Imagining a Whole New Architecture:

"You must start right from the beginning, letting your
buildings grow from the daily lives of the people who will live in
them, shaping the houses to the measure of the people's songs,
weaving the patterns of a village as if on the village looms,
mindful of the trees and the crops that will grow there,
respectful to the skyline and humble before the seasons.
There must be neither faked tradition nor faked modernity,
but an architecture that will be the visible and permanent
expression of the character of a community. But this would
mean nothing less than a whole new architecture." Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poor(p.45)

Hassan Fathy was born in 1900 in Alexandria, Egypt to an Egyptian father and Turkish mother. Despite that he was raised in a middle class household, the community he focused much of his life on was the poor. This may have more to do with his father's background who was born poor but managed to establish himself as a landowner and farmer. Hassan Fathy himself benefitted from his middle class status and was schooled at British schools in Cairo as a youngster and went on to the University of Cairo as an adult. Ironically he started out there studying agriculture but had switched to architecture and completed his degree at the university in 1926.

His interests were wide and varied including music and literature and he is noted as saying that "Architecture is music frozen in place and music is architecture frozen in time". In addition to being considered an accomplished architect he was considered to be an accomplished violinist.* These early interests and influences gave him an admiration for Western cultures and traditions and his earliest projects leaned more towards classical Beaux-Arts style(with doric columns, etc.) and Modernist materials(concrete, steel, and glass). This can be seen in such projects as the Talka School, the Husni Omar Villa, and the Sada al-Bariya all of which were completed before 1930.

However this admiration for Western trends was uncomfortable and proved to be unsuited to his developing concepts on the need for an architecture for the people of his own country. Perhaps brought on by his studies on typologies of forms for the Islamic architecture of Cairo, by the late 30's his work began to reflect an interest in a more traditional Egyptian architecture. An exhibit in Mansuriya in 1937 displayed a series of unbuilt mud-brick projects done in watercolor(gouaches) and the beginnings of the Hassan Fathy that we are now familiar with. The paintings have an surreal quality that is only strengthened by the fact that he utilized an Ancient Egyptian technique of multiple perspectives within a single painting.