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The Unknown Hassan Fathy

by Leîla el-Wakil

Seminar Hassan Fathy and his legacy, Bibliotheca Alexandrina,

25 of October 2007

First of all I wish to thank Dr Ismaïl Serageldin for inviting me to

participate this outstanding seminar on Hassan Fathy organized
for the occasion of the Fifth Anniversary of the Bibliotheca
Alexandrina, this famous cultural institution, under the
patronage of Suzanne Moubarak. It is a great honour and a
pleasure to attend this important event.

I also whish to apologize for the title given to my communication

“The unknown Hassan Fathy” especially in front of the other
speakers who were close to him, wrote or produced exhibitions on
him, worked with him. I personally never met Hassan Fathy.

I can argue for my defence, it might be easier to study

scientifically Hassan Bey, the “Gourou” as many people use to
say, without knowing him personally. I hope that way I can
remain objective and uninfluenced by this charismatic
personality. The memory of Hassan Fathy, that one often has, is
the one of an old and a bit dogmatic man, involved in mud brick
and appropriate technology. But who remembers the young
Hassan Fathy? The one before Gourna? The modern architect?
The seducing Hassan Fathy?
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My attempt as a historian is to approach the truth through

investigation methods, that is to say, in our case, by studying the
archives, a fantastic and immense world, which is still being
classified at the Rare Books Library at AUC, by interviewing the
people who closely knew Hassan Fathy, by understating the
timeframe during which he lived and worked, to shed the light on
his important network of relationships. Hassan Fathy may have
given us the impression of being a lonely creator but in fact he
had numerous professional relationships. He was involved with
ministries, international organizations, associations, appointed
for projects concerning rural development, housing, heritage,
education, culture, tourism …

By contextualising the thoughts and works of Hassan Fathy, we

discover that he is completely in accordance with his time, as a
nationalist architect who defends the Egyptian way of building
against westernized architecture. The researches undertaken to
understand his relationships with the Egyptian intellectuals and
artists of his time are of greatest significance. Nadia Radwan,
assistant at Geneva University, who wrote a remarquable thesis
on the work of Hassan Fathy that won a price in Switerland, will
present this subject later on.

I myself would like to examine the work of Hassan Fathy under

the axis of modernism. By Modernism I mean his concern for
modern programs, but also his modern thoughts and way of
designing. Hassan Fathy, who was trained at Cairo University in
the Twenties, mainly by Italian and British professors, is deeply
westernized and this was never emphasized in the publications
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on him. His early production reflects the Deco Style and Modern
Movement influences. We still know little about this subject.
Fathy didn’t mention it in his old years, maybe considering this
early work as a youth failure and censuring these early projects
for the posterity? The attempt to reconstitute Fathy’s carrier
during the Twenties is a difficult task. Very few papers remain
from this period when Hassan Fathy worked at 44 Falaki street
and lived in a brand new modern apartment house in Zamalek.

At that time, during the reign of King Fouad, Fathy designs

projects for the cosmopolitan cairene society who enjoys
entertainment and elegant villas. Like his contemporaries he uses
the new technology of concrete even if it was not such an easy
task, as it appears in a controversial correspondence with the
Egyptian constructor of the Bosphore Casino in 1932. An
interesting contract with Victor del Burgo, an Italian engineer and
constructor, specialized in concrete, shows us that he would have
applied a mixed technique for the construction of an apartment-
house in Zamalek in 1937. This project was to be constructed
with a concrete skeleton and brick walls. Hassan Fathy intended
to cover the building with various coatings (like tartache or
takchine or “à la tyrolienne”), which was commonly used in Egypt
at that time to disguise modern materials. Sayed Korrayem
condemned this way of dissimulating in an article of 1940,
mentioned and translated by Mercedes Volait in her outstanding
publication Al Imara, Pour un style national de l’architecture en
Egypte.
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The early forties are usually considered as the turning point

of Fathy’s career and the beginning of the vernacular style as
shown in the Hamdi Seif el Nasr project in the Fayoum. From
then on Fathy had the reputation of an architect mainly
concerned with tradition, heritage and vernacular architecture.
The material found in the archives enables us to try another
interpretation of Hassan Fathy’s work. Though he rejected in a
very interesting text the idea of modern architecture and created
the concept of contemporary architecture, I would like to point
the ambiguity and the richness in the work of Hassan Fathy
through a few examples. I would also like to relate him to his
contemporaries.

The idea and the ideal of the village

As admirably described in Architecture for the Poor, a book written

like a novel or like a symphony, Fathy discovers the beauty of the
old Nubian villages during a travel with his colleagues of the Fine
Arts Academy in 1937. Everybody is aware of the importance of
this “revelation” on the production that follows this trip. The
interest of Hassan Fathy for villages comes from, as he says
himself, his study of the theories of British urban planners.
Thomas Sharp is one of them. Sharp, a follower of Ebezener
Howard, wrote several books on the English village during the
thirties and the forties. As well as Sharp thought “the man-made
landscape of England was the most beautiful in the world and the
English village was the perfection of the village idea”, Fathy
praised the Nubian villages as ideal and perfect locations and
tried to recreate something of them in Gourna. Both are searching
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for the secret of the charm and character of those traditional

villages of which they study the conscious or unconscious
principles of design. Both have the fear that those beautiful and
worthy entities loose their genuine identity.

The theme of the village is central in the designs of Hassan Fathy,

from Gourna to the latest community projects of the eighties.
Those villages are mainly either peasant villages or touristic
villages. During his stay in Greece with the Doxiades agency
(1957-1962) Hassan Fathy studies many proposals for
implantations in Irak in the country of the Great Mussayeb. The
planning of the cosmopolite agency is often totally modern,
without any formal reminiscences from any kind of vernacular
architecture. Later on, after his return to Egypt, Fathy will plan
the village of Baris, an unaccomplished but magnificent
endeavour.

The holiday village

Major part of Fathy’s villages projects from the sixties to the

eighties are holiday villages. This very contemporary concern of
Hassan Fathy with tourism was never really underlined, though
many projects and texts reflect a comprehensive and pioneering
attitude. Hassan Fathy was called back by Sarwat Okasha, the
minister of culture, as Ahmad Hamid, one of his disciples,
asserts. In 1963 Hassan Fathy, after his return from Greece,
became consultant to the Ministry of Tourism.
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In which way did his stay by Doxiades give him the image of a
westernized architect able to cope with this urgent and important
program? The holiday village appeared all over the world as the
best answer to Post Second World War social tourism and the
more clever formula to preserve the beauties of the sites. Thomas
Sharp thinks that “the holiday village” should be a future solution
and says: “The holiday village will … provide country and seaside
holidays, with the amenities of small community life, for urban
family group, each family having a house to itself.”

The Hassan Fathy’s archives show us some touristic projects of

the Doxiades Agency. The village of Apollonion at Porto Rafti in
Attica forty kilometres from Athens “combines the comfort of
modern living and the privacy of one’s own home with the beauty
and tranquillity of an unspoiled natural setting”.
Apollonion is an example among many others built in the fifties or
in the early sixties to fight the damages caused by excessive
building. Gérard Brick then associated with Trigano will invent in
1950 the successful formula of the Club Med, whose holiday
villages all included will proliferate through the world and answer
the general demand of the new social tourism. Alcudia (Majorca)
will host the first constructed village of the Club Med.
The formula of (pseudo-)vernacular village is very much
appreciated around the Mediterranean Sea. Such inventions like
Port Grimaud by the architect François Spoerri (1963) were even
supported by the General de Gaulle to avoid in France the
disastrous concrete densification of the Costa Brava in Spain.
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We know that Hassan Fathy collects documentation about many

Mediterranean touristic infrastructures, like Varna in Bulgaria,
Izmir, that he will visit in company of Omar el Farroukh (1968),
Marrakech, Djerba, where was built a first Club Med in 1965 and
Tunis. Later on, considered as a specialist in tourism, Hassan
Fathy will participate to the Hammamet conference, a panarabic
meeting, held by the UNESCO in 1974, hosting an important
section on the impact of tourism on architectural surroundings.
Fathy certainly influenced deeply the conclusions of the general
report concerning the recognition of heritage, inspiration of
vernacular models and claim for genuine form and typology.

At the end of the sixties Hassan Fathy will begin developing some
proposal for a low cost holiday village on the North Coast west of
Alexandria. He addresses an interesting report to the minister of
tourism and proposes to construct a village in indigenous
character that should have an esthetical appeal on tourists. Two
prototypes should be built for the investors to get an idea of what
will be the realisation: the first one in Agami (it will produce the
Sidi Krier House, 1971), the second on the Mokhatam in Cairo,
which was never built.
Sidi Krier, which was built out of sandstone, the local material,
enables us to experiment the cleverness of the inner and outer
organisation according to the program, the climate and the site.
Hassan Fathy says himself that “he tried to bring to the guest all
the best qualities of Arab domestic architecture crystallised into
this unit”. He mentions the combination of the Qâa with its iwan,
the courtyard, the Ma’qâad or loggia, the use of the
muschrabeyya, but concludes: “It is worthy of note that while all
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the elements of design were of the most traditional, all the

materials were of local origin, yet the building is absolutely
contemporary”.

Hassan Fathy’s project for the North Coast won’t be constructed

and the house of Sidi Krier (1971) will be the late and isolated
result of creating a housing unit as prototype. After this first
attempt many other projects will be designed for touristic and/or
cultural villages, as the Nile Festival Village in the Seventies,
which should have been located near Louxor and which should
have hosted many artistic manifestations.
The very controversial Village of the Journalists (karia al
Sahafiyin) in Sahel el Shamali, 82 kilometers west from
Alexandria, and constructed after the death of Hassan Fathy,
could, I think, nevertheless be considered as a late or posthume
realisation, if not of Hassan Fathy, in close connexion to him.
AUC archives conserve a mass planning of 1989 showing the
Hassan Fathy’s signature.

Hassan Fathy’s many attempts to build touristic villages since the

the sixties remained unaccomplished. In Nasser’s time, tourism
was in his first steps. Twenty years later, plenty of touristic
villages were to be constructed on the shore of the Red Sea, by
followers, who beneficiated from the track he had opened.

Housing Units
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Involved since Gourna in the elaboration of the housing units,

Fathy goes on working on different minimal units that should
host various family cells. The way of thinking and designing these
Housing Units has close connexions with the work of Modern
architects concerned with social housing. Germans and
particularly the Frankfurter Schule also studies Das
Existenzminimum, that is to say the minimal vital housing cell.
Gropius and Le Corbusier, among others, produced revolutionary
low and middle classes apartments, grouped in some Siedlung,
like those beautiful and protected examples which still could be
visited in the neighbourhood of Berlin, or in the Unité
d’habitation, like the one of Marseille, which is today listed as
national heritage.

Gourna

Gourna’s experience has fairly in a good and in a bad way

hidden the rest of the production of Hassan Fathy. The project
was partly misunderstood by people who saw in it merely the use
of poor material (mud brick) and the shape of tombs architecture
(domes). But who did really appreciate this Egyptian endeavour
as a contemporary answer to modern housing questions?
Isn’t the fellahin village the counterpart of the European
working classes city? Who, a part from the Greek photographer
Dimitri Papadimou, underlined the very modern game of the
simple masses under the light? What about the curves of his
mud-bricks vaults which are very close to some concrete
constructions like the parabolic vaults of Freyssinet for the plane
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shelters of Orly Airport? Fathy himself didn’t totally emphasize in

Architecture for the Poor that he used mud brick to achieve social,
typological but also formal modernity, approaching in that Le
Corbusier (for whom he had contradictory feelings) formula:
“L’architecture est le jeu savant, correct et magnifique des
volumes sous la lumière”.

Hassan Fathy tried by many means to save and restore the

unfinished and deteriorated village of Gourna. He even thought of
turning it into a touristic village. From 1968 until the eighties this
proposal was examined. The latest plans (1981) propose the
restoration of the existing village and his extension for the
touristic project in its original style adapted to coming times.

Hassan Fathy remains a major figure and his production is an

important subject for researchers as this seminar organized by
the Bibliotheca Alexandrina confirms. Behind the known Hassan
Fathy, the technician of raw brick and Architecture for the poor
hides a much richer personality: a polyvalent architect, able to
design for the poor as well as for the rich, in mud or in concrete,
caring for heritage while looking towards the future. Even though
he has been awarded and honoured during his life, most of his
constructions are today neglected and call for urgent care. What
remains of his work deserves protection as an outstanding
heritage for Egypt and for the world. Gourna, the jewel that Fathy
gave to Egypt and that Egypt gave to the world, has been recently
considerably damaged. As Mies van der Rohe Barcelona’s small
Pavillion was entirely reconstructed as a testimony of Modern
architecture, it is now the time to bring Gourna back to life.