The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

Audience member: I'm not really sure what becomes of all the architects who are churned out by architecture schools. How many of them really end up being involved in housing, let alone low-cost housing?

AWW: Exactly. They are supposed to do the dream projects, the artist's studio, the villa and so on. You have to reevaluate. I didn't stop at what I learned from Hassan Fathy. I've developed techniques in construction, I've looked at different types of energy. The point is not to worship the legacy of Hassan Fathy, it is rather to see how his thinking came about and what he tried to achieve. His problems started with the Second World War, when there was a shortage of materials in Egypt. So he sat down with his brothers, who were engineers, to help him, to solve such problems as how to roof a building, because that's the greatest cost. But it's not just materials, it's a man who is a visionary, a reformer, one who is saying, "What can I do for my community and its people? What can I do to help in my capacity as an educated man?" People don't ask these questions much, at least architects don't. It's not part of the training at all.

DD: What can any of you say about specific projects, people, or things that are being done today that further Fathy's architectural legacies and dreams? How much impact are they having?

JS: I think there's been an evolution over the last 50 years in terms of housing in general. If you look at the examples of government-sponsored housing, in Asia and India and so on, right after the colonial experience, you have tower blocks. This was seen as the solution to housing the poor, especially in Singapore and Hong Kong. But that solution brought with it infrastructure and maintenance problems that the governments found difficult to solve. That led to a second stage, the "self-help" stage, of which Fathy is the major paradigm. The idea is that if you give people the means and the material and the financial help, then they can do it for themselves. But that proved problematic too, as many people found it a bit offensive to be required to do it themselves, or to do it in the way that the donor agency or other authority required. They lost dignity.