See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/271701372

Hassan Fathy : Egypt’s Visionary Architect

Article · January 2014

CITATIONS READS

0 2,572

1 author:

Ismail Serageldin
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
237 PUBLICATIONS   2,485 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Euclid's Statistical Matrix View project

The BA African Networks View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Ismail Serageldin on 02 February 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Hassan Fathy
Egypt’s Visionary Architect

Ismail Serageldin
 Hassan Fathy was undoubtedly Egypt’s most important
architect in the 20th century. Yet he remains a controversial
figure for many, who avoided and even opposed the
modernist wave that prevailed in favor of the legacy of each
society’s heritage and its vernacular architecture. Sometimes
dismissed as a romantic, sometimes as a hopeless idealist,
he nevertheless inspired whole generations of architects
by his tenacity and his commitment to principle. Ismail
Serageldin participated in producing the first major book
about Fathy and his work in the 1980s and later wrote two
other books about him, and as Director of the Library of
Alexandria organized an architectural prize in his honor. In
this lecture, which is here reproduced in DVD format, he
talks about the man and his legacy. Serageldin shows Fathy
as a visionary architect whose ideas about the importance
of the environment, attention to the poor and guided self
in building, plus using local materials have all become so
accepted that we forget their revolutionary character when
he articulated them so long ago.
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Background
The twentieth century was a century of upheaval
and modernization. Politically, it was to see colonialism
defeated by the rise of nationalism and decolonization,
totalitarianism of various stripes and its ultimate defeat by
the democracies. In art, it was to see the rise of abstract art
and the broad applications of the telephone, radio, cinema
and television, the first true mass media for entertainment
and social connectivity, the last being crowned by the
appearance of the internet.
In architecture, the twentieth century saw the largest
transformation in the history of that art, as engineering
and new materials, seen on a large scale for the first time
in the 19th century, with such iconic achievements as the
Crystal Palace by Paxton in 1859 and the Eiffel Tower
in 1889, would come to dominate construction, and as
urbanization and mass housing and the emergence of the
middle class were to transform societies. The emergence
of true globalization and the International Style after
the Second World War would be part of that profound
 Ismail Serageldin

transformation, as the modern movement evolved from

the early part of the century into last quarter, and the
post-modern movement appeared. Hassan Fathy was to
be part of that scene for his whole life, but always as a
counterpoint, a dissenting voice that called to architects to
take a different path. This is the story of that remarkable
man and his ideas.
The Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy was born to a
wealthy family on the 23rd of March 1900 in Alexandria.
When he was eight years old, he moved to Cairo with
his family and settled in Helwan. He was talented in
drawing which was to stand him in good stead when he
joined the King Fuad I University to study architecture.
In his formative years he witnessed the 1919 revolution
and Egyptian independence in 1922. Fathy graduated in
1926 and took a job as an engineer in the Local Councils
affiliated General Administration of Schools. In 1930, he
was appointed as instructor at the Faculty of Fine Arts
where he remained until 1946.

4
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

During that first half of the 20th century, Europe was

in turmoil. Modern art flourished, and movements such as
Futurism in Italy, epitomized by speed and such sculptures
as Umberto Buccioni’s bronze, and Santelli’s vision of the
future city, were at the forefront. Constructivism in Russia
was to influence architecture, as in this Zuev Workers' Club
of 1928. In addition Art Deco emerged as an embrace of bold
design, machines and technology as well as bold geometric
shapes, and lavish ornamentation. But by the 1930s, the
bold leaders of the Modern Movement in Architecture had
emerged: Walter Gropius with the Bauhaus in Germany,
and Le Corbusier in France and others. Their work was
impressive: Mies van der Rohe with the great Barcelona
Pavilion of 1929, with its fabulous chairs, and buildings
such as the Schroder house in Utrecht by Rietveld in 1926,
the Villa Savoye in France in 1928 by Le Corbusier, and
Tugendhat House in Brno by Mies in 1930 epitomized this
new Modern Movement.
In America, Frank Lloyd Wright was to hew to a
somewhat different path with a truly unique and evolving
style all his own, from the Robie House in 1910 to the
house on the waterfall of 1936.

5
 Ismail Serageldin

But it was the emerging ideas of the futurism,

modernism, and constructivism that melded into the
deification of the machine and the birth of the Modern
Movement in European Architecture that would anger
Fathy. Fathy would start his attacks on the Modern
Movement, and the International Style that it would
engender in the late thirties, confronting such giants as
Le Corbusier in the forums of the Congrès International
d' Architecture Moderne (CIAM), calling for an architecture
of humanism and a vocabulary of forms drawn from local
vernacular architecture. That was to isolate him from his
peers who were trying to join the Modern Movement.
Some of them were indeed successful. Thus my father, Anis
Serageldin had one of his designs featured in the NY Times
of 1937 as an exemplar of modernism’s use of glass.
Between 1949 and 1952, Fathy was appointed director
of the Educational Buildings Department of the Ministry
of Education, and in 1953 Hassan Fathy became the head
of the Architecture Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts
of Cairo University until the late fifties. During these years,
he designed what was to become his flawed master work,
the village of new Gourna: an architectural masterpiece
beset by socio-economic issues beyond the control of the
architect. He was recognized by State Awards, but was

6
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

increasingly out of step with the modernist trends ruling

supreme in the architecture schools of those days. In 1959,
he left Egypt to work for the Doxiadis Organization in
Greece for two years, but returned to Egypt and resumed
his activities. His long career continued, but he was
marginalized by his peers as he remained true to his vision
with dogged determination.
He wrote about his experience in a book that was to
make him famous: Gourna: a Tale of Two Villages1, which
when re-issued in the west as Architecture for the Poor2
would become a major text for all architectural students
in the world. Fathy was an international figure of stature,
even if in Egypt the mainstream views and the teaching in
the architecture schools still tended to reject his ideas.
He did consulting work for the United Nations and
the Aga Khan Foundation, and took part in numerous
international and Arab conferences, where his ideas found
receptive audiences. Despite having erected very few
buildings, Fathy had become an international superstar.

1
Hassan Fathy, Gourna: A tale of two villages, Ministry of Culture of
Egypt, Cairo, 1969.
2
Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poor, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1973.

7
 Ismail Serageldin

Hassan Fathy served on the first steering committee of

the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and was technically
barred from being considered for a prize. However, a special
award, the Chairman’s Award, was created for him. He was
also the first architect from developing countries to receive
the Gold Medal of the UIA (the International Union of
Architects).
Finally recognized at home and abroad, Hassan Fathy
was laden with honors when he passed away at the age of 89
on the 30th of November, 1989.

The Man
For many, Hassan Fathy remained an enigma. The
purity with which he pursued his vision of the truth,
his unwillingness to compromise his standards, and
his devotion to his art and his craft have always been a
great inspiration to all those who knew him and to many
students who have simply heard of him. But his message
had a resonance of ambiguity, that came from a populist
who was nevertheless a member of the elite. In Hassan
Fathy’s life and character there is a striking noblesse oblige
of the aristocrat, the intellectuals, and social elite of his
country.

8
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

It is somewhat ironic that Hassan Fathy, whose name

is so closely associated with Architecture for the Poor, built
much for wealthy patrons. Just like the great master of
Western architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hassan Fathy’s
genius was initially appreciated mostly by an intellectual
and wealthy elite, whose private commissions remained the
important body of his built work. Like Wright, Fathy built
for them structures that drew upon a local environment,
which in the hands of a master were transformed into a
better vision of the reality from whence they sprang, using
familiar imagery but remaining categorically distinctive.
The paradox of the situation is sharpened in the case of
Fathy since his concern with rural architecture and community
building found its expression in four great projects. Two
of these were public commissions that were plagued with
problems due to socio-economic circumstances beyond his
control: New Gourna (undoubtedly his masterpiece and
most well-known work) and New Bariz (largely unbuilt).
Both were architectural and planning successes flawed by
external socio-economic considerations. The other two
were private commissions: Lu’luat al-Sahara built for the
epitome of the wealthy Egyptian elite, Hafiz Pasha Afifi,
and the Islamic community effort in the United States
which was still under construction at the time of his death.

9
 Ismail Serageldin

These are hardly the means of guided self-expression for

the rural poor. His other famous buildings were private
residences mostly for the rich and well-to-do.
Yet such criticisms are unjustified. To many young
architects and planners in Egypt, Hassan Fathy’s intellectual
and personal integrity shone through the isolation and
adversity that an indifferent government bureaucracy and
architectural establishment forced upon him. His is the
triumph of ideas. The few projects that were known to us
(mostly Gourna) were so powerful in their immediacy and
their aesthetic appeal that they eloquently expressed the
integrity as well as the artistry of their creator.
In retrospect, to most Near Eastern architects, Hassan
Fathy was the dominant figure in the architecture of Egypt
in the 20th century. He was a controversial figure and one
whose impact was widely acknowledged but not quite
understood, although he had been a continuous presence
on the scene for almost 60 years. Nevertheless, during
those six productive decades he had always been peripheral
to the mainstream of building activity, of architectural
education, and of decision-making on urban matters in
Egypt. But peripheral to the mainstream does not mean
easily discountable. His persistent presence had sometimes
infuriated, sometimes disconcerted, always challenged

10
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

those who were most influential in building matters in

Egypt. His intransigence baffled some, who saw him as
a lonely guru, reminiscent of Old Testament prophets,
promising that the world will reap misery for not listening
to the truth of his message.
His strength was the strength of ideas more than
buildings. In his long and illustrious career, he had built
only about 30 projects. Furthermore, with the exception of
Gourna, his most well-known and widely respected work,
few of Hassan Fathy’s buildings were known to the wide
public. Yet his name and ideas are widely acknowledged.
What were those ideas?

The Ideas
Appraising the intellectual contributions of Hassan
Fathy is not an easy task. Perhaps his most significant
legacy will be the humanism that he championed and the
boost he gave to the self-image of architecture in the Third
World generally, the Muslim World specifically, and in
Egypt in particular. He elucidated his positions over the
years with a remarkable clarity, courage and consistency.

11
 Ismail Serageldin

Fathy was not enamored by modern forms. He

recognized that architecture is for human beings. This was
not just an affirmation of a simple truth, it represented
an alternative paradigm to the prevalent “modern”
understanding of architecture and its role in society.
The paradigm can be sketched out by spelling out the
various themes that comprised its various elements: architecture
is for humans, cultural authenticity, non-interchangeability
of cultures, adopting scientific measurements as arbiters of
choice, the participatory nature of the design process, and
individualized attention to each building.
Fathy articulated cultural authenticity as a main
theme of his message. He rejected architecture that was
not indigenous, rooted in the location and the culture of
the area, which in his mind found its truest expression
in the vernacular architecture of a society. He opposed
an imported internationalism, rooted in a common
technology rather than a common humanism, and
championed an indigenous architecture with its vernacular
heritage.
In so doing, Hassan Fathy reaffirmed a central
element of his major paradigm. The recognition that
architecture is for humans, and that human beings are
not interchangeable, requires that architecture must be

12
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

responsive to their psychological and cultural needs as

well as their physical and physiological needs. Fathy
therefore rejected the elements of internationalism that
were to try to unify the world in a common pattern of
living derived from a common technology. His rejection of
internationalist modernism thus went beyond a rejection
of Westernization of a cultural heritage that he considered
an important part of his identity. His rejection was of
internationalism itself as a homogenizing concept that
stripped human beings of their individuality.
In defending cultural authenticity, Hassan Fathy
emphasized that there is an essential non-interchangeability
of cultures. By that he meant that basic cultural elements
developed in response to indigenous needs, environmental
and psychological, and that alien elements cannot
be implanted or transplanted from other cultures or
other environments if they are culturally inappropriate.
Culturally inappropriate elements that are so inserted into
the fabric of the harmoniously built environment will
undoubtedly generate contradictions, and will, with time,
corrode and degrade the traditional culture.
He was careful, however, to note that a living culture
must always remain open to the world and borrow, as well
as, invent new things. There is nothing wrong, he would

13
 Ismail Serageldin

say, for us to take from the West that which is suitable. It

was the difficulty of defining what is suitable that led him
to encourage architects to use as determinants of suitability
the objective measurements of science such as thermal
efficiency, cost, energy efficiency and other measures of
the suitability of materials or the appropriateness of the
relationship of spaces and volumes.
He was open to the use of appropriate technology, even
if it was not indigenous technology, in the narrow sense of
the term. He thus did not hesitate to transplant the dome
building techniques of Southern Egypt to the villages of
Northern Egypt. This was particularly suitable for a time
when wood (for shuttering) was expensive, labor was
plentiful and mud brick was the local building element
throughout rural Egypt. In addition, it was suitable to
the climate. He, himself, launched an experiment around
1970 in which he tested seven chambers built in different
techniques to identify their suitability to Egyptian climatic
conditions. But in his own studio, and in his own work,
he dealt with the much more subtle aesthetic aspects of
the suitability of form to indigenous expression. In this
domain of nuances, his yardstick was his own aesthetic
sensibility much more so than arid historical scholarship.

14
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

Another element of the paradigm that Fathy erected

step-by-step, was the participatory nature of the design
process. He encouraged self-help and promoted user
participation in design. In some instances he allowed
the peasants to express their wishes for the layouts of
their homes, in other instances he let the peasants use a
courtyard for a number of days and then established the
layout of the courtyard on the basis of their use, defining
the pathways where the earth had been beaten by their
steps. In designing the village streets in Gourna, he accepted
that the farmers live with their animals, and thus allowed
ways of having the animals enter the homes from external
entrances as he allowed the small street to be for human
use and interaction. All these efforts are examples of Fathy’s
persistent attempts to introduce further individualization
in the design process.
On the philosophical level, Hassan Fathy stood against
the dehumanizing bureaucratic approach to mass housing
with its endless repetition of prototypes in ever-shifting
combinations. He could not accept the “assembly line”
approach to architecture. He advocated individualized
attention to each building and housing unit. He was fond
of offering an analogy that the greatest brain surgeon in
the world, if given two hundred operations to do in one

15
 Ismail Serageldin

day, would surely kill all his patients. He admonished

architects never to take commissions of more than 15 to
20 units at a time, to deal with users as individual clients
and persons and not as “prototypes” or “generic average
families”. Architects, he asserted, had to remain true to the
human dimension of their vocation if their work was to
retain its meaning.
Hassan Fathy’ s ultimate contribution, and possibly his
most important, was to shift the attention of architects,
however briefly, away from the mainstream commissions of
major buildings towards the problems of the poor. He was
concerned with the masses of humanity that were living in
poverty, and identified directly with the problem of shelter
for the poor. He became one of the prime advocates,
and most powerful voices, of the social consciousness of
architecture in the seventies and early eighties that merged
with so many currents that have exploded throughout the
universities of the world in the sixties.
The upheaval that the sixties wrought throughout
Western universities was matched by an age of equally
important upheaval in Egypt; intellectually, Egypt passed
a milestone. At that time national priorities shifted from
the pursuit of sovereignty and national independence
to the pursuit of social development. In parallel to that

16
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

change the old “icons” of the established orders were being

questioned. Fathy started his third major community
building effort, New Bariz, at that time, but the war of
1967 stopped that project as national priorities shifted
back to foreign policy considerations.
But internationally, this socially-oriented climate
was particularly receptive to Fathy’s ideas of humanism,
national authenticity and concern with the poor. By the
late sixties, Fathy found a responsive echo in some Western
universities. In Egyptian universities, however, architecture
was one of the disciplines that was to remain among the
most insulated from these currents of thought. Repetition
of the dictated models the Western masters of the forties
was the order of the day. Even during the seventies, the time
when modernism was being called into question in the
West, there was no rising wave calling into question these
same ideas and theories in the East. Ultimately, Hassan
Fathy’s work and his ideas would be legitimated by being
“rediscovered” in the academic circles of the West. After
an intellectual odyssey that lasted forty years, widespread
recognition finally came in his own home country by
the late seventies. Although it must be noted that partial
recognition had been granted to Fathy in 1967 when, at
the instigation of some far-sighted university professors of

17
 Ismail Serageldin

architecture, he was awarded the Egyptian Order of Merit.

That, however, did not lead to significant commissions or
widespread academic acceptance in Egyptian Universities,
which for the most part remained indifferent (though not
hostile) to both Fathy and his message.
This prolonged lack of acceptance only served to
motivate Fathy further in pursuit of his cause. But as time
went by, Hassan Fathy’s emphatic manner in preaching his
truth forced upon him a number of positions that were
etched with a hard edge, that made it impossible for some
of the subtleties to remain in the message. And this, to my
mind, led many of his followers, if not himself, into three
broad shortcomings from which the school of thought
whose seeds he has planted is still suffering today.
First and foremost among those shortcomings is an
overly romantic vision of the past combined with a mystic
understanding of Islam as a culture and a presence in
society. It is the “flip side” asserting an indigenous cultural
identity and the intensive pursuit of authenticity in
expression. This pursuit has undeniably contributed to an
elaboration of counterpoints that sought to emphasize the
“otherness” of the Western mode of thought and thereby

18
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

underline the differences between the West and the East,

between non-Muslim and Muslim societies.
The emphasis on defining the difference created,
amongst many would-be disciples, a stark image that bore
little resemblance to the reality of muted variations and
of infinite flexibility that scholars of the Muslim world
have come to recognize and accept. Nor did this narrow
interpretation of Fathy’s much more subtle message
recognize that in the same individual whose cultural
identity Fathy and his followers sought to preserve,
there was an innate evolving synthesis of modernity and
tradition. This synthesis was being wrought by the very
nature of a progressing everyday life, a reality that cannot
be fitted into the sharply defined categories that these
limited intellectual constructs would imply.
An example of this narrow interpretation is the
assertion that only inward looking courtyard houses are
truly Islamic. This certainly does not apply to much of
Arabia, where in Yemen a remarkable heritage of vertical
multi-storied, outward-looking architecture shows a different
conception. It is also incorrect to generalize such a

19
 Ismail Serageldin

statement to all social strata. In historic Islamic Cairo, for

example, a large number of persons lived in multi-family
apartments called Rab’ (plural Riba’)3 .
In pursuit of a humanistic architecture for the poor, and
in his concern with the authentic Egyptian architectural
medium, Hassan Fathy ultimately developed an extremely
powerful architectural vocabulary and syntax, but one that was
primarily rural. The forms and the medium – Adobe – that
he chose to express them in were predominantly of a
village architecture. Therein lay the second shortcoming.
This vocabulary, being rural in character, has limited
applicability in confronting the challenge of large-scale
urbanization in the developing world generally, where high
land values and massive urban densities prevail. There is a
need to pursue a new paradigm for the aesthetic form of
our sprawling urban metropolises, one that can cope with
the standard office building, the dense vehicular traffic,
and contemporary technology. To answer these questions

3
See for example Laila Ali Ibrahim, “Up-to date Concepts of the
Traditional Cairene Living Units” in Ekistics, vol. 48 No. 287, 1981,
and Andre Raymond, “The Residential Districts of Cairo during
the Ottoman Period” in Ismail Serageldin and Samir el-Sadek (eds.)
The Arab City: Its Character and Islamic Cultural Heritage, Arab Urban
Development Institute, Riyadh and Washington, D.C., 1982.

20
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

Fathy’s work provides few clues, although his message of

humanism and individuality remains important.
Hassan Fathy’s pursuit of an authentic cultural
expression and a low-cost medium of building pushed
him to experiment very successfully with vernacular
architectural techniques, indigenous materials and forms
of guided self-help. Having achieved great success in these
areas he encouraged, and rightly so, young architects to
look at and recognize that important wealth of experience
and expertise that lay at their doorsteps, rather than
always seek answers amongst the imports. But at the same
time, this intensive pursuit kept him from extensively
experimenting with the new materials of the 20th century.
This, to my mind, is the third major shortcoming. In the
hands of a master such as himself, with his assured use of
volumes and forms, his understanding of a cultural identity
whose structures, symbols, and instruments he had so
thoroughly internalized, such materials would probably
have produced a new set of expressions using 20th century
methods and techniques. Perhaps that was not possible,
for there is only so much that one can do in a lifetime. It
is thus perhaps unfair to ask of one who has already given
so much to the architecture of his country, his region and
even of the world, why he has not given even more.

21
 Ismail Serageldin

But it is nevertheless important to highlight these

points if one is to try to draw lessons from Fathy’s
work, to understand the limits of extending them to
the problems of a contemporary urban metropolis. It is
important to highlight these points to those who have
claimed for Fathy’s architectural vocabulary a universality
of application that it does not possess, and that he, the
most dedicated of individualists, who vehemently eschewed
“cookbook recipes” and always studied every new problem
afresh, would be the first to recognize.

The Built Form

The seductive simplicity so characteristic of Fathy’s
work is misleading. He was an accomplished architectural
craftsman with an artistic eye for form, balance and
harmony. The learned casualness of his layouts and the
almost austere simplicity of his facades owe much more
to his creative genius than to the vernacular “architecture
without architects” that inspired him.
Through the years, he had worked and reworked some
of the key elements of the architectural vocabulary in an
unrelenting search for “truth” and “oneness” as he saw
them. It is wrong to imagine this visual repetition as an

22
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

absence of imagination. Rather it is the same perfectionism

which is found in Goethe reworking the same manuscript
for forty years, or in Ingres and the late Picasso who
reworked many variations on the same theme - some of
which appeared to be almost copies of the first work.
Discriminating critics have recognized some of these
themes, as Renata Hood and Darl Rastorfer said of Fathy
when he received the Chairman’s Award in the first cycle
of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture:
“The architect accepted not only the forms of this
building tradition but the entire constructional system
and its constraints. By working within it, he elaborated
its spatial and structural aspects. What evolved from a
close observation, filtered through the architect’s superb
aesthetic sense, was a distinct, clearly ordered universe of
architectural hierarchies based on the juxtaposition and
arrangements of the following elements: the square domed
unit, the rectangular vaulted unit, the semi-domed alcove,
the breezeway/loggia, the courtyard. The urban forms of
Cairo, which he so lovingly collected and to which he
referred in his sketches and studies, served to enrich this

23
 Ismail Serageldin

architectural universe and provided models for later larger-

scale projects”4 .
By accepting the austere limits of both indigenous
materials and construction systems, Fathy’s work could
not rely on color or surface texture for effect, except to
the extent that his carefully crafted brick facade variations
could be termed textural variations. This imposed a greater
importance on volume, forms and fenestration to achieve
the overall aesthetic effect. This self-imposed limitation,
however, was handled with such artistry that one does
not feel that the imagery of the end product is in any
way impaired. In fact, it is as if the quasi-monochromatic
treatment of exteriors and interiors was a conscious choice
to blend better with the surroundings and to heighten
the sense of overall harmony that colors, or contrasting
materials, would have ever so subtly disturbed.
It is an evolving polishing and glazing of the work of
art, drawing ever more deeply from the same well. There
is a strengthening of a set of symbols that are gradually
turned into signals, making the image sharper and the
message clearer. He succeeded to such a degree that his

4
Renata Holod with Darl Rastorfer (eds.), Architecture and Community:
Building in the Islamic World Today. The Aga Khan Award for
Architecture, published by Aperture, N.Y., 1983.

24
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

message has been caricatured by insensitive critics as

quaint rustic scenes; domes, vaults and arches; courtyards;
mudbrick! That is the same nonsensical oversimplification
as saying that Mies van der Rohe’s contribution is nothing
more than a glass-encased steel box!
In fact, by his later years, Fathy had elaborated a number
of aesthetic standards establishing geometric proportions
for the elements of his architectural vocabulary that were
very carefully crafted but not as restrictive as the standards
of the classic orders. On the other hand, some of Fathy’s
pursuits of a metaphysical symbolism in architectural
design are really marginal to an appreciation of his work.
In his own hands they may have helped, but in the hands
of some of his disciples, this aspect has been turned into a
veritable esoteric numerology.

The Buildings
But architecture has to be experienced. In the absence
of an actual visit, pictures are worth a thousand words,
especially in the case of Hassan Fathy, where many
of his buildings have been so neglected that they are
unrecognizable. So let me show you a few pictures of some
of the buildings of this great artist.

25
 Ismail Serageldin

Let’s look at the simplicity of an early residence, the

Hamed Said House, uses the basic Fathy motifs that we
came to know and appreciate. These same motifs are also
deployed in the larger and later Casaroni House … They
also reappear with considerably more sophistication and
complexity in the Sami Akil house. The variations on the
vertical and the horizontal are like musical variations on a
basic theme, they retain the overall character, the signature
of the artist.
The variations have been successfully adapted to the
needs of different kinds of building from a small ceramics
factory … to a small school … and these are the distinctive
stylistic features of the built form in Gourna as well.
But allow me to show you my favorite: the little
mosque that he built in Gourna. Here you can see the
enormous ability of the artist at work. The simple serene
restful façade, remarkably well balanced, but actually
innovating in form as well as function. No other mosque
at that time had such a minaret with an ascending staircase
in this fashion.
The dome is simple, yet exquisitely balanced to cover
the space underneath it and to bring in enough light.

26
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

The interplay of light and darkness provides echoes

of shade from the harsh midday sun and openness to the
soft afterglow of the late afternoon light of the setting sun.
The cool interior is peaceful and invites meditation and
spirituality. For the architect or the architectural critic
there is much in this subtlety that invites reflection and
repays attention.
On the outside, Fathy makes an ally of the harsh sun.
He creates a pergola that casts these stark lines etched in
shadow against the blank wall. In so doing, he evokes the
classic Ablaq stonework of many great Islamic structures
where alternating rows of dark and light masonry would
create this series of horizontal lines on the monumental
facade. Fathy creates a muted echo, appropriate for a small
peaceful rural mosque.
Few in Egypt at that time followed that path. Few had
the capacity to do so. A rare and worthy exception was
the great Ramses Wissa Wassef, a friend and occasional
collaborator of Hassan Fathy who created his own
masterpiece in Harraniyya, a village whose plan Fathy had
designed. There Ramses Wissa Wassef created an amazing
community of young artists from poor rural backgrounds
that he brought under his wing, and whose talents in
pottery and weaving he nurtured. It blossomed into a

27
 Ismail Serageldin

world famous location. And in that location where his

own house was found we find the mastery of another great
artist: witness the rhythmic elegance of this facade. Look at
the spaces he created. And here in counterpoint to Fathy’s
Gourna Mosque I would like to show you Wissa Wassef ’s
incredible museum for the sculptures of Habib Gorgi.
Notice the studied casualness with which he angled
the interior of the plan from the exterior rectangle of the
building, thereby creating an amazing sequence of totally
different spaces, each suitable for particular presentation.
Notice how he used the harsh midday sun of Egypt to
introduce lighting into dark corridors or even to light the
sculptures in the alcoves as if with spot lights … but they
are spotlights created by natural light.
I chaired the second Aga Khan Award Jury in 1983
which gave that building a prize. Regretfully, it was only
to be posthumous, as Wissa Wassef did not live as long as
his friend Hassan Fathy and it was his widow and his sister
who received the honor in his name.
But returning to Hassan Fathy, what is the legacy of
that great architect? His buildings are few and scattered,
and his image in the minds of younger generations that
have not known him or his works is dimmed by a new wave
of technological advance and environmental concerns.

28
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

The Hassan Fathy Award for

Architecture
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), the New Library of
Alexandria, decided a number of years ago that to be faithful
to its mission, it should make a special effort on behalf of
Architecture. A number of activities were launched, but
one that immediately gained a special place in the hearts of
both the management of the institution, the students and
practitioners of architecture, and the public at large, was
the idea to honor the name of the great Egyptian Architect
Hassan Fathy. An annual Award (medal) in his name was
welcomed by all.
However, a number of points are pertinent to underline
about this Award. Hassan Fathy was not only a brilliant
architect in terms of his mastery of form, space, and
building techniques, but he also was a person of principle,
who defended the ideas of an architecture of humanism at
a time when the modernist wave of the 20th century was
deifying the machine. Fathy would wage his sometimes
lonely fight for decades, and it was only very late in his life
that he received the recognition that was his due.
But beyond his convictions and his ideas, Fathy was
an artist of great talent whose architectural creations
enchanted everyone by their seductive simplicity of form,

29
 Ismail Serageldin

their learned casualness of layout and interplay of light and

shadow, solids and voids, in always brilliant harmonies.
Some have mistakenly reduced the legacy of his ideas to
the vocabulary of domed structures and walled courtyards
that were his characteristic of many of the structures that
he built, to a simplistic message about environment and
local materials, or to an excessive attachment to the folk
architecture of parts of Egypt.
It is not the intention of this prize to reassert a style
that characterized particular buildings that Hassan Fathy
produced 70–80 years ago, in totally different socio-economic
and technological conditions. This prize is dedicated
to those committed to an architecture of humanity, to
caring designs that nurture the well-being of people and
community, to those who recognize that we must live in
harmony with our environment and to those who can see
beauty in simplicity and not just in lavish expense and excess.
To those who struggle with the challenges of societies today,
from over-populated slums to vast, ugly but necessary
infrastructure, to the need to recapture beauty and to
those who see architecture as serving the poor and the
marginalized as much we serve the rich and the affluent.
The Award also seeks to recognize those who toil to preserve
the legacy of the past as much as those who dream to create

30
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

the icons of the future. It must pay particular attention to

youth. As a result, there is an enormous range of projects
that were selected for recognition by the Award. (start of
Video Mosaic of winners of the medal fits here).
Because the Award seeks to recognize different parts
of the vast canvas on which Hassan Fathy worked, from
architectural writing and journals to interior design and
decoration, from teaching and art to building methods
and techniques, each year a steering committee organizes
our efforts around a different theme or themes.
By the diversity of these themes, the greatness of the
legacy of Fathy is underlined (end of Mosaic Video about
here). Long may it endure to inspire successive generations
of young Egyptian architects to stand on principle and
to build the architecture that suits their time, but with a
firm commitment to humanism. That is how we hope the
legacy of Hassan Fathy will be truly kept alive.

31
 Ismail Serageldin

A Summation
So how could we sum up the man and his legacy?
In the final analysis, Hassan Fathy’s contribution to
Egyptian architecture has been his image-making faculty,
his ability to give body and form to a concept that was
always recognized but that could not be easily seen,
remaining formless and invisible simply by virtue of being
all around us in the environment in which we live. It was his
ability to charge with symbolism, and to suggest and evoke
a reality emanating from the ontological substance of an
Egyptian society that traces its roots from the mists of time
through its most recent manifestation of a predominantly
Islamic culture. This was the supreme creation of an artist,
for art is an act of bringing truth into being. In effect,
Hassan Fathy has shown us an Egypt which all of us knew
was there.
He integrated the information which was available
to all but heightened it by his sensitivity and his ability
to discover something that otherwise would escape
our attention. For Hassan Fathy picked from the world
of Egypt many of the forms that he ultimately used to
such good effect. But it was an integrating exercise. He
transported the skills of the masons from Upper Egypt
to the fertile lands of the Delta. He combined these

32
 Hassan Fathy: Egypt’s Visionary Architect

with his own vision and emotional understanding of the

myth of a bucolically pure, rural Islamic Egypt. Then the
sensibility of a wealthy patron or understanding client was
all that was needed to enable him to transform his vision
into the lyrical structures that have evoked such a strong
empathetic emotional response from all those who saw
them. He speaks with incredible immediacy and purity to
our understanding of such terms as serene, simple, calm,
balanced, peaceful, and above all; beautiful.
In the realm of ideas his emphasis on self-help, concern
for the poor, cultural authenticity and individualism are
now so widely accepted that it is difficult to remember the
revolutionary character of his message when he enunciated
it so long ago. It is an impressive legacy. It is a great privilege
to have known him personally and to have been inspired
by his voice and his presence. It is a great challenge to try
to live up to the lofty standards he has set for all of us.

Thank you.

33
 REFERENCES

1. Hassan Fathy, Gourna: A Tale of Two Villages, Limited edition issued

by the Ministry of Culture of Egypt, Cairo – January 1, 1969.
2. Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poor, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1973.
3. See for example Laila Ali Ibrahim, “Up-to date Concepts of the
Traditional Cairene Living Units” in Ekistics, vol. 48 No. 287,
March-April, 1981,pp. 96-100, and Andre Raymond, “The
Residential Districts of Cairo during the Ottoman Period” in
Ismail Serageldin and Samir el-Sadek (eds.) The Arab City: Its
Character and Islamic Cultural Heritage, Arab Urban Development
Institute, Riyadh and Washington, D.C., 1982, pp. 100-110.
4. Renata Holod with Darl Rastorfer (eds.), Architecture and
Community: Building in the Islamic World Today. The Aga Khan
Award for Architecture, published by Aperture, N.Y., 1983 p. 240.
 Ismail Serageldin, Director, Library
of Alexandria, also chairs the Boards of
Directors for each of the BA’s affiliated
research institutes and museums. He serves
as Chair and Member of a number of
advisory committees for academic, research,
scientific and international institutions. He
has held many international positions including as Vice
President of the World Bank (1993–2000).
Dr. Serageldin has received many awards including: First
recipient of Grameen Foundation (USA) Award for
a lifetime commitment to combating poverty, (1999);
Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters awarded
by the government of France (2003); Pablo Neruda
Medal of Honor, awarded by the Government of Chile
(2004); The Bajaj Award for promoting Ghandian
values outside India (2006); Order of the Rising
Sun – Gold and Silver Star awarded by the Emperor of
Japan (2008); Champion of Youth Award by the World
Youth Congress, Quebec (2008); Knight of the French
Legion of Honor awarded by the President of France
(2008); The Swaminathan Award for Environmental
 Protection (Chennai, India, 2010); Millennium Excellence
Award for Lifetime Africa Achievement Prize, by the
Excellence Awards Foundation, Ghana (2010); The Public
Welfare Medal, by the National Academy of Sciences,
Washington DC (2011); Commander of the Order of Arts
& Letters awarded by the government of France (2011).
He has lectured widely all over the world including delivering
the Mandela Lecture (Johannesberg, 2011), the Nexus
Lecture (Netherlands, 2011), the Keynote Address to the First
International Summit of the Book (Washington DC, 2012).
He was distinguished professor at Wageningen University
and at the College de France.
He has published over 60 books and monographs and over
200 papers on a variety of topics including biotechnology,
rural development, sustainability, and the value of science
to society. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in
engineering from Cairo University and Master’s degree
and a PhD from Harvard University and has received over
30 honorary doctorates.

View publication stats