The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

The use of materials is key to the idea of sustainability today, specifically the use of local materials, directly from the area, and telluric materials, which are in a primary relationship with the earth—wood, stone, mud brick and so on.

It wasn't all perfect though, as there were some misreadings of context. For example, the idea of the dome, which he thought was very much symbolic of the past and could be used in the house and in the buildings that he built, was often seen by others with a negative connotation, as it had traditionally been used for a tomb or a mausoleum in this area.

But it was a very courageous act for him to take mud brick and build with it, to go back into the millennia and look to something that was really essential to the Egyptian countryside. He developed a language based on natural materials, natural ventilation and natural systems. If I can just say so, with great trepidation, I think Abdel Wahed el-Wakil is the true successor of Hassan Fathy, because he took the mud-brick architecture and brought it into a more pragmatic realm, using fired brick instead of mud brick, which is more acceptable to more clients and also performs environmentally the same way, if not better in certain aspects.

Fathy lived what he taught. He used these ideas in his own house in Sidi Krier, near Alexandria, and also in the Mamluk house that he bought in Cairo in 1933. He was not above practicing what he preached.

The current trend of sustainability began in the 1970's, when Earth Day 1970 marked the beginning of an awareness of environment-friendly architecture. As you recall, Fathy's Architecture for the Poor was actually first published in French in 1966, and it was brought out in English in 1973 by the University of Chicago Press. So he was, in a sense, vaulted into international recognition by the rising interest in ecological issues. Ian McHarg wrote Design With Nature in 1966, about the same time, and he was one of the first people to popularize the idea of ecological zones, or ecoregions—but Fathy had been there long before him, saying that each building should respond to its microclimate, to its ecological region and its own kind of context.