User:Ethansanch/Hassan Fathy

Early career/New Gourna

He began teaching at the College of Fine Arts in 1930 and designed his first adobe buildings in the late 1930s.^{[citation needed]}

The remains of a house in New Gourna

Fathy gained international critical acclaim for his involvement in the construction of New Gourna, located on Luxor's West Bank, built to resettle the village of Gourna, which fell within the archaeological areas of the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens.

New Gourna Village - Craft's Exhibition- Section

Fathy's plan devised groundbreaking approaches to economic, social, and aesthetic issues that typically impact the construction of low-cost housing.

With regard to the economic issues, Fathy noted that structural steel was not an apt choice for a poor country, and that even materials such as cement, timber, and glass did not make good economic sense. To address this issue, Fathy instead devised a plan that included the use of appropriate technology, notably mud brick construction.

Noting that the traditional village, although afflicted with issues of overcrowding and poor sanitation was also an expression of “a living society in all its complexity,” Fathy strived to design New Gourna in a manner that addressed the social concerns, including attempting to consult directly with "every family in Gourna" and advocating for the involvement of social ethnographers in the planning process. Despite this, inhabitants of the former village were not enthusiastic about relocating, which effectively cut them off from their existing livelihood of trading in archaeological finds.

With regard to aesthetic issues, Fathy placed emphasis on traditional Nubian architectural designs which he observed in a 1941 trip to the region (enclosed courtyards; vaulted roofing), yielding what Fathy described as "spacious, lovely, clean, and harmonious houses." He also made use of traditional Nubian ornamental techniques (claustra, a form of mud latticework), as well as vernacular architecture techniques of the Gourna region. Some critics have observed, however, that Fathy's project for Gourna is not a superlative example of how to prioritize vernacular architecture in an urban plan, given that the domed architecture Fathy championed is traditionally used for funerary architecture rather than residential or domestic spaces

Despite the effort, and also the proper issues he tackled while building New Gourna, through his publication, Architecture for the Poor, he describes the "Gourna Experiment" as a failure. He mentions in Architecture for the Poor , “the Gourna experiment failed."

Dwelling houses in New Gourna

He further describes the sense of failure that due to the village not being completed and the construction being halted, the theory of mud brick construction was seen even more cranky and impractical. Despite the theory being completely lost, that there wasn't anyone that tried to find other practical ways of getting peasant houses built efficiently. There were more issues he came across, such as him stating "This is because no architect knows the real cost of building." Although he dives further into that thought, by speaking on how nobody realistically knows the price or cost, because we’re at the mercy of the economy. Despite the negative outlooks he had writing these books, he managed to make Gourna a community, and till this day is still preserved with only 40% of the original buildings being lost. It's still standing due to being placed on the 2010 World Monuments Watch, and UNESCO and World Monuments Fund joined forces.

Later career

In 1953 he returned to Cairo, heading the Architectural Section of the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1954.

Fathy's next major engagement was designing and supervising school construction for Egypt's Ministry of Education.

Through his work of the years, and especially after New Gourna, he targeted bureaucracy being one of the leading reasons that the experiment failed, which influenced later actions such as in 1957, frustrated with bureaucracy and convinced that buildings designed with traditional methods appropriate to the climate of the area would speak louder than words, he moved to Athens to collaborate with international planners evolving the principles of ekistical design under the direction of Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis. He served as the advocate of traditional natural-energy solutions in major community projects for Iraq and Pakistan and undertook extended travel and research for the "Cities of the Future" program in Africa.^{[citation needed]}

Returning to Cairo in 1963, he moved to Darb al-Labbana, near the Cairo Citadel, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He also did public speaking and private consulting. He was a man with a riveting message in an era searching for alternatives in fuel, personal interactions, and economic supports.

He left his first major international position, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, in 1969 to complete multiple trips per year as a leading critical member of the architectural profession.

His participation in the first U.N. Habitat conference in 1976 in Vancouver which was followed shortly by two events that significantly shaped the rest of his activities. He began to serve on the steering committee for the nascent Aga Khan Award for Architecture and he founded and set guiding principles for his Institute of Appropriate Technology.

He was part in 1979 of a colloquium entitled in his honour 'Architecture for the Poor' in Corsica (France) Alzipratu.

In 1980, he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Architecture and Urban Planning and the Right Livelihood Award.

Fathy designed the mosque and madrasa, constructed with adobe, at Dar al-Islam, an educational center near Abiquiú, New Mexico, USA. The main buildings were completed in 1981, and Dar al-Islam opened in 1982.

Death

Hassan Fathy died on November 30th, 1989. He died in Cairo, Egypt. He passed away peacefully in his home, and died of natural causes.