Couldn't mud bricks be used to cover my houses on top? What about some sort of vault?”Īs far as Fathy knew, building a vault required a wooden centering, using both materials and skills beyond the means of most peasants. I could build walls, too, but I had nothing to roof them with. Egypt had not always imported steel from Belgium and timber from Rumania, yet Egypt had always built houses. At least I still had mud bricks! And then it occurred to me that, if I had mud bricks and nothing else, I was no worse off than my forefathers. Yet, still obsessed by my desire to build in the country, I looked about for ways of getting round the shortage. Steel and timber supplies were completely cut off, and the army requisitioned such materials as were already in the country. Soon afterwards the war started, and all building stopped.

In spite of their economical mud brick walls, they were not so very much cheaper than houses built of more conventional materials, because the timber for the roofs was expensive. So I started to design country houses in mud brick… These houses, mostly for rich clients, were certainly an improvement on the old town type of country house, but largely because they were more beautiful. Here, for years, for centuries, the peasant had been wisely and quietly exploiting the obvious building material, while we, with our modern school-learned ideas, never dreamed of using such a ludicrous substance as mud for so serious a creation as a house. And here, in every hovel and tumbledown hut in Egypt, was the answer to my problem.

But the peasant built his house out of mud, or mud bricks, which he dug out of the ground and dried in the sun. “Surely it was an odd situation that every peasant in Egypt with so much as an acre of land to his name had a house, while landowners with a hundred acres or more could not afford one. At least the peasant had a home of his own, unlike the more comfortable middle class, who had somehow lost the ability build their own homes. His family owned land which they leased out to tenant farmers and young Fathy could never accept that the peasants lived in such poorly built homes.

Rijksmuseum, Netherlands.Īs a young man growing up in a well to do urban family Hassan Fathy had a dream of building not single houses, but entire villages: a not uncommon dream (or fantasy) among many people in his days and ours. Hutje onder boom te Kaïro - 1858 - Willem de Famars Testas (1834-1896).

Architecture Poor Hassan Fathy Pdf