking to satisfy the individual needs of each family in the design.
As he
said in Architecture for the Poor, "In Nature, no two men are alike.
Even if they are twins and physically identical, they will differ in
their
dreams. The architecture of the house emerges from the dream; this is
why in
villages built by their inhabitants we will find no two houses
identical.
This variety grew naturally as men designed and built their many
thousands of
dwellings through the millennia. But when the architect is faced with
the job
of designing a thousand houses at one time, rather than dream for the
thousand whom he must shelter, he designs one house and puts three
zeros to
its right, denying creativity to himself and humanity to man. As if he
were a
portraitist with a thousand commissions and painted only one picture
and made
nine hundred and ninety nine photocopies. But the architect has at his
command the prosaic stuff of dreams. He can consider the family size,
the
wealth, the social status, the profession, the climate, and at last,
the hopes
and aspirations of those he shall house. As he cannot hold a thousand
individuals in his mind at one time, let him begin with the
comprehensible,
with a handful of people or a natural group of families which will
bring the
design within his power. Once he is dealing with a manageable group of
say
twenty or thirty families, then the desired variety will naturally and
logically follow in the housing."
All of the architect's
best intentions, however, were no match for the avariciousness of the
Gournis
themselves, who took every opportunity possible to sabotage their new
village
in order to stay where they were and to continue their own crude but
lucrative version of amateur archaeology. Typically but mistakenly
misreading
the reluctance of the people to cooperate in the design and building
of the
village as a sure sign of the inappropriateness of both programming
and form,
many contemporary critics fail to penetrate deeper into the relevant
issues
raised by this project. These issues now, as at the time of
construction half
a century ago, revolve around the extremely important question of how
to
create a culturally and environmentally valid architecture that is
sensitive
to ethnic and regional traditions without allowing subjective values
and
images to intervene in the design process. In the final analysis, the
portion
of New Gourna that was completed must be judged on this basis."
Source:
Steele, James. 1989. The
Hassan Fathy Collection. A Catalogue of Visual Documents at the Aga
Khan
Award for Architecture. Bern, Switzerland: The Aga Khan Trust
for
Culture, 16-18
Hassan Fathy
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