The Legacy of Hassan Fathy

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MM: I think that one of the big problems with using traditional materials and traditional techniques is that today's engineers and code writers have locked themselves into current construction technology. They aren't looking at the tradition and why traditional methods worked within the tradition. I've faced that problem many, many times here in the us, bringing brick makers from Mexico or working with adobe. There is finally an adobe code in New Mexico, but you have to use stabilized adobe. That's because the people who write these regulations don't understand how adobe works. Try to build a house out of unstabilized adobe [as used in traditional construction] just about anywhere in this country and they'll laugh you out of the building-permit office.

DD: Is this a matter of vested interests, habit or what?

MM: Well, there is some of that. I was commissioned to do a vault of wood-fired brick. I brought it over, the engineer saw it, and the project was killed because it's a "weak" brick. It was more than structurally adequate, but it just wasn't what he was used to.

DD: Are there places in this country where there is a more progressive attitude toward these things?

MM: You have to have a ranch of your own somewhere. There's an old saying in Mexico that for a good house, you need good shoes and a good hat—that is, a good foundation and a good roof. I can take you to jungle areas where it rains all the time, and there's unstabilized adobe that's been there for three hundred years—but try to get that message through the building-permit offices here.

RA: I believe there has been some success in getting building codes adjusted for straw-bale buildings. Some of those have been built here in central Texas, haven't they?

MM: Well, that's kind of separate. The pressure of that group right now is incredibly strong compared to that for adobe.

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RA: So it's a political success?

MM: And it's a common enthusiasm.

RA: So why is there no such political momentum in favor of adobe?

MM: Its momentum was in the 70's and early 80's, and by the mid-80's it had pretty much fizzled out.

Hasan Uddin-Khan (HK): Why do you think that is?

AWW: Fashion, fashion.

MM: I think there was so much problem with the code people. Even though we have the most enlightened adobe code in New Mexico, it's still very restrictive. You can't use a natural mud plaster with unstabilized brick, which will work fine but implies periodic maintenance. It's a cultural thing: Traditionally you would get your family or your community together every two or three years to re-apply the plaster as a group project. Now that we're kind of a non-extended-family society, we just don't think that way any more.

JS: I think that's another reason why [Fathy's project at] Abiquiu has been questioned. It was a lifestyle difference. If you listen to the lectures that Hassan Fathy gave at the opening of Dar al-Islam, he was talking about adobe but the people who were asking questions were saying, "Well, we think it's too cold here for adobe, and we don't know if we can maintain the buildings." This self-build, hands-on maintenance approach does not really work in America.

AWW: It's more than this. Hassan Fathy is not just introducing a construction material. He was introducing a style and even a quality of life that we are losing. When I went and saw the Amish people I was stunned: I think if Hassan Fathy had gone there he would have found his hometown in America.

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RA: So aren't we saying that if you take a building out of its culture it's not going to work?

DD: What about these so-called New Urbanist projects and the neo-traditional town planning projects? There's one in Houston that just started up and the plots were sold almost instantly. That implies people feel that such projects could meet social and environmental needs, could be something more sustainable.

AV: Well, you have to look at who bought them. It's not really meeting a social need. It's meeting a need for people who want to make their life structure an object of desire. And what kinds of materials will these buildings be built with? I think they're pretty conventional. It raises the question not only of forms and materials, but also the nature of authenticity. I think this is the problem we have in this country, trying to find something that is, indeed, authentic. What's selling is some image of authenticity. I think what's interesting about Fathy's work is that he was somehow able to find a compromise between being original, on the one hand, and, on the other, appropriating and synthesizing. He was able to do things that were original, but to do them in ways that were embedded within the culture. What would be sustainable yet also authentic in the United States? I don't think there's an architect who can answer that question today.

JS: On the issue of authenticity, Fathy said that tradition is the social analogue of personal habit. I think that's true. What traditions are today are whatever people do. And those traditions change. Fathy also said that traditions that can be retained are valuable, while the ones that can't be retained should be discarded. To answer Hasan-Uddin Khan's question about whether Fathy was authentic or not, I've written down some interesting transitions: Roman architecture followed Greek architecture—the Romans copied it, but they also reinvented and evolved it. Ottoman architecture followed Christian architecture. Hellenistic architecture followed Greek architecture. Renaissance architecture followed Roman architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright was influenced by Japan. Who is authentic? We find ourselves throughout the history of architecture borrowing, adapting, evolving—that's what the human species does.

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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.

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Timothy Driscoll (TD): Since you bring up crafts, I'd like to talk for a moment. My organization is the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craft-workers. We represent bricklayers and stonemasons in the US and Canada. About eight years ago we attempted to come up with a program to address the relationship between architecture and crafts, and we now have a two-week summer camp where architectural students in their fourth and fifth years meet with our third- and fourth-year apprentices to try and walk in each other's shoes.

DD: What kinds of results have you seen?

TD: Well, as most of you know, in your first three or four years of practice after architecture school you're not really given much latitude, so in terms of them going to work for some high-profile architectural firm and doing something innovative that can be traced to us—we're not quite there yet. But we've had several architects come to work for an industry organization, which we're very happy about.

DD: Is your program unique?

TD: We're not aware of other craft unions doing this.

AWW: But a lot of young people do not want to follow this path of craftsmanship. That is part of the problem.

DD: I'd like to talk a bit about Fathy's commitment to humanity in general. He cites in Architecture for the Poor a statistic of some billion people who are condemned to die sooner than they otherwise would due to problems that come along with bad housing. In the 10 years since Fathy's death, that number has only increased. Are there people today whose work either builds upon or parallels Fathy's, who offer any glimmer of hope that this statistic might change?

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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.

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Now there's a third stage, dating perhaps from the late 60's to the 70's, which turns on empowerment, where people don't get the pieces handed to them, but get legal and financial encouragement. An example of that would be the Grameen Bank, and now other microcredit organizations. But this empowerment drives architects who are in the conventional mode crazy, because it marginalizes them. In a sense Fathy bridged this gap too, because he saw giving people the means to do what they want to do as the first step toward helping them, and the architect he saw merely as the advisor, as Abdel Wahed said. But that role remains a marginal one.

HK: I think it's true that architects are being marginalized in this process, because the decisions are becoming economic ones. The decisions at higher levels are being done on a structural basis, in terms of whether it's lending, legislation or community mobilization, all of which has to do with ethical issues and your role not as an architect, but as a member of the community. But there are groups working with communities. Take Laurie Baker, who decided that what is needed is very cheap housing that people had to build for themselves—and he builds in brick, by the way, in an area of south India which doesn't have much wood, in Trivandrum. He manages to cut the cost of building to something like 20 percent of what a normal government building costs. He has produced a whole series of buildings, starting with individual houses for particular people who are very poor. Then he started building institutional buildings, and training the local population—again, as with Fathy, a very important part of it. The difference, though, is that his ideas and his training have been taken up generally, and you see his work being reproduced by local builders and local people all over the state.

DD: Why didn't this happen to Fathy?

HK: Well, I would say that Baker's buildings meet some image of modernity that the people had in mind. Fathy's buildings, at the time, actually went in the opposite direction.

DD: Are there other people or projects you can think of?

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HK: The architects of the Development Workshop who were working in Iran before the revolution went into the villages, worked with the villagers. These architects actually learned how to build vaults with Fathy, took their technology across to Iran and taught it to the local masons in a setting where the conditions were suitable for adapting the ideas well. There's a fair number of schools built there, and there were four or five villages that were actually built after the Development Workshop left. But once their patronage in the country was gone the program died out.

Audience member: I want to ask Mr. Driscoll what else his organization is doing.

TD: Our union, in conjunction with 19 others across the globe, formed the International Construction Institute, whose goal is the betterment of construction workers throughout the world. An adjunct of the ici is the Hassan Fathy Institute for Construction Workers. We simply appropriated the name, but we find it quite fitting because his principles are guiding us. The aspect of Hassan Fathy that appeals most to us, quite logically, is the role of the craftsman and how he fits into the building process. We are following up on the Istanbul Statement from the 1994 Human Settlements Conference, a best-practices document from the craftsperson's point of view. The Hassan Fathy Institute is now helping, mostly through in-kind contributions, to provide craft training for workers overseas, so far in Egypt, El Salvador and Poland.


http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/199904/the.legacy.of.hassan.fathy.htm