The poor engineer Hassan Fathy pioneered construction technology in Egypt
The poor engineer Hassan Fathy pioneered construction technology in Egypt,
Hassan Fathy was a well-known Egyptian architect who pioneered technology suitable for building in Egypt.
Birth and upbringing:
Hassan Fathi was born to an Egyptian father and mother,
in the city of Alexandria and studied architecture at King Fouad University,
from which he graduated in 1926.
Hassan Fathy was influenced by Upper Egypt and simple rural architecture in his architectural designs.
He designed a southern-style villa for his wife on the Nile shore.
The beginning of the career of Hassan Fathi
Hassan Fathy was a professor, world-class polyglot engineer, amateur musician, playwright, and inventor.
He began teaching at the College of Fine Arts in 1930 and designed the first adobe buildings in the late 1930s.
International critics praised the engineer, Hassan Fathy,
after designing and building the village of Al-Qurna, located on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor, between 1945-1948.
The poor engineer Hassan Fathy pioneered construction technology in Egypt
The purpose of building this village was to settle the residents of the village,
which is located in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens.
His incredible work in the village of New Gourna is characterized by the combination of sustainability and contemporary collective design.
Fathy’s projects have been described as postmodern vernacular,
and he was recently discovered as a teacher who proposed a different idea of modernity.
His new project Baris was built in central Egypt to host 250 families of farmers after a new discovery of a large water well.
This well can irrigate thousands of hectares of previously arid land.
Hassan Fathy’s work can be understood as an ongoing search to identify an appropriate structure in relation to the local context,
capable of expressing his Arabism.
Hassan Fathy adheres to the Egyptian character in his architectural designs,
as his works constitute opposition to foreign cultural domination and the use of Western architectural models in the Arab region.
The trend at the time was the lack of a local style, the homes of the rich and the poor were without character.
Describing this situation, Fathi wrote: “The signature is missing, the houses are without an Egyptian dialect.
The poor engineer Hassan Fathy pioneered construction technology in Egypt
The tradition has been lost and we are cut off from our past since Muhammad Ali cut the throat of another Mamluk.”
Fathy was in contact with representatives of modern Egyptian art while studying and then teaching in Cairo in the 1920s and 1930s.
During this period, Egypt was still under colonial rule, and Egyptian writers,
painters, and sculptors began to rediscover their Egyptian identity.
Their motivation was similar to Fathy’s as he struggled to find a structure capable of expressing a true Egyptian and Arab identity.
In the fifties of Omar Fathi, which was considered the most fruitful period in his entire career,
after he came into contact with the urban ideas of the modern movement and assumed a theoretical organization of his thinking.
Hassan Fathy’s main architectural work
- Hamed Said House, El-Marg, Cairo, 1942
- New Qurna Village, Luxor, 1945-1948
- The ceramics factory in the village of Grajos, Qena, 1950
- Fares School, Fares, 1956
- New Paris Village, Kharga Oasis, 1965-1967
- Fathi House in Sidi Kerir, 1971
- Aqil Sami’s house, Dahshur, 1979
- Dar al-Islam, New Mexico, 1980
- Andreoli Residence, Fayoum, 1984
The most important architectural awards that Hassan Fathi received
- Aga Khan Architecture 1980
- Balzan Prize 1980
- Right to Live Award 1980
- UIA 1984 Gold Medal
