The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

Michael Moquin (MM): I'm a craftsman, and I also happen to be editor of Adobe Journal. The craftsmen are often left out of this discussion.

DD: What's your relationship with architects?

MM: It's almost adversarial. We excerpted some of your writing, James, about Hassan Fathy, in one of our early issues, and I was struck by the need to bridge the gap between the builders and the architects. There's a huge chasm between them. A couple hundred years ago, builder and architect were the same person, and now it's very specialized and different.

Robert Arndt (RA): But wasn't Hassan Fathy the first one to separate the builder from the architect, by his mere presence? The Nubian masters whom he was imitating, or following or learning from, were both architect and builder. So the first level of abstraction from the authentic comes with Fathy himself, when he, as an architect, said, "Okay, we're going to bring this back."

AWW: No, [the separation] was already there. What Hassan Fathy did was to say to the government, "Instead of doing those horrible housing schemes for the poor, why don't you work with the architecture that they are doing already, and use your architects to improve it?" Technology was important to Fathy, and it is important today, but in relation to facts, not hype. Fathy used adobe bricks, he used stone, and so did I. But these days I use fired red bricks because the cost of firing is nothing compared to cost of mud bricks. Mud bricks are more expensive because of transportation and manual-labor costs, even among poor people. I am using red bricks because they are cheaper than mud bricks, and faster to handle.