An Architecture for People: The Complete Works of Hassan Fathy

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Summary: desert architecture of Egypt
Review: A beautiful development from vernacular desert architecture, Hassan Fathy is an architect that developed the concepts and solutions of desert architecture to a new era using traditional materials coolers and shapes a natural advance from old Egyptian knowledge to modern and simple solutions for the villagers on the Nile, seeing his work is inspiring to reach far with the most simple and traditional forms

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Summary: Decent introduction to the man, his work
Review: This is a Thames and Hudson coffee table book: readable text, good photography, lucid groundplans, and the binding is strong. Hassan Fathy's most available major text is Architecture for the Poor (Univ. of Chicago Press). Here is an excerpt from a brief article in Al-Ahram Weekly (19-25 Dec 2002, Issue 617) written to coincide with a recent Fathy retrospective in Cairo:

"As American architect James Steele writes in his book An Architect for the People (1997), the standard work on Fathy, by "defining tradition as 'the social analogy of personal habit', Fathy intimated that it is the responsibility of each architect to develop a heightened awareness of such habits, and to incorporate them sympathetically into each design... [Fathy's] determined attempt to reawaken a sense of cultural pride among his countrymen, and to make them more aware of their rich architectural heritage," has led "many young people [to become] more informed about Islamic architecture in the mediaeval part of Cairo."

"This new awareness is no longer confined to Egypt alone, as Fathy's name has now become associated with the re-establishment of architectural tradition throughout the developing world," Steele writes. In addition, Fathy's early emphases on appropriate technologies, on local materials and construction techniques and on social co-operation chime with contemporary, environmentally conscious architecture, in which architects have tried to work with the environment instead of changing it, exploring the renewed use of traditional materials and techniques and having a more modest understanding of their social and cultural roles.

For Steele, "rather than believing that people could be behaviourally conditioned by architectural space, Fathy felt that human beings, nature and architecture should coexist in harmonious balance. For him, architecture was a communal art that should reflect the personal habits and traditions of a community rather than reforming or eradicating them. While he was certainly not opposed to innovation, he felt that technology should be subservient to social values, and appropriate to popular needs, ... [prefiguring] the current ethos of sustainability."