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Introduction

The Egyptian architect and master builder, Hassan Fathy (1900-1989) was one of the first architects to found a new approach based on a conception of interpreting forms and masses from the past. He was unique in believing that this language could exist alongside that of an aggressively modern one that cut all ties with the past. In addition to Fathy’s tireless efforts to establish his traditional approach, he struggled to improve the housing and living environments of the poor, especially in the Third World. Fathy’s efforts were acknowledged by several awards, including the Chairman’s Prize, Aga Khan Awards for Architecture (1980), (fig.1) the Right Livelihood Award (1980) and the first Gold Medal of the International Union of Architects (1984).

In order to understand Fathy’s life and career, and to explain the origins and much of the evolution of his thinking as well as his nationalist attitude, an understanding of the historical circumstances within which he lived, is necessary. A brief history of modern Egypt and the many transformations in Egyptian nationalist orientations over time will clarify how Fathy perceived his own identity and how he tried to realise his nationalist beliefs in the world around him. The crowning event in establishing a brilliant period of Islamic civilisation and a prosperous centre of Islamic culture was during the Fatimid dynasty that ruled Egypt from 969 to 1171. During this period the Islamic character of Egypt, especially its capital Cairo, emerged, represented still in the architecture of the houses and mosques of the Fatimid era. However, old medieval Cairo was the city which influenced Fathy and in which he spent his formative years and the most productive part of his career as a professional architect.

Fig.1. The Aga Khan First Award Steering Committee

Front row left: Hassan Fathy, His Highness the Aga Khan, Renata Holod.

Fathy was born when Egypt was under British occupation and ruled by the Egyptian crown. The extensive foreign involvement in Egyptian affairs had brought into the country a large number of people whose way of life differed from that of the native Egyptian. This also brought to Egypt different architectural styles, which Fathy regarded as inappropriate and a threat to Egypt’s culture. The nationalistic atmosphere of the early twentieth century inevitably affected Fathy’s thinking and was the impetus behind his search for cultural identity. Fathy’s opposition to the concept of Westernisation was the result of the hegemony of the west on his country as well as the taken-for-granted idea that the East is inferior to the West. Fathy stated, “When Hitler classified the races, I was very worried, I decided that there is no superior race, there are only specialities of race”.

Fathy’s anti-westernisation attitude, which was reflected in his architecture, could be interpreted in the context of orientalism, which was thoroughly discussed by Edward Said in his Orientalism in 1978. Said defined “Orientalism” as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”. Orientalism is mainly a British and French cultural enterprise based on the assumption that the relationship between West and East is a relationship of power, hegemony, and domination. For Egypt, colonisation and Western imperialism was different before and after the British occupation. From the time of Napoleon, Egypt was an “academic example of Oriental backwardness”, but it became “the triumph of English knowledge and power”. However, it is likely that Fathy’s quest for an authentic vernacular architecture was not only to fashion architecture for the people, but also an expression of his intention to liberate his country from ongoing westernisation during the second half of the twentieth century. Fathy was a contemporary of other intellectuals in Egypt, who were the product of this period, including the artist Hamid Said, for whom Fathy built a house in 1942 (fig.2).

Fig.2. Hassan Fathy (right) and Hamid Said

Like Fathy, Said’s main concern was to establish a link between the modern world and Egyptian culture through the medium of art. In the early 1960s, he was asked by the Minister of Culture to write a book to represent his ideas. In his book The Contemporary Art (1962), Said argued that history is similar to nature and always needs reinterpretation. He explained that we make history when we highlight both its spirit and meaning and history makes us by defining the direction we follow in our life. “History is the way to understand the present, and the way to the hope in the future”.

Like Said, the late Ramses Wissa Wassef (1911-1974), architect, weaver and former head of the Architectural Department at the School of Fine Art in Cairo, was also Fathy’s close friend and shared with him the same traditional architectural approach (fig.3). Wassef studied architecture in Paris, but although he was the product of the Beaux-Art educational system he was, like Fathy, concerned about national issues and the decline of the traditional architecture and handicrafts of Egypt. Wassif was influenced by the teaching of the educator and sculptor Habib Gorgy, whose main concern was to establish a distinct Egyptian national character. Gorgy was Said’s teacher and later became Wassef’s father in law. Gorgy and Wassef taught a group of village children to weave tapestries according to the children’s own designs.

Their work has been exhibited in Europe and attracted the admiration of artists as well as critics. Like Fathy, Wassef also was impressed and influenced by the buildings of the old parts of Cairo and believed that the “hideous fungus-like modern buildings” are going to destroy human sensibility. He found it difficult to explain, “why our own civilisation should produce such coldness and ugliness to replace the wealth of indigenous architecture”.

Fig.3. Ramses Wissa Wassef (1911-1974)

Wassef sought an architecture that would be the product of the way of life of Egypt’s people, traditions, and climate and would express his country’s national character. Wassef’s philosophy and his rejection of mechanisation paralleled the ideas of both Said and Fathy. Their shared belief in the value of people co-operating to create their society formed a strong friendship between them.

Among Fathy’s contemporaries, the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Najib Mahfouze (b.1911) also reflected this renaissance movement and the search for Egyptian identity in his writings (fig.4).

Fig.4. Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Najib Mahfouze (1911-2006)

Both Fathy and Mahfouze were members of the Council of Literature and Arts. In a meeting with the author, Mahfouze argued that coincidentally, both Fathy’s A Tale of Two Villages and his novel Zoqaq El-midaq (Alleyway) were translated into the French language in the early 1970s. He explains that Fathy visited the places, where the events of his novel had taken place and that on many occasions he discussed the details of the story with him. Although Mahfouze has not seen Fathy’s work, he “admired the idea behind it”.

Like Fathy, Mahfouze, has always been influenced by mediaeval Cairo in his writings. “I think there has to be an attachment to a place or a thing which could become a starting point for feelings”. Following the Egyptian revolution of 1952, Mahfouze wrote Bayna Al-Qasrayn (Between the Two Palaces), a trilogy through which he commented on modern Egypt. The trilogy provides an insight into the great transformation from the emptiness of inherited tradition to the challenges facing a new generation in revolt through portraying the lives of one fictional Cairene family between the two World Wars. In this, both Fathy and Mahfouze shared the same belief that Egypt cannot be built on modern technology only, but it should also be moderated by tradition and social values. Certainly, history, whether in the hands of a great novelist or a sensitive architect, can preserve the memory for future generations.

However, medieval Cairo, which inspired Fathy and Mahfouz, has experienced a radical change in its appearance from the time of Khedive Ismail to the present. Fathy argued that the new architecture had failed to acknowledge traditional architecture and had instead become preoccupied with technological advance. Because of this lack of tradition, Fathy believed that cities “are becoming more and more ugly. Every single new building manages to increase this ugliness, and every attempt to remedy the situation only underlines the ugliness more heavily”. Fathy always regarded modern Egypt’s cities as if they were a group of people who do not play music well yet still insisted on forming a band. However, all the buildings and the architecture became grotesque. In Fathy’s opinion, the architecture of Cairo should match its cultural and technological milieu exactly as had happened at certain key points in history. In his article “Cairo of the 21st century”, Fathy wrote “my new dream is the utopian city… which novelists spoke about… and envisaged in their dreams and books… let it be Cairo of the 21st century whose planning would be based on humanistic principles… and respect of aesthetic aspects which were forgotten within the technological modern life”.

The methodological framework of this book involved a combination of extensive and intensive field work along with archival and library research. The fieldwork, which was conducted in Egypt between November 1999 and February 2000, included visits to the sites and photographing many of Fathy’s buildings and villages. During this period, I was able to meet and interview some of Fathy’s relatives, close friends and clients, who are now elderly people. These included, Abdel-Hamid Ezzat, Fathy’s nephew, Souad Hamdi, Fathy’s niece, the artist Hamid Said, Fathy’s close friend and one of his clients in the 1940s, Tusun Abu-Gabal, one of his clients who offered photographs of his house at the time of its completion in the 1950s and Fathy’s close friend, Dr Nawal Hassan. The fieldwork also included in-depth tape-recorded interviews with other clients, architectural professionals, and scholars and those who valued Fathy’s work and philosophy. All these people offered valuable insights into the realities of the architect’s life as well as confirming the existence of a number of previously unverified buildings. The main objective of this book is to establish a firmly documented, factual account of Fathy’s life and career in order to correct the inaccurate and missing details relating to his family background of previous accounts. This made it possible to explore in greater depth Fathy’s formative years, the influences, which shaped his architecture and his passion for ideal forms and, more importantly, his capacity to transform lessons from history into vocabularies directed at contemporary cultural realities.

Hassan Fathy

Prophet of Earth Architecture

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Dedication

Content

Introduction