Hassan Fathy and the New Gourna Experiment
Intro
This paper discusses the work of Hassan Fathy, especially the village of New Gourna near Luxor, Egypt. The village, and his book on it Architecture for the Poor, and his contrast between the traditional vernacular building techniques and the modern concrete-based buildings that are, in his opinion, unsuitable for the villagers’ lives.
Based on my previous, indirect, knowledge of Hassan Fathy’s work, I believe that his work was idealistic, and I would argue that it was unrealistic. However, his work is extremely influential on the collective architectural theory in the Arab world in particular and the Islamic world in general, and many of his theories and idioms have become what one might call conventional wisdom. Reading his books directly and seeing his work firsthand (while the latter is unattainable during the research window due to time constraints), will enable the comparison between what his ideas actually are and what they are understood to be, and compare with his western world compatriots on one end, and how his disciples, like Abdel Wahed El-Wakil, have chosen to build on his ideas and theories. In other words, is the collective understanding of Hassan Fathy’s legacy true to the actual legacy of Fathy?
What does Hassan Fathy represent to us in the Middle East? Where does the myth end and the truth begin?
The Myth
The National Context and his Influence
Fathy is generally considered to be the greatest modern Arab architect, Zaha Hadid notwithstanding. He is considered a visionary whose ideas should be followed because he was right.
This is how we were taught his ideas in school: we have been using un-Arabic and un-Islamic forms in our architecture, and it would be proper for us to use the traditional forms and mechanical methods that he used in his buildings. Mud brick is unquestionably good, while concrete is unquestionably bad. And traditional forms and materials are better suited to us than whatever we import from the west. And it is very important to note, to most of us, the connection to Hassan Fathy is personal. We were taught by professors who studied under his disciples.
One of Fathy’s most famous disciples, who is a famous architect on his own right, is Abdel‑Wahed El‑Wakil. As his work in the Corniche Mosque in Jeddah shows, he uses the same forms Fathy used in Lower Egypt (which he has borrowed from Upper Egypt) in Jeddah, and his other mosques around the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. His work could be summarized very Egyptian forms, marketed as Islamic or Authentic, for Saudi and Qatari clients.
Our educational institutions, however, while acknowledging the influence and importance of Hassan Fathy do not put a lot of stock in his ideas, but instead prepares students a practical market. So they appreciate him enough to talk about him and ask us to be informed about his work, while seemingly negating everything he did in the next class to have us design air circulations systems. He was not even mentioned in the Housing class, which is in my opinion the most relevant to his ideas.
Critique of his legacy
Compare the previous Fathy drawing (Richards, Serageldin and Rastorfer 1986), with the King Khaled Mosque in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
It is the same dome. Even though the material is different, and the location is different, and the climate is different, the architect of this mosque misunderstood this form to be the all-end-all of Islamic forms. Traditional mosques of the Najd do not, ever, have a dome, but are instead roofed flatly using palm leaves and trunks. I believe that these two images sum shortly everything that is wrong with Fathy’s legacy as it is commonly understood. Architects fail to make a distinction between the re-use of traditional methods and revival of ancient styles; and fail to make the distinction between the traditions of Upper Egypt and those of Islamic countries around the world.
This is, in part, due to the romanticizing of his ideas, and the emphasis that this is our architecture as opposed to their architecture. Claiming that courtyard houses are the “Islamic” type, ignores a long tradition in Yemen of building mud skyscrapers. Fathy’s ideas were extremely narrow in scope and in implementation, but many of his disciples failed to understand this and extended them for the entire Islamic world instead.
Fathy himself did not fall in this trap, at least not entirely. In one example of his later work outside Egypt, Villa Nassif in Jeddah, Fathy shows knowledge and understanding of the Hijazi tradition He does not use the materials and vocabulary of his Egypt designs, but instead uses materials and methods indigenous to the region.
The Reality
The Two Villages
Old Gourna was a village located right on the Valley of Kings, and its residents made their living poaching the graves and selling what they find. While the practice was very profitable for the villagers, it prevented the relevant authorities from properly cataloguing and preserving the artifacts of the ancient Pharaohs. A competent and caring government would have found a way to give the peasants other, more profitable sources of income so that they would cooperate in excavations instead of sabotaging them. But the Department of Antiquities had another idea: relocate the peasants from their old village to another one far away from it as cheaply as possible so they would keep their hands as far as possible from the ancient artifacts. This was where the architect came in.
Fathy had proved in several occasions that he could produce sustainable and cheap houses for a fraction of the cost of the usual housing. However, his work was mostly for private clients and on smaller scale than that of New Gourna. The village had 7000 villagers, in 900 families, who all needed to be housed in new houses and left to fend for themselves.
The villagers were obviously reluctant to move to their new houses. The government was reluctant to spend anything more than necessary, and came back several times on their promises and obligations to Fathy. The architect, and his team of artisans, were literally the only people involved in the project who cared. For an architect with an unusual despise for the average housing and a passion to revive the traditional crafts, that was a recipe for disaster.
The Ideas
The village’s plan and layout was based largely on the social structure and the urban structure of Old Gourna. The village had five “tribes” of varying sizes who were themselves arranged in smaller social units, each of them called a “badana”. Each tribe were assigned a neighborhood that, as much as possible, reflected their social structure and customs. However, the individual houses of these badanas did not have the standardized designs of the neighborhood you can see in the plan, but were instead based on info taken from the families themselves. This disparity between the regularization of the neighborhood and the individualized houses could be seen in the finished plan of the village next page (Richards, Serageldin and Rastorfer 1986).
He had different ways to get the villagers to participate in the design. Either he and his team would interview them and draw a plan, at site on the ground, with them; or he would house them in an empty courtyard for a couple of days and then build the walls around their footsteps on the ground. He also tried to get the villagers involved with the construction process, by teaching them how to lay the bricks and how to build the roofs and so on.
The villagers’ livelihood was also considered. He looked for the crafts the Gournis specialized in, like weaving and pottery, and asked the masters to teach their crafts to the younger generation. The idea was that now the villagers are robbed of their main source of income, and they’re too large a community to be sustained by farming, the only way for them to be profitable and sustainable is to turn the village into a center of arts and crafts that can supply their products to Cairo and tourists of Luxor. (Which is not an unheard of business plan for villages. Several villages in Egypt seem to gain their livelihood this way even today). The plan did not pan out for several reasons, chief of which was the government’s reluctance to support the crafts school or connect the village with the existing institutions that aimed to preserve the traditional crafts. Fathy also did not view it as his responsibility, but as an added bonus to what he was already doing.
Comparisons
Frank Lloyd Wright
There are more similarities than meets the eye between the most celebrated Egyptian architect and the most celebrated American architect that go beyond them being both “the most celebrated”, and beyond that they were both concerned with finding a regional architectural identity for their respective nations in a Euro-centric world of architecture.
One part of that is related to their legacy. Both are widely influential architects with a widely acknowledged impact. However, both are more associated with the forms they developed than the reasoning that led to it. Talk about Wright must involve the Prairie style and how it connected to the wilderness and whatnot, and talk about Fathy’s work is about the mud brick and the vault and the wind catchers and the octagonal domes. But, in my experience at least, it is neglected to mention that their drives were first and foremost regional in nature: they developed their forms to respond to a specific context and a specific culture. Their important legacy is in how they approached the problems, rather in how they solved it.
To illustrate, see Wright’s works is the Usonian house, which he proposed as the model for the new American family. The proposal caught my fancy because of the kitchen. Previously, kitchens were the domain of servants; and therefore they were out of sight of the usual living spaces, became the domain of the now-poorer housewife. So Wright brought the kitchen into the living room to respond to this social change. Yet Wright’s more known and more appreciated work is his work for rich clients that appreciated his ideas. The parallels with Fathy are obvious: both responded to an otherwise ignored social condition but both found more success with clients than do not need their more important ideas.
The Modernist Movement
As much as Hassan Fathy himself would refuse the comparison, his research for an architecture of the people, rather than an architecture for the state and for the elites of society. Modernism failed to achieve this status because people viewed its forms as alien to their culture. Fathy approached the problem from the opposite end and failed, for reasons that include, among many, that his forms are not “modern” enough. The debate is still on, and the solution in my opinion is not in one or the other, but in a compromise.
That aside, Fathy in his later work develops an obsession of a perfect proportion, supposedly redeveloped from whatever technique the pharaohs used to determine the proportions of their structures and spaces. These proportions were based on the ideal man (Richards, Serageldin and Rastorfer 1986). The similarity shared here with Le Corbusier’s Modulor is, I hope, apparent.
I find it safe to say that Fathy’s ideas and drives are shared by Modernist movement, albeit they are in, and for, a different context and a different clientele.
Yona Friedman
Throughout the reading, Fathy makes several remarks about the futility of the “average person”, which he dismisses with all sorts of analogies. My favorite analogy is as follows:
Statistical averages might be of great value to a life insurance company in estimating the average life span among its policy holders, but not even an insurance company, let alone a statistician, can tell us when any given individual will die. For a government department, lacking architects, to mass-produce designs for the different families on the basis of statistical averages, would be like an insurance company, lacking accountants, deciding for each one of its policy holders his allotted life span and then send round its agent with a pistol to tidy the client away and thus keep the books in order. (Fathy 1973)
This attack at and hatred of designing for the average person permeates through another famous architect, who is seemingly unrelated to Fathy: Yona Friedman (Friedman 1975). Like Fathy, Friedman is more known for his ideas and his theories than his built work as an architect. Friedman says that the average person does not exist, and it is quite lazy for the architect to construct, and design for, this average person. The result of which, he adds, is that you will have 500 people upset with their houses in as many different ways as they differ from the average person. The most striking similarity, however, is that how both Fathy and Friedman advocated that the solution to this problem is to have the users design their own houses without the tyranny of the architect (but perhaps with his guidance, as neither wants to be out of a job.)
Can you have Architecture without architects? They both argue that you can, and that this has been the case for millennia of human life on earth.
Conclusions
Hassan Fathy and the future of Architecture
Mentioned earlier is how Fathy’s ideas were for a specific context, and his tendency later in life to romanticize it and generalize it led to a mistaken understanding of what he preached, and a disservice to his legacy and his ideas. However, once taken the context into account, are his ideas applicable for a wider scope? Could they form a foundation for the future of architecture?
While the value of Fathy’s work is in the realm of public housing, it is important to see where his ideas and methods could serve us elsewhere, and maybe solve the problem of housing with new technologies. While the results he arrived to were suited for the context he dealt with, we should examine how these methods could provide different results in different contexts, or inputs.
For example, one of the methods Fathy used to let the peasants inform the designs of their houses, is to let them inhabit an empty courtyard and live in it for a few days. Then, by tracing their footsteps and observing how they organized themselves, he would put up the doors and the pathways. This is an elegant and smart solution to a problem that is often repeated in computer-aided design theories: how to let the user participate in the design of his house when he doesn’t speak the technical language of the architects and the builders, and how to make the user interact with whatever computer designing their personal space.
One very specific example, admittedly, does not provide a very convincing argument that his ideas are applicable for an entirely different context than public housing. But it is my belief that a look into his work beyond the title and the narrow premise will prove valuable. It would be insulting to his life’s work to dismiss it otherwise.
Personal Conclusions
His is the triumph of ideas.
Before doing this research I had an image of Hassan Fathy. After it I started to have a begrudging respect for him, and especially his earlier ideas. After successive failures and let downs (his projects failing one after the other due to government negligence and the war with Israel.) turned him into a caricature of his former self. As evidenced by his TV interviews and whatnot.
That is not to say that Fathy was without faults. One thing that struck me in reading his book is that, while he recognized the importance of reviving the economy of the residents of New Gourna, he did not view it as “his job”, neglecting what I believe to be the heart of social housing: how to make a living. The peasants eventually went back to their old village, because it provided a source of income that they did not have in the New Gourna. This is not a one-man’s job, and the government should have been more interested in the well-being of the peasants more than their interest in keeping these villagers away from the graves, the government’s own source of income.
It is ironic that I had to come to Chicago to learn to appreciate Hassan Fathy.
Bibliography
Fathy, Hassan. 1973. Architecture for the Poor: an Experiment in Rural Egypt, or Gourna: A tale of two villages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Friedman, Yona. 1975. Toward a Scientific Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Hamid, Ahmad. 2010. Hassan Fathy and Continuity in Islamic Architecture: the Birth of a New Modern. Cairo, New York: The American University in Cairo Press.
Richards, J.M., Ismail Serageldin, and Darl Rastorfer. 1986. Hassan Fathy. Aperture.
Steele, James. 1997. An Architecture for People: the Complete works of Hassan Fathy. New York: Whitney Library of Design.
Swan, Simone. 1999. “Hassan Fathy’s Elegant Solution.” Aramco World, July/August: 17–31.
