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Kathleen O’Donnell
Modern Theory - Draft
27 April 2017
Architecture of the Poor
A poor man’s Architect – Hassan Fathy
INTRODUCTION
Across the world, apparent in all nations, the poor are underserved. This not only effects
the stomachs, wallets, and education of millions, but in the apparent architecture as well. A
particularly notable individual, Hassan Fathy, analyzed this condition and need for change
throughout his career. His work stands in several countries and serves as a model for thoughtful,
sustainable, and economical design. He design for the peoples culture, function, and inherent
nature.
“If possible, I want to bridge the gulf that separates folk architecture from
architect's architecture. I always wanted to provide some solid and visible link between
these two architectures in the shape of features, common to both, in which the people
could find a familiar point of reference from which to enlarge their understanding of the
new, and which the architect could use to test the truth of his work in relation to the
people and the place.” (# Fathy)
This being noted, what is the radius of relatable people and places from the ones he designed for?
Can an Egyptian template for the Nubian poor be shipped across seas and decades? Fathy’s
bridge might just exceed the gulf he intended, accommodating the poor of today.
BODY
I. Hassan Fathy’s work and legacy
Growing from his roots deep within Egypt, Fathy worked as an architect in his own
private practice and stood as the Head of Architecture at the University of Cairo. He designed
more than 160 building projects consisting of residences, master planning, mosques, schools,
theatres and markets. In his time as a architect, he saw the dismay of Egypt’s architecture and its
lack of relative vernacular. Civic buildings were designed for the wealthy in a grandiose and
lavish style. But this language was not apparent in the local villages. The style of the buildings
remaining; markets, residences, mosques, was abandoned and ignored. Egypt’s building industry
was content perpetuating this ancient style for economic gain. Feeling a loss within the culture,
he began to develop a vernacular for the country’s poor. It was his belief that the poor deserved
the same accommodations provided within the rich’s architecture. Every man’s dwelling would
respect individuality, tradition, and comfort.
he championed that the poor deserved as much as the rich of decent accommodation that respect
individuality, and scorned mechanical construction based on money, industry, greed, and snobbery
that homogenizing people of different needs and traditions into moulded cells.
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He elaborates this apparent need in his book Architecture for the Poor stating, “They
needed decent houses, but houses are expensive. In large towns capitalists are attracted
by the returns from investment in housing, and public bodies…frequently provide extensive
accommodation for the citizens, but neither capitalists nor the state seem willing to
undertake the provision of peasant houses…” (# Fathy)
A. Review and assessment of Architecture for the Poor
a. Design principles
i. Fathy’s work stems from six major principles these being; belief in
primacy human values, designing in a universal approach, using
appropriate technology, using socially oriented construction
techniques, prioritizing tradition, and re-establishing national cultural
pride.
b. Design of public buildings
c. Design of domestic buildings
i. “For house design in the Middle East, the introverted plan wherein
family life looked into the courtyard was changed to a plan with family
life looking out upon the street. The cool, clean air, the serenity and
reverence of the courtyard were shed, and the street was embraced
with its heat, dust, and noise. Also, the qa'a [a central, high-ceilinged
upper-story room for receiving guests, constructed so as to provide
natural light and ensure ventilation] was supplanted by the ordinary
salon, and all such delights as the fountain, the salsabil [a fountain or a
basin of still water designed to increase air humidity] and the malk-haf
[wind catch] were discarded in the name of progress and modernity.”
(Fathy)
ii.
B. Outcomes and work that was influenced due to his findings.
II. Hassan Fathy’s success / failures.
A. Fathy’s asethic design approach
a. Adobe
i. adobe became Fathy's technological passion, and he remained loyal
to it not only because of its durability over millennia—some adobe
structures in Egypt are more than 3000 years old—but also because
of its thermal properties: In many desert climates it maintains
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comfortable temperatures within a range of three to four degrees
centigrade (5-7°F) over a 24-hour cycle. Furthermore, it is plentiful:
Approximately one-third of the world's people already live in houses
made of earth. Finally, the flexibility of a material for which right
angles and straight lines are not always essential nourishes
architectural creativity. Under Fathy's control, adobe led to simple,
captivating beauty.
ii.
b. Nubian vault
i. In 1941, he discovered that the masons of the Nubian village Abu al
Riche built vaults with mud bricks without centring using a very
ancient technique which had been used for thousands of years to build
houses, graves and royal palaces. He started to use this technique in his
project for the Rural Hospital
c. Designing for the public realm
i. Fathy believed in the importance of human values, in the use of
technology suitable to time and place [that is climate and local
economies], in the need for socially-oriented cooperative construction
techniques. He assigned an essential role to tradition and hence to the
re-establishment of a national cultural pride, a goal to attain by means
of the act of building“If you were given a million pounds, what would
you do with them? A question they were always asking us when we
were young, one that would start our imagination roaming and set us
daydreaming. I had two possible answers: one, to buy a yacht, hire an
orchestra, and sail round the world with my friends listening to Bach,
Schumann, and Brahms; the other, to build a village where the
fellaheen would follow the way of life that I would like them to.”
ii.
B. Fathy’s climatic considerations
Architectural form should consider the forces in nature of wind, rain, even how an
earthquake shaking it would make it fall in a pattern that follows the geological formation of
a mountain,” (# Fathy)
Each zone has a unique climate that makes one type of construction very suitable to it
while another creates serious problems of air conditioning. The desert areas of the
Middle East, North Africa and some coastal areas of the Mediterranean present a
challenge to architects when designing buildings. The low humidity of the air and
the high solar radiation make the temperature of the air reach extremely high limits
during the day (with temperatures higher than 50ºC) and very low at night, sometimes
dropping from 0ºC.
Hassan Fathy was a construction expert for desert climates, and is now considered the
forerunner of bioclimatic architecture in the desert . Their buildings do not have
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refrigeration equipment and, however, they have a thermal behavior much superior to
the buildings that are currently built in Egypt.
a. Dense brick walls for passive cooling
i. In traditional desert architecture from the Maghrib to Central Asia, the
most efficient air conditioner available is the inner courtyard. It traps
cool night air and releases it gradually during the day to adjoining
rooms through built-in claustra, an effect that complements the
thermal properties of mud brick. Trees, shrubs and other plantings,
both in the courtyard and, to the extent possible, immediately outside
the house, help clean the air and afford a measure of protection from
the dust-laden desert winds—or the fumes of trafficked streets. In
almost all of Fathy's designs, the courtyard was literally a central
feature. He experimented almost endlessly with its variations, yet he
never lost sight of its thermal as well as its social and esthetic
functions. To Fathy, the development of the courtyard house was
even a metaphysical response by desert-dwellers to their
surroundings:
b. Lattice Screening
i. The mashrabiyyah is an artful lattice of lathe-turned dowels that
intersect at carved wooden spheres (or, on occasion, other shapes). It
is used as a window covering from Morocco to Pakistan (see Aramco
World, July/August 1974, July/August 1993). The mashrabiyyah
allows air to circulate through the house while maintaining privacy for
its occupants, and in regions of intense sunlight it is the most effective
of window shades because the curved, often polished surfaces do not
block light: Rather, they diffuse it into the interior with the splendid
subtlety of radial reflection. Over the centuries, building mashrabiyyah
became a highly developed craft, as woodworkers produced panels
several meters high that nonetheless seem as delicate as lace. Fathy
followed the traditional form of the mashrabiyyah, in which the
apertures at eye level are narrow, to reduce glare, and the ones
higher up, where sightlines do not compromise privacy, are larger. In
colonial times the mashrabiyyah lost favor, but now—thanks in part to
the efforts of Fathy—it is enjoying a revival, and not only in the Middle
East. Antoine Predock, the New Mexico architect, has adapted it into
his work; in Paris, Jean Nouvel transformed the idea of mashrabiyyah
into steel for the Institut du Monde Arabe's electrically operated
façade.
ii. The system consisted of creating openings in the cover facing
the direction of the predominant air currents and thus forcing
the passage of the cross-ventilationflow through a zone of water
so that it was cooled down by evaporation
c. Use of windcatchers / “Malqaf”
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i. The malqaf, or windcatch, originally developed in Persia, is another
millennia-old popular cooling device that fell into disuse in the Middle
East when European housing design gained popularity. Fathy's most
famous use of the malqaf was in Bariz, the second entire town he
designed. The malqaf is a shaft rising above a building, open to face
the prevailing wind. Functioning as the opposite of a chimney, it
catches and channels the wind down into the cool, lower reaches of
the interior, often across a pool of water and occasionally also over
wet fabrics or screens, both of which further decrease the air
temperature by evaporation. When clients could afford it, Fathy often
made such water an esthetic element by installing fountains centered
in an octagonal configuration, as in classical Arab houses, that often
echoed the eight-sided support of a dome overhead.
C. Fathy’s economic considerations
a.
D. Preserving and Fostering of traditions and culture
a. The Egyptian architect was intellectually stimulated by the art of the
pharaonic period and was directly influenced by vernacular architecture. He
studied the buildings of the old city of Cairo and Nubia in order to create a
national architectural language based on the employment of traditional
elements and building techniques. His projects are based on the use of a
narrow vocabulary made of morphological and structural elements taken from
tradition: parabolic arches, square spaces covered with domes, rectangular
rooms or narrow spaces with vaults, courts, balconies wind towers Both for
the value he attributed to manual work and for economical and ideological
reasons, he resorts, for the realization of his projects, to traditional techniques
that extremely reduce the use of machinery and exploit what is available in a
cheap way: earth, straw, man’s labour, stones. The brick is in fact the only
material used in his works. The supporting walls are made either of sun dried
bricks made of mud and reinforced with straw (adobe) or of local stones or
fired bricks
b.
III. Applying Hassan Fathy’s techniques today
A. Are these techniques only applicable to hot climates?
B. Can these principles be abstracted and reapplied per community and condition?
C. Discussion on overall success/ failure/ mixed results.
CONCLUSION
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Hasson Fathy pioneered technology and construction methods to design for an underserved
community that was ultimately successful and transferable.
A. Fathy’s architectural approach addressed constructability, practicality, and its people.
a. “ it is the responsibility of the modern architect to find a remedy. He must
renew architecture from the moment when it was abandoned; and he must try
to bridge the existing gap in its development by analyzing the elements of
change, applying modern techniques to modify the valid methods established
by our ancestors, and then developing new solutions that satisfy modern
needs.” (# Fathy)
b.
B. His ideas helped revolutionized design considerations for all user groups.
C. This was successful.
II. Close With Impact
A. Confirmation of success or failure in research findings.
B. Why or why not this was successful, how it can be used.
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WORK CITED
Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976).
Architecture and Environment', Arid Land Newsletter, 36
(1994) http://ag.arizona.edu/OALS/ALN/aln36/Fathy.html
Bauer, Catherine. “The Social Front of Modern Architecture in the 1930s.” The Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1965)
Fathy, Hassan. Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976.
Ghirardo, Diane. Architecture After Modernism. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996.
Rudofsky, Bernard. Architecture Without Architects. New York: Modern Museum of Art, 1964.
Hassan Fathy, Alberto Ferlenga and Attilio Petruccioli, 'Hassan Fathy [What is a
city?].', Casabella, 62 (1998), 52-79.
Hassan Fathy, 'Beyond the Human Scale [Interview]', AAQ : Architectural Association
Quarterly, 6 (1974), 53-57
VISUAL AIDS
Photos of projects and architectural elements that illustrates his approach
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http://architectureandmorality.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/its-not-easy-being-green-is-it-just.html
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http://eudomus.com/arquitectura-bioclimatica-desierto-hassan-fathy/
http://www.earth-auroville.com/adobe_buildings_en.php
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