Hassan Fathy: When an Architect Tried to Build for the Poor with Dignity

A brown file marked Old Gourna arrives at Hassan Fathy's office with a whole village inside it: the government wants the families living over the ancient tombs of Luxor relocated cheaply and quickly, and Fathy sees human beings in the names that spill from it. That night he is summoned before a Court of Building Materials where Cement sits as judge among steel, glass and fired brick, and he answers with a block of earth, saying that the poor want good homes and should not be sold the appearance of modernity. He travels to Nubia to find builders who still raise mud-brick vaults and domes without timber formwork, then designs New Gourna as a village of shaded streets, courtyards, a school, a theater, a market and a mosque, until the file loses a house at every desk in the corridors of administration. When the people of Gourna arrive with their memories and the graves of their ancestors, the court returns with the Poor Man as judge, who tells Fathy that dignity begins when you ask a person how he lives, and an unfinished house testifies that they simply stopped completing it, a slower way to die. Found guilty of believing that beauty belongs to the poor, Fathy is sentenced to an incomplete village, and the book ends by asking architects to open their ears before their plans, because a project may need listening before it needs earth.