WATANI International
12 July 2009
A recent news article saying that the village of New Gurna would be declared a cultural heritage site by UNESCO has elicited feelings of relief from disciples of architect Hassan Fathy. Fathy designed and built New Gurna to rehouse the occupants of the original Gurna, which sprawled over the Tombs of the Nobles to the detriment of the tombs, but it was never fully occupied.
Now it seems that Fathy and one of his most outstanding projects are gaining due recognition and protection, with UNESCO calling the village a landmark of outstanding international architecture. The United Nations cultural organisation will offer all the necessary technical and financial support to restore the village, which has been adapted to suit different requirements over the years, to its original concept. The Egyptian government has welcomed the move and pledged to cooperate closely with UNESCO.
Innovative
Born in Alexandria in 1899 to an Egyptian father and a Turkish mother, Hassan Fathy was an outstanding and innovative architect who demonstrated how elements from vernacular Arab urban architecture, such as the malIqaf (wind catcher), shukshaykha (lantern dome) and mashrabiya (wooden lattice screen), could be combined with the mud-brick construction traditionally practised in Nubia in Upper Egypt to form a distinctive, environmentally and socially conscious building style that linked the use of appropriate technologies with co-operative construction techniques and the guiding thread of tradition. Fathy was responsible for some 105 projects in Egypt, Spain, Kuwait, Palestine, Greece, Saudi Arabia and the United States, among other locations.
As an intellectual, writer, humanist, architect and scientist, Fathy had a considerable influence on generations of architects and engineers throughout the world. He worked in Egypt except for the five years from 1957 to 1962 which he spent in Greece, working in the very cosmopolitan Doxiades Agency in Athens. He became internationally famous after the publication of Gurna, a Tale of two Villages in 1969, republished in 1973 under the title Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt.
Mud brick buildings
The depth of Hassan Fathy’s anthropological thinking, his genuine social concern and the wisdom of the reasoning underlying his architectural experience were internationally acclaimed but still need to be fully absorbed in the age of sustainable development. The notion of “appropriate technology” formulated by Fathy at the twilight of his life has not been sufficiently acknowledged, in particular in emergent countries.
Fathy trained as an architect in Egypt, graduating in 1926 from the University of King Fouad I (present-day Cairo University). He designed his first mud-brick buildings in the late 1930s. He held several government positions and was appointed head of the architectural department at Cairo University in 1954.
Fathy made use of ancient design methods and materials, integrating 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. Based on the structural massing of ancient buildings, Fathy incorporated dense brick walls and traditional courtyard forms to provide passive cooling. Fathy worked to create an indigenous environment at a minimal cost, and in so doing to improve the economy and the living standards in rural areas.
Sidelining science
“The quality and values inherent to the traditional and human response to the environment might be preserved without a loss of the advances of science. Science can be applied to various aspects of our work, while it is at the same time subordinated to philosophy, faith and spirituality,” Fathy said. An engineer-architect, musician, dramatist, teacher, professor, and inventor, Fathy re-inspired the living art of adobe architecture, giving it a mission for the 20th and 21st centuries.
Interestingly, Fathy started out with no special aspiration but drawing. He flirted with the idea of training as an agronomist but did not master an aptitude for it, and then failed at mechanical engineering when he could not cope with the maths. Finally he studied architecture as part of a civil engineering course, and after graduating worked for local councils. His first design was for a school design in Talkha, which caused his first friction with other architects who, according to his description, were designing buildings not fit for human beings.
Distressingly inexpensive
At the very outset of his career he was assigned to design an old people’s home in Minya governorate. His director asked him to stick to the classic approach while mapping out his design, but Fathy did not like to work in such a way so in 1930 he tendered his resignation. Returning to Cairo, he met the French head plastics arts school and offered to work for him gratis, as his ultimate goal was to design no more classic architecture. The French headmaster welcomed his offer but, since classic architecture was in vogue then in all Egyptian institutions and universities, Fathy could not teach countryside architecture in the school during the 16 years he spent there.
His opportunity came in 1941 when the Royal Agricultural Society decided to provide suitable housing for farmers in the village of Bahtim, north of Cairo. Fathy put together a complete design for the project and tried to convince officials of his ideas, but his project was rejected out of hand. His work was considered ahead of his time and was neither welcomed by the government bureaucrats nor the Egyptian peasants who longed for the “luxury” of the concrete city buildings. Fathy’s buildings were distressingly inexpensive, and this was seen as backwards.
Inappropriate
Fathy felt strongly that Western techniques and materials such as reinforced concrete and steel were inappropriate for the climate, being too hot in summer and cold in winter. However, farmers as well did not welcome Fathy’s project because there was no place for their cattle in his houses. Fathy had aspirations for the peasant way of life but was not in tune with it; he did not realise the farmers’ fears about not having their cattle under the same roof and thought it better to separate them for hygienic reasons.
When in 1946 the pre-revolutionary government deemed it necessary to demolish the village of Gurna with a view of enabling the antiquities council to further excavate the underlying tombs, Fathy was commissioned to tailor the architectural design of a new village on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor.
This project lasted until 1953, marking Fathy’s real start in architectural accomplishment and bringing him wide recognition. He built the village following the traditions of the tribal families living in the old village on the hill, and incorporated workshops and a suq (market). The mosque echoed the hypostyle hall at Karnak, while the traditional materials and Nubian-style domes kept the houses cool and airy.
Again, though, the project failed. The residents did not want to leave their lucrative tourist monopoly on top of the hill, and they did not like the “untraditional”. In the end only one or two families moved in, and only because for personal reasons they were socially alienated from their community and had nowhere else to go.
“Too similar to tombs”
Fathy returned from Athens at a time when Egypt was undergoing a scientific movement and there was a suggestion of rebuilding New Gurna for conferences and seminars. He capitalised on every opportunity to contact officials of scientific research, education and land reclamation, and as of 1963 he worked in several committees of the Ministry of Scientific Research, the UN and the Aga Khan Organisation. His private office became a Mecca of architecture art. In this period of his life Fathy attended Arab and international conferences, undertook lecture tours and became a celebrated master in environmental architecture.
The third project in Egypt Fathy undertook (1965 – 1967) was New Baris in Kharga Oasis, six kilometres from the original village. Fathy made detailed drawings for buildings in the traditional Nubian style, but again the villages rejected them, this time because, they said, “the houses were too similar to tombs”. In Upper Egypt and the oases sheikhs’ tombs are built with a dome.
Despite his unsuccessful quest in Egypt, Fathy’s work took him abroad. He was at the UNs Habitat conference in 1976, served on the steering committee for the Award for Architecture, and founded the Institute for Appropriate Technology. For his dedication he received the Right Livelihood Award for saving and adapting traditional knowledge for adaptation to the needs of the poor. Known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” this was established in 1980, the year he received his award.
In 1981 Fathy designed the Dar al-Islam project in New Mexico. This was set up as an Islamic community, partly funded by individuals from Saudi Arabia. This last project boosted Fathy’s international reputation, especially after Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi expressed her admiration for his style and said it would be suitable for housing millions of poor Indians.
Mastery of languages
Growing up within an aristocratic family, Fathy was attentive and chivalrous to guest, especially women. Romance threaded its way through his entire life: he built a theatre in Gurna, despite his full awareness that such a thing was unprecedented. It was occasionally used before an audience of the princes and princesses of the day, adding a romantic touch to the new village.
Fathy died in 1989, but his legacy lives on through his disciples. Ironically, his ideas are now more in vogue. It was not exactly his aim, but his style has become popular with the upper class to which he himself belonged, suggesting that he was, perhaps, designing for a taste that met his own Utopian ideals rather than those of the rural poor. Touristic resorts such as Gouna, near Hurghada—one of which architects was a student of Fathy’s—have followed this theme.
In 1985 Fathy donated his entire collection of drawings and texts to the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The archives are now housed at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Geneva, Switzerland, and at the American University in Cairo. The collection of more than 1,200 images and drawings in the ArchNet Digital Library means that the work of this important and ground-breaking architect is available to a wide audience.
Fathy’s niece, Soad Hamdi, told Watani that after Fathy’s death his relatives asked the Ministry of Culture to establish a museum at his home in Darb al-Labbana to protect the archives, sketches, photographs and drawings that would serve as a reference for architect scholars. However, the ministry turned a deaf ear and instead it asked Fathy’s family to evacuate the house after 1993 earthquake on the pretext they wanted to restore it. No restoration has yet taken place.
In 1994, the Fathy family signed a deed of gift donating the collection to the AUC for its newly-opened Rare Books and Special Collections Library. In early December, after the Aga Khan Trust for Culture donated the cabinets that held most of the conventionally sized drawings, the transfer of materials from Darb al-Labbana was completed.
Four collections
The Hassan Fathy Archives at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at AUC comprise three collections of Fathy’s documents and drawings; his personal library; and his household furnishings. A fourth collection consists of material about arrangements of Fathy’s work compiled by others. The largest of the four groups, the papers, includes his architectural drawings, prints, and project files; his personal and professional correspondence; his manuscripts, awards, passports, appointment books and all the other materials customary in manuscript collections. The second group consists of about 1,700 books and periodicals; many of them annotated and inscribed, and over 150 sound recordings. The third group is equipment, furnishings, decorative works by others, and personal belongings. The fourth group contains records, or copies, of an unrealised project of the Aga Khan Foundation, begun in 1985.
Interest in Hassan Fathy and his professional papers and architectural plans has continued to grow. In December 2002 an exhibit featuring part of the archive opened at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Other exhibitions and publications honouring this great Egyptian architect are currently being planned, as well as internet and digital access to the archive.