During his long career Fathy designed more than 170 projects, but only the village of New Gourna (1945) achieved real international attention, thanks to the publication,Ģ4 years later, of Fathy’s book Gourna, A Tale of Two Villages, the first time his work became known to a wider architectural community outside Egypt. For a long time, his work was associated with the vernacular and confined to the boundaries of critical regionalism, making the Egyptian master a full member of that ‘multifaceted family of architects’, such as Dimitris Pikionis, Jože Plečnik or Fernand Pouillon, who, due to their heterodox interpretation of modernity, were almost forgotten during their lifetimes. Known as ‘the architect of the poor’, Fathy’s name rarely appears in histories of architecture of the 20th century. The tradition is lost, and we have been cut off from our past ever since Mohammed Ali cut the throat of the last Mameluke.’ The signature is missing the houses of rich and poor alike are without character, without an Egyptian accent.

He wrote: ‘In modern Egypt there is no indigenous style. His work poses an opposition to foreign cultural domination and the use of Western architectural models in the Arab region: a trend which was particularly in vogue in Egypt at the beginning of the 20th century. Hassan Fathy’s oeuvre can be understood as a continuous search to define an appropriate architecture with respect to the local context, one capable of expressing his arabité. ‘For many years Fathy’s projects have been described as Postmodern vernacular, and only recently has he been rediscovered as a master who proposed a different idea of modernity’ In this simple statement Fathy summed up the entire meaning of his work and poetics. I’m searching for an architecture and an urbanism, searching and trying to find my lost arabité’. To the question ‘who are you?’ he answered: ‘I’m an Arab architect who has lost every point of reference in the Arab society, who has lost his arabité.

In the background are the sounds of chaotic traffic and the chants of the muezzins. Swathed in a brown cloak, he walked back and forth on the house’s rooftop with the ensemble of Cairo’s buildings and the dome and minarets of the Sultan Hassan Mosque behind him. At the age of 78, in a key scene of the documentary movie Il ne suffit pas que Dieu soit avec les pauvres, Hassan Fathy was interviewed at his Ottoman-Mamluk flat, at the foot of the Cairo Citadel.

Architecture Poor Hassan Fathy Pdf