The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

DISCUSSION

Dick Doughty (DD): We heard a lot about sustainability early on this morning. Can we define it, and how would our definition differ from Fathy's?

James Steele (JS): Sustainability is really the first institutionally driven movement about the environment, in the sense that it was backed by the United Nations and the World Bank as a way of solving the "growth-no-growth" dilemma of the late 60's and early 70's. It's the sincere desire to come to terms with the need to grow, but to do it in a way that satisfies environmental issues. The definition that came out of the Rio Conference on the environment was that sustainability means meeting the needs of today without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. For the World Bank and the United Nations, the question then became how to define needs. Are the needs of a family in Bangladesh the same as the needs of a family in Brooklyn? No, because in western societies we use about 20 times the resources of the family in Bangladesh. So issues of equity arise.

The architects calling themselves the New Urbanists are the first group in the last 30 or 40 years to actually produce a manifesto, and they've adopted the idea of sustainability as a driving force. What are the relevant principles? I've written some down, not necessarily in order of importance: Use of local materials to save on the energy of importing materials. The recognition that there is embodied energy in material, basically that energy that was needed to create it. The idea of studying traditional architecture, not for its quaintness or style or form but for the lessons it has to teach us related to the environment. The idea of acting locally but thinking globally—that is, that every move we make in architecture relates to another culture and another economy. All these have been adopted as principles by the New Urbanists, but also, I have to say, by more and more municipal planners around the United States. Sustainability is a force that's not going away, and Fathy was at the forefront of it.