The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

Fathy as a Precursor of Sustainability

I suggest that Fathy is the earliest, clearest example of a sustainability-oriented architect we can find. He took Cairo as his text, particularly the medieval part of the city, the one-square-kilometer area that was actually founded in 1969 by the Fatimid sultan al-Mu'izz. The area is very rich, very dynamic, and very difficult to understand. It is a cacophony of sound and life. Within that area, he began to look at how an architecture might be developed that would reflect his national background and roots. At the [17th-century] Bayt Suhaymi, he discovered how convection kept the house cool: The private, family courtyard on one side of the takhtabush screen was planted, and the formal, public courtyard on the other side was paved. The resulting temperature differential created a flow of air from the cool, planted courtyard into the hotter paved courtyard, and the room above the courtyard that benefited most from this airflow was wonderfully cool, even on the hottest days. This construction is testimony to the traditional understanding of natural forces, and Fathy began to appreciate that and to incorporate that into his ideas.

He began to observe this kind of phenomena and to research them. Nobody had done this to the extent he did when he was young. He began to understand that the courtyard itself is one of the primal forms in the Middle East.

He began to understand that traditionally the choice of building materials was based on the environmental forces in the building rather than the pursuit of a decorative effect. For example, the decorated wooden cupola inside the qa'a, the central airshaft in a house, at the top, was put there to help the air rush up faster. All our sophisticated research about solar chimneys—such as that going on now, for example, at the University of Arizona—is really in many ways simply trying to recover traditional knowledge of the qa'as. Fathy looked at mashrabiyyah screens and found that they were not only decorative and good at soaking up the glare from the sun, but also that they had hydrometric properties, for the wood soaks up humidity, too. This sort of relationship between environmental aspects and the traditional elements in the houses he began to incorporate into a language