The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

I'd like to start with Fathy and people. I think Fathy had, in some ways, a romanticized view of "the people." Don't forget, he was trained in westernized institutions and came from a well-off family. He went into the villages with a kind of paternalistic relationship with the people and with Egypt. He was brought up in that post-colonial moment, and he was thus looking for a new Egypt. He was a man of Egypt, but he was also very much a man of the world. He had a romantic view of what the village is, and what architecture there means.

New Gourna needs to be talked about in this sense. We can see in this project that Fathy was interested in the vernacular and in history. He brought together traditions of Upper Egypt, [architectural] proportions from the pharaonic system of measures, and a different kind of technology to help the government settle a population in a village near Luxor. I have suggested that this is an amalgamation of traditional sets of models; that's why I call it an "instant vernacular," because he begins to produce what is basically a reconstituted idea of what village life is like, or should be like. It is an amalgam of different traditions that do not belong entirely to one place.

Fathy wasn't alone in what he was doing, in Egypt or elsewhere. At the same time and in the same milieu as Fathy, there is also Ramses Wissa Wassif, who used the same social ideas as Fathy and created a village that is still today training kids—orphans—and others in the art of weaving tapestries as a means of giving them an economic basis for a community. There is an architect in India called Laurie Baker, an Englishman with Indian citizenship, who has worked with vernacular, lower-income and indigenous building materials in southern India with amazing impact for 50 years, though he is not very well known. Jorge Anzorema has worked with building for the poor in Japan, and there are others elsewhere.