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The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

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Author Topic: The Legacy of Hassan Fathy  (Read 2129 times)
Bianca
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« on: July 13, 2007, 10:56:18 am »

                                                        
                                                        DAR AL-ISLAM MOSQUE IN NEW MEXICO


THE DOME OF DAR AL-ISLAM

This reached a kind of apotheosis in the 1980's, when Fathy, for the only time in his career, built in America; this was the Dar al-Islam project. It was a community set up as an Islamic community, partly funded by individuals from Saudi Arabia, and its architecture has been appropriated from the vernacular into the Islamic. There is an equation, in terms of the poetic ideals of the spirituality of the desert, of this location in New Mexico with the Middle East. But the climate in New Mexico is quite different. The winters are really cold, so the building performs in a very different way from the way it would have done in the Middle East. The adobe cracks. It's quite beautiful as a piece, but it doesn't actually do what the vernacular of that place would suggest it should do. It is rather an image of the vernacular, and an image of Islam.

Now, in the 1990's, what is happening is a third phase. The second generation of architects, all these young Egyptians who had some contact with Fathy during the course of his career, are now suddenly being taken over by the international tourism industry. Since about 1989, large companies have been forming in Egypt, and it is essentially Fathy's stylistic model, that "instant vernacular," that they are choosing for their holiday hotels. These are not business hotels downtown, but the ones tourists go to in order to experience the place, and which say, with their forms, "This is what Egypt is about"—or at least, "This is an environment that we tourism promoters like, as an image of our country and ourselves, and want foreign visitors to experience." Tony Mallor, a developer working in the country, said, "The business of reinventing style by replicating a piece of the past is an essential dilemma of architects working to be authentic." The question that I would raise is this: Was even Fathy being "authentic"? What it even means is highly questionable. To be authentic in terms of a location, any location, has become quite a problem for architects. But I would argue that this third phase, this "Disneyfication," represents a deterioration and a denaturing of the signs and symbols that Fathy used and intended. I don't want to emphasize this too much, but the process is occurring, and it needs to be talked about in reference to the continuity of Fathy's ideas and his heritage.
« Last Edit: July 19, 2007, 07:43:29 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

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