1 William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, [reprint of 3rd edition 1996], London: Phaido (...) 1The history of twentieth century architecture reveals a number of cases in which one designer almost completely dominates the narrative of a country’s architectural culture; Alvar Aalto in Finland or Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil immediately come to mind. Similarly, any survey book on twentieth century architecture reduces a discussion of the architectural production of Egypt to the work of one man: Hassan Fathy. In his book Modern Architecture Since 1900, William J.R. Curtis gives Fathy ample attention in the chapter entitled “Modernity, Tradition and Identity in the Developing World.” Curtis presents Fathy as one of those “Third World” architects who, as a critical response to industrialisation and its accompanying forms, turned to the “wisdom of [local] tradition” and developed an alternative to an imported architectural modernism by drawing on vernacular building practices and morphologies.1 In Fathy’s case, this resulted in a return to and the promotion of Nubian techniques of earth construction using mud-brick walls, and the use of key “traditional” spaces such as the square domed unit, the rectangular vaulted unit, the alcove covered with a half-dome and the courtyard. Best known—and widely discussed—in this respect is his project for the village of New Gourna, near Luxor, designed and built using local labour between 1946 and 1953 as part of a resettlement program aimed at relocating a peasant population living nearby.

2 Hassan Fathy, Gourna: A Tale of Two Villages, Cairo: Ministry of Culture and National Guidance, 19 (...) 3 Diane Ghirardo, Architecture after Modernism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996 (World of art), p. 1 (...) 4 James Steele, An Architecture for the People: The Complete Works of Hassan Fathy, London: Thames a (...) 5 Ahmad Hamid, Hassan Fathy and Continuity in Islamic Arts and Architecture: The Birth of a New Mode (...) 6 François Béguin, Arabisances: décor architectural et tracé urbain en Afrique du Nord, 1830-1950, P (...) 7 Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs, Be (...) 8 Zeynep Çelik, “Cultural Intersections: Re-visioning Architecture and the City in the Twentieth Cen (...) 9 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of (...) 10 Panayiota I. Pyla, “Hassan Fathy Revisited: Postwar Discourses on Science, Development, and Vernac (...) 2The work of Hassan Fathy gained international attention after the publication of his 1969 book Gourna: A Tale of Two Villages, translated into French the following year as Construire avec le peuple. Histoire d’un village d’Égypte: Gourna, and re-edited in 1973 as Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt.2 That Diane Ghirardo in her survey book Architecture after Modernism includes Fathy’s 1969 work among the four publications that signalled the “demise of the appeal of rationalist Modernism” in the 1960s accounts for Fathy’s influence and fame.3 By the late 1990s, Fathy’s reputation, which was also nurtured by his teaching and public lectures, had “grown to cult status,” as James Steele wrote in the first substantial monograph on the architect, published in 1997. Ambitiously titled An Architecture for the People: The Complete Works of Hassan Fathy,4 Steele’s monograph presents a broad and chronologically organised overview of the architect’s trajectory, from his early career (1928–1945) to the later work (until 1989), based on a wealth of material drawn from the architect’s personal archives and on interviews with Fathy and some of his clients, family members and collaborators. Since then, increased attention has been devoted to Fathy and his influence. One notable example is Hassan Fathy and Continuity in Islamic Arts and Architecture: The Birth of a New Modern, in which one of Fathy’s former collaborators, Ahmad Hamid, situates the work of the Egyptian master in a larger narrative on the nature of Islamic building culture and the origins of modern architecture.5 The studies of Steele and Hamid testify to a continued fascination with, and even devotion to, Fathy’s work, but more critical analyses have also emerged. In 1992, Zeynep Çelik provocatively compared Fathy’s work to the 1910s and 1920s architectural production in French Morocco under Lyautey’s regime, which François Béguin once labelled “arabisances,”6 arguing that, if their originating concerns were different, both were nevertheless quite similar not only in their “return” to vernacular morphological elements and types, but also in their “benevolent paternalism”.7 Çelik further portrays Fathy as a figure exemplifying the internal contradictions of what Frantz Fanon has termed the “native intellectual”, someone that often ends up creating a “hallmark which he wishes to be national, but which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism”.8 Political scientist Timothy Mitchell’s discussion of the New Gourna project, published in 2002, further dissects the Egyptian architect’s somewhat naïve and paternalistic stance towards the rural population, demonstrating how Fathy’s project was instrumentalised in a political agenda based on the “invention of the Egyptian peasant,” an agenda that resonates today.9 In 2007, Panayiota I. Pyla produced a stimulating assessment of a long-overlooked episode in Fathy’s career, namely his collaboration with the international firm Doxiadis Associates between 1957 and 1961, claiming that it demonstrates the extent to which “Fathy’s thought was complexly intertwined with larger mid-twentieth century architectural debates on culture and modernity, and as such, transcended any essentialist discourses of identity that often appropriated his notion of vernacular architecture”.10

11 Leïla el-Wakil (ed.), Hassan Fathy dans son temps, Gollion: Infolio, 2013, p. 14. 12 The photographic credits indicate that apart from material held in the rbscl (Cairo (Egypt), Ameri (...) 3Hassan Fathy dans son temps provides a substantial contribution to the literature on the Egyptian master. Impressive in terms of its 416-page length and 325 high-quality and good-sized illustrations, this gracefully designed book was compiled and edited by Leïla el-Wakil, who currently teaches at the Art History Department of the University of Geneva. In her introduction, el-Wakil explicitly positions the book vis-à-vis the existing literature, stating that her incentive was to produce a book that avoids on the one hand the idolatry surrounding Fathy—which he, in acting as a “guru” for his disciples, nurtured himself—and on the other hand the overly simplistic critiques that have assessed Fathy in wide-ranging terms as “traditionalist,” “orientalist” or “essentialist,” or which categorised him as either a “modern,” a “modern Arab” or even a “postmodern” architect.11 The alternative approach that el-Wakil proposes is twofold. First, she explicitly argues for a return to a serious investigation, a “véritable travail de fond,” of the immense wealth of archival material available. As such, she has continued the engagement with these sources initiated by James Steele. The book, then, results from in-depth research in Hassan Fathy’s private papers mainly held in archival collections in Cairo and Geneva,12 and from multiple site visits to Fathy’s actual buildings. As el-Wakil rightly argues, “the complete works” of Fathy have not yet been fully established, documented or studied, and the book does bring to the fore lesser-known projects and episodes from Fathy’s professional life. Of particular interest in this respect are some projects dating from his early career, but also his other work in Africa, such as the research on the City of the Future, dating from 1960–1961, and Fathy’s involvement in the design of tourist villages after his return from working at the Doxiadis office in Greece in 1961. The book’s meticulously compiled “Sources” section, which contains among others a list of published and unpublished Fathy texts and the most up-to-date bibliography on the topic, is an important contribution in itself. Another major contribution of the book is the wealth of original documents presented, often large in size and in colour. Compared to the rather sparse redrawn plans presented in James Steele’s monograph, these documents offer the interested reader a fine insight in the design process of some of the projects discussed. El-Wakil is to be congratulated for having persevered in negotiating high-quality reproductions of archival material with the publishing house. The book is not only a beautiful object, but more importantly a true testimony of Fathy’s practice as an architect and artist.

By making a plea to act like a historian and maintain “la juste distance critique” from the subject of inquiry, the second element in el-Wakil’s alternative take on Fathy consists of considering him as a “situated architect”. While previous scholarship emphasised the uniqueness of the figure, “déraciné de son époque et son milieu” as el-Wakil puts it, it is timely, she argues, to study the man and his work “dans son temps,” as the title of the book explicitly underlines. To do so, she has not only presented her own analyses but also commissioned a number of other researchers to address specific aspects of Fathy’s personality and oeuvre. Among them are established scholars such as Mercedes Volait and Joseph Abram, as well as the keeper of archival funds of the architect and the above-mentioned former collaborator of Fathy, Ahmad Hamid. Wakil also includes contributions from junior researchers who have conducted analysis of a specific aspect of Fathy’s work or life under her supervision.

13 For insightful discussions of this topic in a tropical context from an Anglophone perspective, see (...) 14 Hassan Fathy, Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture: Principles and Examples with Reference t (...) 5However laudable this use of a variety of voices may be in itself, it has consequences for the overall quality of the book. Clearly, not all contributors are Fathy specialists, which is evident, for instance, in Joseph Abram’s piece entitled “Choisy/Fathy. Entre rationalisme et bioclimatique”. His text reminds us that the principle of the Nubian vault was in fact already described in Auguste Choisy’s 1899 book Histoire de l’architecture, and thus did not constitute a “forgotten” technique given the influence of Choisy’s book on twentieth-century architectural practice. But Abram’s attempt to inscribe Fathy in a larger narrative on climate responsive building via references to the work of Paul Nelson and Jean Prouvé is less convincing. Indeed, Nelson and Prouvé were marginal figures in the postwar debate on climate responsive building,13 and their projects, despite their innovative character, do not provide the reader with truly relevant insights into the kinds of principles Fathy drew upon to design “une architecture bioclimatique”. A more in-depth discussion of Fathy’s 1986 book Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture: Principles and Examples with Reference to Hot Arid Climates would have been welcome.14

15 We can think here of the work of authors like Viviana d’Auria and Ahmed Zaib Kahn Mahsud. 16 Rémi Baudouï, “De l’ékistique à l’urbanisme situé,” in Leïla el-Wakil (ed.), Hassan Fathy dans son (...) 17 For references relating to the work of the figures mentioned, see the introduction to this themed (...) 6Many chapters bring new and interesting aspects of Fathy’s practice and reflection on certain topics to the fore, but are descriptive rather than interpretative. Several contributions would have benefitted from a more direct engagement with the recent scholarly literature on the broader context in which their authors seek to situate Fathy. The chapter on Fathy’s collaboration with Doxiadis Associates, for instance, presents an array of new and fascinating information and visual documents on a lesser-known period of his career, but does not take into account the recent literature on this Greek “global expert,”15 nor does it take a clear position vis-à-vis Pyla’s earlier study. The same holds true for Rémi Baudouï’s discussion of Fathy’s reflection on urban planning. As Fathy is considered primarily an architect who focused on the rural rather than the urban, the in-depth discussion of his own, often unpublished, writings on the city forms a welcome addition to our understanding of the Egyptian architect. But one can only wonder why Fathy continued to define the Western urban planning model as one that proclaimed to offer “une solution ready-made,”16 while figures like Michel Écochard and the members of atbat-Afrique in North Africa, Josep Lluis Sert in Latin America or, on a more general level, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt were already developing an approach more sensible to local contexts.17 Given that the Doxiadis office functioned as an international forum for those involved in rethinking the practice of modernist urban planning, Fathy must have been well aware of these developments that Baudouï touches upon without, however, re-assessing critically the architect’s rather remarkable position in this respect.

18 Nicholas Warner, “Clarke/Fathy: La resurgence des traditions,” in Leïla el-Wakil (ed.), Hassan Fat (...) 19 See references in notes 7 and 8. 7In the book’s ambition to dissect the myth of Hassan Fathy as an “autonomous genius,” one chapter in particular offers a fascinating new perspective: Nicholas Warner’s discussion of the work of the British Victorian architect Somers Clarke. Around the turn of the century, Clarke indeed built several projects, often to accommodate foreign scientific missions involved in archaeological work on pharaonic sites, in which he drew on local building techniques using “la brique crue,” and on morphological elements taken from the local building tradition, such as domed units. In his conclusion, Warner points out the different influences and “valeurs morales” that underlie the shared use of the same traditional building technology by Clarke and Fathy.18 But thinking of Zeynep Çelik’s critique of Fathy, and the entanglement she sees between his work and that of French colonial architects,19 Warner could have engaged more explicitly with what this comparison tells us about the ambivalent search for the “authenticity” of Fathy’s work. Such a lack of critical engagement with dissonant voices on Fathy is recurrent in many contributions included in el-Wakil’s book.

20 Mercedes Volait, “Les débuts d’un romantique dans l’Égypte libérale,” in Leïla el-Wakil (ed.), Has (...) 21 Schwaller de Lubicz is also mentioned in passing by James Steele, who does not provide an in-depth (...) 22 Leïla el-Wakil (ed.), Hassan Fathy dans son temps, op. cit. (note 11), p. 10. 8Overall, a few chapters stand out for the way they successfully put “Hassan Fathy dans son temps”. Not surprisingly, these are by authors with a profound understanding of Egypt’s modern society and culture. Mercedes Volait convincingly situates Fathy’s early work in the liberal climate pervading Egypt at the time, demonstrating how the early projects also relate in formal terms to the contemporary production of architecture in Egypt, which was in many cases authored by designers of European descent working for middle- and upper-class clients.20 In her many contributions to the book, el-Wakil herself also provides several new readings of Hassan Fathy’s work and personality. For instance, based on an inquiry of the architect’s private library, she paints a fascinating portrait of a uomo universalis deeply immersed in the larger intellectual debates of his time. Particularly interesting in this respect is the chapter on the spiritual dimensions of Fathy’s thinking and the elaborate discussion of his link with “le très singulier” Egyptologist René Schwaller de Lubicz, author of the controversial book Le Temple de l’Homme.21 The—rather descriptive—contributions of el-Wakil’s students, which focus on his engagement with art and music, provide welcome additions to this portrait of a man who at a late age truly became “un ‘gourou’ proselyte finissant ses jours comme un anachorète, seul avec ses chats et Umm Samir, une domestique âgée, lui servant quotidiennement un identique menu au diner, du poulet, du riz et un orange”.22

23 Mercedes Volait, “Les débuts d’un romantique dans l’Égypte libérale,” op. cit. (note 20), p. 72. 24 Leïla el-Wakil (ed.), Hassan Fathy dans son temps, op. cit. (note 11), p. 177. 9Several chapters in the book inevitably touch on the New Gourna village, the project that constitutes Fathy’s opus magnum and probably his biggest frustration. While Steele focused largely on individual houses in Fathy’s early career, several contributions in this book help to construct the genealogy of the New Gourna project. In a discussion similar in perspective to Timothy Mitchell’s work, though less critical, Samir Radwan, a prominent Egyptian economist, discusses the broader political and ideological framework within which to situate Fathy’s first attempts in this domain, which were actually related to his personal background, coming as he did from a wealthy family that owned several large farms in Egypt. Mercedes Volait demonstrates in her contribution how the “ethos réformiste de l’Égypte libérale” characteristic of the interwar years triggered several initiatives to improve the living conditions of the so-called “fellah,” or peasants, and provided architects like Fathy and Sayyid Karim, Egypt’s perhaps most prominent, though lesser known modernist architect, with commissions for experimental rural housing.23 From el-Wakil’s insightful discussion of these early projects of the 1930s, which she refers to as “la ‘izba modèle,” an important lesson is learned. Fathy indeed was not the only Egyptian architect to experiment with vernacular building techniques and local materials such as “la brique crue” or “adobe,” although el-Wakil still claims that “le génie de Fathy sera d’élever cette technologie au rang d’architecture”.24

25 Ibid., p. 201. 10In her analysis of the New Gourna project, el-Wakil succeeds in going beyond the perspective on the project as it was codified by Fathy himself in his 1970 book Construire avec le peuple. Drawing on unpublished documents from the architect’s private archives, she constructs an alternative and quite surprising narrative, defining New Gourna as “le Hellerau africain”: “Bien que fascine par le retour à la tradition constructive vernaculaire égyptienne et intimement convaincu de concevoir un authentique village égyptien, c’est aussi dans le fonds de commerce européen que puise Fathy lorsqu’il s’agit d’établir le programme pour lequel il a carte blanche”.25 El-Wakil argues that New Gourna, a “pseudo-village paysan” destined to house 7000 relocated inhabitants, was actually over-equipped with cultural and educational facilities. Referring to the bipolarity of the village’s program, which combined a theatre and workshops for local crafts, el-Wakil then draws a rather convincing parallel with the German model garden city of Hellerau near Dresden, a project designed around 1909 by Herman Muthesius and Richard Rimerschied in collaboration with Heinrich Tessenow. However surprising this parallel may sound, we should not forgot, as el-Wakil reminds us, that Fathy was indeed an architect with a cosmopolitan culture and an erudite architecture professor, well versed in the debates and literature of twentieth-century European architecture.

26 Ibid., p. 316. 27 Leïla el-Wakil, “Les villages touristiques,” in Hassan Fathy dans son temps, Gollion: Infolio, 201 (...) 11But perhaps most important of all is that el-Wakil’s discussion of New Gourna shifts the focus from its materiality and vernacular language to the issue of the program. In that respect, the chapter on the tourist villages that Fathy designed in the 1960s forms another critical lens through which to reassess the New Gourna project. El-Wakil discusses in detail the several projects in which Fathy was involved and how he worked together with both Egypt’s official authorities and real estate developers active in the lucrative market of tourist facilities in Egypt, arguing that the architect’s influence on the construction of tourist villages along the Mediterranean has not yet been measured “à sa juste valeur”.26 Fascinating in this respect is that during the late 1970s, the possibility of turning New Gourna into a “projet touristico-culturel” was investigated, an initiative that remained a paper project. In this chapter on touristic villages, el-Wakil also touches on the delicate question of the use of an “architecture vernaculaire traditionnelle” by referring to an international conference, held in 1974 in Hammamet under the auspices of Unesco, on the question of Les problèmes contemporains des arts arabes et de leurs relations socio-culturelles avec le monde arabe. Central in the discussions held during this event, el-Wakil explains, was the age-old dilemma revolving around the “old” and the “modern,” with some participants claiming that a “retour au style ancient” risked it turning into little less than “folklore,” rather than being “authentic”. As in the contribution of Warner mentioned above, el-Wakil does not engage with the somewhat unsettling question this production of “authentic-looking” tourist villages raises with regard to Fathy’s work. Her assessment of the so-called Village des Journalistes in Sinaï, commonly considered “un mauvais pastiche du travail de Fathy,” is revealing in this respect. While el-Wakil unearthed historical evidence testifying to Fathy’s involvement in the project, she nevertheless concludes that after the architect’s death, the models of touristic villages developed by Fathy lost “leur logique constructive et leur efficacité climatique”: “le vocabulaire et la morpologie, recopiés par trop de constructeurs sans formation, ont perdu leur sens architectural pour ne plus être que de pales appâts signalétiques”.27

28 Leïla el-Wakil, Hassan Fathy dans son temps, op. cit. (note 11), p. 209. 29 This would, however, require an English translation. 30 On Kroll’s project, see Wolfgang Pehnt, Lucien Kroll: Buildings and Projects, New York, NY: Rizzol (...) 31 Leïla el-Wakil, Hassan Fathy dans son temps, op. cit. (note 11), p. 378. 12It is here, and in certain other passages of the book where the tone of the writing becomes normative, that el-Wakil’s devotion to the “genius” of Fathy comes to the fore. This ambitious edited volume, then, reads as a work of love for a seminal figure in the history of twentieth-century architecture. Not surprisingly, el-Wakil has been heavily involved in the campaign to “save” New Gourna.28 It is precisely this love and devotion that at times stands in the way of her keeping “la juste distance critique,” the importance of which el-Wakil underlines herself in the introduction. This said, because of the amount of new material and themes that it brings to the fore, this publication is a substantial contribution to the scholarship on Hassan Fathy, and deserves an international readership.29 Moreover, it leaves the reader with a new set of intriguing questions that provide a basis on which to build future research. In this respect, I was particularly struck by the caption of an unpublished photograph of Fathy standing in front of Lucien Kroll’s student housing project La Mémé near Brussels, a key example of so-called participatory design, albeit with an architectural language very different from that of Fathy’s work:30 “Devant le complexe complexe Woluwe-Saint-Lambert / Esprit d’Advocacy Planning; Que pense Fathy de Kroll?”31 Despite the enormous task completed by Leila el-Wakil and the contributors to this voluminous publication, there remains much to discover about this remarkable figure of twentieth-century architecture.