Environment: Architect for the Poor

Hassan Fathy is an Egyptian architect whose life was completely changed in one moment of revelation. It happened when he visited the unspoiled Nubian village of Gharb Aswan on the Upper Nile. What he saw there, he later wrote, was “a way of building that was a natural growth in the landscape, as much a part of it as the palm tree.” Sight led to insight. Fathy recognized that traditional architecture, unlike modern industrial architecture, is compatible with “God’s environment” of nature, climate and materials. He never looked back.

That was in 1941, and Fathy (pronounced Fott-hee), at 74, has only recently become a major influence on the world of architecture. Building experts from England, France, Pakistan and the United Nations now come to Cairo to consult him. In the U.S., a show of his works will soon begin a 20-city tour. Fathy’s newfound fame results from his success in a field where everybody else has failed: public housing.

Terrible Responsibility. To date, nobody has been able to build public housing for less than $1,200 per unit —more than most developing nations can afford. As Fathy has proved by rebuilding the village of Gourna in Upper Egypt and the town of Paris in the nation’s western desert, he can bring the cost down to $500 per unit, including a kitchen and a latrine. He designs housing so that peasants can build it much as their fathers did in the past. No structural steel, concrete or wood is needed, just mud bricks and the native technique that Fathy learned in Nubia. As a result, he says, he has “a billion clients” —the world’s poor.

Fathy, the son of an Alexandria landowner, first became interested in these clients in 1926 when his job with a government agency took him near a family property where peasants lived in stench, filth and misery. “Because the place was owned by my father, I suddenly felt terribly responsible for it all,” he says. “I decided I must do something.” Using the architectural training he received at Cairo’s Higher School of Engineering, he decided to design decent dwelling for peasants, using locally available bricks made of mud and straw.

“The walls were no problem, but the roof defeated me,” Fathy recalls. “If I used structural materials, the house became too expensive for the peasants. If I tried to build a vaulted roof using only mud bricks, the whole thing collapsed.” The problem was that a vault, like any arch, has structural strength only when it is complete, and the peasants lacked wood to support the arch while it was being built. Still, Fathy remembered that the ancient Egyptians had somehow built sturdy houses of the same material. But, he says, “I feared that the secret had been lost.”

It was in Nubia that Fathy rediscovered the technique. Native brick masons could create a clean vault of bricks by first building the back wall of the house higher than the intended roof level. Then they built the arched roof, inclining it slightly against the wall, which provided support until the arch was completed. The roofs would not fall in earthquakes, and the technique was so simple that it could be used anywhere in the world.

By 1942, Fathy had built two handsome prototype houses that proved to him that mud was the right material for Egypt—or any other arid North African or Middle Eastern nation. The mud bricks last virtually forever, provided that they do not get wet through. Moreover, the houses kept temperature and humidity within the comfort zone throughout the searing days and cool nights. In modern, prefabricated concrete houses, by contrast, the temperature varies by as much as 68° F.

Egyptian authorities were not impressed; they regarded the building of mud houses as a backward step, especially because Fathy’s housing for peasants was built to last even after the nation modernized. The building industry scorned the idea of native architecture because it offered few new jobs and only a small market for materials. While Fathy’s philosophy was largely ignored, other architects in the region were becoming increasingly enthralled by the efficient Western ways of building. As a result, from Baghdad to Benghazi, look-alike blocks of dreary high-rise buildings rose along drab, dusty boulevards.

Blazing Sun. Fathy was forced merely to preach what he longed to practice. As a teacher at Cairo’s fine arts school, he told young architects that they should perceive the reason behind indigenous forms. Old Islamic houses have filigreed windows and central courts, for example, to admit light without glare, coolness without air conditioning. The same principles could easily be incorporated even into high-rise buildings.

Similarly, Fathy taught that the layouts of old Arab towns, rabbit warrens of narrow, tortuous streets, have a powerful rationale. “In desert climates,” he explains, “there is always a drop in temperature at night so that a mass of cold air is ‘stored’ near the ground. In a typical Arab town, the coolness lingers through most of the day. But if you break open the old cities and build broad, straight boulevards, the wind blows the coolness away, and you’re left at the mercy of the blazing sun.”

Such precepts first won wide recognition only last year, after Fathy lectured at the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago and had his book, Architecture for the Poor, published in the U.S. and France. International honors—and actual projects—followed. Fathy senses in the surge of interest in his ideas a return to the logic of traditional architecture. “To me,” he says, “it’s a sin to put a Swiss chalet beside palm groves.” Or a bleak glass and steel tower in a sun-scorched Moslem nation.