The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

Abdel Wahed El-Wakil

The Vital Aspects of Hassan Fathy's Work

I have a technique for evaluating things and ideas. I believe that the only ways to see what you have done—I used to paint and sculpt—is either to step back and get some distance, or to turn the thing upside down so that you look at it differently. So I go to antiquarian bookshops to buy and read books that present ideas before they have become very sophisticated, intellectual and, in a way, arrogant, that date from when people were more simple in their thinking. Hassan Fathy's ideas are not new! Neither are our problems. If you read pharaonic texts and stories, they make you think that it is happening today.

Architecture and its forms arise from the whole revealed doctrine of a culture and religion. They do not emerge like a wild plant in the forest; they are crafted. I suggested to the Prince of Wales, when he wanted to found an architecture school, that he needs to create a new subject—the science of forms. We don't understand them. We talk about forms, play with forms, and we are, as we say, formalistic, but we don't understand them. The science of forms is the study of how they emerge and fill our environment.

In pharaonic architecture, the forms all came from a specific religion and culture that has since been lost. In Egypt there are Muslims, Copts and—until the revolution—a Jewish community. These three cultures lived together and they had the same architecture. You never heard a house described as "Coptic" or "Islamic." The architecture belonged to a unified community. A difference between our age and earlier ages is that, until the 15th century, people seemed to live better with their differences. In our age, you might ask how this was possible? I believe it was possible because they lived in a universe that was primarily spiritual, and that primacy has been largely or entirely destroyed today. It has been destroyed because our whole point of view has changed. Before, people lived according to a vertical axis: Man was related to heaven and to God. Then Darwin came along and tipped that axis horizontal, and it became a time axis.