Hassan Fathy (1900‐1989) has gained an internationally growing reputation as an architect, teacher and writer. James Steele’s An Architecture for the People: The Complete Works of Hassan Fathy is the first critical account of Fathy’s entire output, drawing on personal interviews, previously undocumented projects, notebooks and journals. With 213 illustrations, 100 in colour, this is a splendid account of an architect whose ideas prefigured our current ethos of sustainability and community. Fathy believed that architecture should reflect the personal habits and traditions of a community rather than reforming or eradicating them. It was Fathy’s interest in indigenous building materials that made him internationally famous, in particular his revival of ancient mud‐brick building techniques.
Fathy’s preoccupation with the rural poor and use of vernacular building traditions was expressed in a series of gouaches and coloured pencil drawings and a number of individual houses; for example, Hamid Said House (1945) and Stopplaere House (1952). Villas are generally built around a courtyard and constructed with mud blocks or brick in vaulted or domed forms. Fathy’s best known project is the village of New Gourna (1948), near Luxor, (later made famous through his book Architecture for the Poor, 1973), to which an entire section of this book is devoted. New Gourna Village was commissioned by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities to solve the problem of tomb‐robbing in the Valley of the Kings, Queens and Nobles. Land was purchased near the Nile as the site for the new village intended to house 7,000 Gournii. Steele outlines in detail how Fathy devised a village plan based on tribal neighbourhoods and aimed to provide the inhabitants with an entirely new economy, based on agriculture and sales of traditional crafts to tourists, rather than illicit archaeology. Although only about a quarter of the scheme was executed, New Gourna remains a powerful influence as an architectural‐model for rural areas, emulated by architects around the world, from Morocco to New Mexico.
This book follows a roughly chronological approach to Fathy’s work, with an introduction setting him in the context of the colonial occupation of Egypt and a conclusion reviewing Fathy’s enduring influence and growing importance today. A chronology at the end of the book gives details of all Fathy’s known projects, including those which were never constructed or not known to have been. This is a definitive account of Fathy’s life and work which brings together the most recent research. As architects and planners have to pay greater account to energy conservation, sustainability and responsibility in their use of natural resources, Fathy’s influence is likely to grow and representation of his work in library collections is essential.
