The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

This came about with a very important change of attitude. Today many people try to find something that they feel has been lost. And it has been, because once you have this different perspective, you can no longer see things holistically. You only have this horizontal view. And this is the view that predominates in schools of architecture. It is why Fathy was so hated. Because on this horizontal line, time suddenly becomes important, and there comes the idea of "progress," and the notion that anybody behind a certain point on the timeline is "religious" or "traditional" and therefore not "progressive," whereas anyone beyond that point is "avant-garde" or "futuristic." This division between the past and the future has led us astray. Architecture and space are intimately related to our ideas. When you say up and down, front and back, left and right, it is significant, it is qualitative, there are values connoted in all these terms. Going forward is progressive. All of these ideas are reflected in our speech.

I see Fathy as a person who looked beyond the time. What is important is not what is "Islamic" or "authentic" or who is rich or who is poor. The problem is that today you want to create an environment, and there are two environments in this world: the natural world created by God, and the man-created environment. The man-created environment is the footprint of culture. You can make of it either a hell or a paradise. Which do our cities with their high-rises resemble?

One day when I was first teaching, I came back to my professors and told them I had discovered Hassan Fathy. After that it was as though I had to wear a bullet-proof vest. They did everything to discourage me, to isolate me, but I knew what I had found. What inspired me about Hassan Fathy was this: I had a dream that one should always have an internal space inside oneself, and that this space needs to be reflected in architecture. I saw this in pictures of Japanese houses and in movies that showed Moroccan houses. But I never saw these in my country; I did not know that these houses existed in Egypt. And then Fathy introduced me to what was to me a miracle—the courtyard house. At the time it was something unbelievable. At the time, the whole environment of Cairo was influenced by colonialism, it was an extroverted architecture. Where did this model originate? With Palladio! In the English "gentleman's villa." This pavilion, basically, that looked out with four arches into nature, was brought into the city, into Cairo. Before that there were no individual plots of land, there were just buildings stuck together, and the life was inside—in the courtyard. This was a treasure-house of ideas to me. Coming out of the university and teaching there without knowing these things gave me a culture shock. How could I not have known this architecture?