The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

AWW: I'll tell you who is authentic: those who follow tradition. And tradition is related to place more than it is to time. If it is related to time, a building becomes stylistic. But if it is related to place, it is timeless. One of the best compliments I ever received came at an exhibition, when one of the students there asked, "Who is the architect of this building?" "Abdel Wahed El-Wakil," he was told, and he had never heard of me, so he asked, "What century did he live in?"

AV: The avant-garde, up until the 19th century, was almost always a return to time-tested principles, a search for tradition. It's only after the 19th century that the avant-garde became this sort of pushing beyond.

DD: In that case, modernism is an aberration. Is it going to go back to that search in the coming years? Are we going to be looking back, someday, at modernism as a little historical anomaly in an otherwise relatively consistent process of building on tradition?

AV: Without crisis, I doubt it will change. It's part of the positivist, historicist myth about the world, that indeed things progress and get better and better—it's part of what Marcuse called "the veil of technology."

AWW: There is this so-called modern idea that every moment in time is just one step along a line, but nature works in cycles, not along an endless line.

JS: This issue of craft, and of divorcing craftsmanship from architecture, is an important issue. I think that divorce happened somewhere around the Bauhaus. To return to your question of a while ago, Rob, it wasn't Fathy who stood back and said, "I'm not going to work with craftsmen." He actually saw himself as an advisor, as Abdel Wahed said: The architect brings the knowledge, the craftsperson brings the skill. He wasn't trying to divorce himself from craftsmanship; he was trying to revive and protect the crafts in a new era that was trying to efface them.