The Architectural Legacy of Hassan Fathy and the Birth of a New Vernacular
By Kenzy Fahmy
Born in Alexandria to a middle class family from Upper Egypt, Hassan Fathy is perhaps one of the most recognizable figures in modern Egyptian architecture. His name has become synonymous with sustainable, vernacular design that strives to bridge the gap between the old and the new, between tradition and the increasing demands of the people and of modern life.
He was, if anything, an eccentric man who believed in living simply and dreamed of a modernist style of Egyptian architecture that was still able to incorporate elements of traditional design, be it the mud houses of rural Egypt, or the intricate homes of Old Cairo with their expansive courtyards and mashrabeya windows. In fact, Fathy lived in the heart of Islamic Cairo for most of his adult life, nurturing the deep connection he had with Egyptian culture and design, and worked hard to extend that appreciation to the general public. He wanted to merge the modernist movement with the old-world vernacular, and in doing so, he created his own distinct style that has since become an iconic part of architecture and design in Egypt.
Throughout his long and highly-acclaimed career, Fathy drew much of his inspiration from the vaulted Islamic architecture of historic Cairo and the traditional mud-brick houses that could be found all over Egypt, from the Nile valley to the desert oases. The synthesis of these two styles became the foundation of all his designs, and his way of protesting against what he saw as an invasive and concrete-heavy wave of modernism influenced by the West.
His protest, however, was confined to a niche group of projects and people, to be recognized on a larger scale only later in his career. Now, Fathy is credited by many as being the father of the movement towards sustainable architecture that made use of traditional building methods and materials. He believed that by teaching local residents of Egypt’s poorer communities how to build using these principles, they would be able to construct homes and buildings that were cost-effective, environmentally appropriate, energy efficient and, most importantly, accessible to all.
Fathy’s designs can be seen not only all over Egypt, but all over the region, including Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and even beyond the Middle East. Over the course of his 50 years as an architect, he designed countless buildings and compounds, from private residences and studios, to mosques, schools and even entire villages, earning him several awards, including the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1980.
If you’ve been to Luxor you’ll likely have heard, or even seen, New Gourna Village, the most well-known of Fathy’s projects and his first real opportunity to build ‘architecture for the poor’, a goal that would greatly influence both his work and his image. The idea behind the village, first launched by the Ministry of Antiquities in the 1940s, was to create housing which could be used to relocate local excavators that worked on, and occasionally looted, the nearby archaeological sites.
The housing had to be affordable and Fathy was eager to incorporate his ideas of using natural, locally-sourced materials and of enlisting the community itself to contribute to the process. But Fathy was met with steadfast resistance on the part of the locals, both to cooperate in the design and construction, as well as a reluctance to be moved from their existing residences; the housing that was meant to be for the community was essentially rejected by that very same community. Despite this rejection though, the village is considered to be an important part of our architectural heritage, and was added to the World Monument Fund’s Watch List of Most Endangered Sites.
Further west, in the oases town of Kharga, lies the village of New Baris, built by Fathy in 1967. Much like New Gourna, New Baris was intended to provide affordable and sustainable housing for a local community. This time however, he was to design a complex where 250 families, made up of farmers and service personnel brought in from other parts of the country, could reside and help cultivate the land there after a new water source had been found with the capability of irrigating around 1000 acres of what was up until then arid desert. Fathy focused his research on the climate of the area as well as the traditional and ancient architecture, drawing on both to help him build housing that was in line with the existing structures and that would be able to naturally protect the residents from blistering desert temperatures. New Baris’ fate was unfortunately similar to that of New Gourna, and the project was apparently abandoned because of the Six Day War.
The term ‘architecture for the poor’ is so closely associated with his work that it has in many ways become his legacy, a legacy that placed Fathy up high on a pedestal and left his contemporaries, like Ramses Wissa Wassef, Ali Labib Gabr and Naoum Shebib, to fall behind in his shadow. Fathy’s reactionary idealism elevated him, both in his own mind and in the eyes of others, to the level of a revolutionary, out to change the course of the modern architectural movement.
It was that very same idealism, however, that created a discrepancy between his vision and the practical reality of the projects he built for the poor; in the end those projects were abandoned by the communities they were intended for and were added instead to heritage lists and tourist itineraries. He was a man with big dreams, and while they may not have all been realized, he most certainly managed to alter the framework within which Egyptian architecture lived and evolved. Despite the problems he faced with his villages for the poor, Fathy has left an undeniable mark on modern architecture, both within Egypt and abroad, and has inspired the generations that followed to build in a way that could take the best of the past and integrate it with the needs of the present and visions for the future.