Hassan Fathy’s New Gourna Village

When it comes to midcentury modern architects, names like Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe immediately come to mind. But the one that is arguably the most relevant today, on this climate-challenged planet of ours, is Egyptian visionary Hassan Fathy, an early pioneer in sustainable design. Often credited with modernizing Arabic vernacular architecture, rather than imposing Western ideas and materials on the world, Fathy rejected concrete and elevated and evolved mud brick construction, and encouraged using traditional circulation techniques rather than air conditioning. "Fathy was not just a modern architect, he was a philosopher and pioneer of sustainable development," says Fekri Hassan, an Egyptian professor of archaeology. In Fathy’s lifetime—he died in 1989—he completed projects in places as far flung as Mallorca and New Mexico, but it was in New Gourna, a village in Luxor built in the mid-1940s (current population: 1,800) to resettle those living near ancient tombs and selling antiquities, that he was able to holistically articulate his utopian ideas. For various reasons, much of the residential housing over the years was destroyed or abandoned, but in 2019 UNESCO teamed up with the Cairo-based non-profit Environmental Quality International, experts in traditional mud architecture, to renovate the town’s mosque, theater, and Khan, a crafts training center. The three buildings were completed in 2022 and have become an inspiring new stop in Luxor for travelers interested in design and sustainability, but the work to restore more spaces as Fathy intended is ongoing. Hassan now operates tours through New Gourna’s Center for Sustainable Architecture.

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