Festival dell'architettura

Fathy’s work on tradition is well known. What the paper wants to explore is the method, aiming at clarifying how the Egyptian architect operates on a set of elements and relations which are already codified. Therefore, we discuss here the main compositional techniques used by Fathy to build his language, being in continuity with history and, at the same time, creating a new architecture, that is able to express a strong identity character.

In February 1958 Dimitri PIkionis gave to his friend Hassan Fathy a poetry collection by the Greek poet Kavafis. The book is one of the few remaining proof of their relationship. The two met in Athens in the years during which the Egyptian architect worked in Constantinos Doxiadis office (1957-61). When Fathy arrived in Greece Pikionis was working on the project for Acropolis and Philopappou access areas. Fathy was fascinated by the work of Pikionis, who, at the time, was composing the stones directly on the site. Both are members of another modernity; their way of working with tradition is different, but they share the purpose to invent a new architecture, ferrying forms of history in the contemporary (Luisa Ferro, 2004).

This is, in fact, the backbone around which the whole work of Fathy is structured. A work that is an uninterrupted research around the language and identity issue. A search inextricably linked to a specific historical moment when Egypt, still bounded to its past of foreign domination, needs to redefine its national identity.

Fathy’s work finds its deeper reason in this necessity: “Je suis un architecte, qui a perdu tout point de repère dans sa société arabe. Je suis un architecte arabe qui a perdu son arabité. Je suis en train de rechercher une architecture et un urbanisme, de retrouver mon arabité perdue” Fathy said in a 1978 interview, when asked “Qui êtes vous?”. A lost Arabness, that Fathy searched for and finally found, looking to the past and choosing to design starting from it. However, the design process used by Fathy isn’t mimetic but inventive; it’s a method that firstly requires the definition of the spatial and temporary boundaries of the reference tradition. Broad horizons in this case. In fact, Fathy, finding in his being Arab the deepest identity of his people, chooses to embrace the Arab Koinè world as a whole and to codify a new language, starting from it. In doing so, a process of ritualization and formalization is triggered (Eric J. Hobsbawn, Terence Ranger, 2002), a process that uses ancient materials, rediscovered and transposed into the contemporary.

Materials that are traditional elements, courtly or vernacular, Egyptian or Arab; some of them are lost and others are still alive. Fathy, fitting into the genealogical chain of forms, chooses to be in continuity with them: we find a recognizing and sharing mechanism in dialogue with past and repetition, while we can identify a principle of modernity in the choice of elements and in semantic transformations. So, Fathy’s architectures are made of quotes and parts that are already defined but rewritten and recomposed according to a new order. It’s a search for a constructive and formal code that, once absorbed, is betrayed. Hence the invention is born.

But, if “architectural inventions are a selection between materials which exist” (Luciano Semerani, 2000, 60), the way in which Fathy works whit the strengthened system of tradition implies, from the operational point of view, to use a set of composition techniques.

First of all, we have analogy, in function of which the choice of traditional elements is done and justified. In fact, Fathy looks to the tradition basin to identify examples that satisfy conditions which are similar to those of the project, that are designed in a similar condition in terms of semantic, social, cultural and climatic context. Examples which are then compared with the place reality and modified, for subsequent adjustment, according to precise criteria that meet the intention of the project itself. This is, for example, the case of the Tunisian desert village part, starting from which Fathy designs the plan of the residential neighbourhoods of New Baris village (1965). Each neighbourhood is a variation of the starting model (Adele Picone 2009). The model is subject to an analytical process: it’s broken up into its constitutive principles and it’s then rebuilt, preserving the intrinsic rules. We find the same process in the village centre and the public buildings design. In fact, collective space and the parts of which it’s made are the result of a memory of shape operation, of analogical and typological operations. Analogy is here the tool thanks to which Fathy assigns to each architecture the role to play within the whole. The buildings’ urban value is expressed in an allusive and memory dimension. The buildings are a reference and, at the same time, a personal interpretation; they are memories of a generic Arab city with its mean characters, of a palace with its courtyards and gardens or a caravan city lost in the desert (Alberto Ferlenga, 1998). Similar pieces, reassembled fragments. Therefore, the type is here intended as a logical arrangement of parts that leaves its mark, despite altering, sometimes, its meaning and as a mean of invention, through an operation of hybridization and contamination, that is related to a new interpretation of reality.

Also the materials, the constructive and technological choices and the elements of which Fathy’s language is made – whether simple or complex phrases, spatial structures or invariant figures – have all an analogic relation with their starting matrices, with the first ring of the chain that Fathy, with his work, wants to continue.

The elements, extrapolated from their original context and then re-contextualized, are subject to a process of transposition (Fernanda De Maio, 2000): a temporal transposition, from past to present, and a spatial transposition, from one place to another, even geographically distant but still related a common substrate that is, according to Fathy, the collective identity place, the tradition itself.

The nature of these elements is two fold, they're simple or complex, taken individually or as a part of a system where the arrangement and the relations between the parts are already pre-defined, and therefore transposed into the project as a whole. In some cases, the elements are kept unchanged, identical to the reference model, such as a quotation. In other cases, there's a variation in scale; in others, again, a reinterpretation or a simplification, which reduces the element to its essence, retaining its intrinsic principle. The latter, for example, is the type of work which has been done on the Q'a, originally the reception room for the guests of medieval Cairo's palaces, transformed by Fathy in a room “for the humble farmer's house” (Hassan Fathy, 1972, 147). Fathy reproduces the plan and section configuration and the fundamental elements. What Fathy maintains is the form, stripped of any stylistic attachment, where the idea of big and small scale defines a hollow space: its articulation represents the deepest sense of the element itself.

In this sense, the transposition primarily involves an estrangement: that's the case of the Nubian mud bricks vault in the home studio of Hamed Said (1943-45) in the Cairo suburb of El-Marg; or the Durqa'a-Iwan system used in Abiquiu, New Mexico (1980). But this is only a part of Fathy's design process: in fact, the juxtaposition gives these elements a new meaning, building a new unity and a new appropriateness to the context. Fathy, in the end, conceives the assemblage process as the confluence of a number of elements, which are separated in time and space, into a contemporaneity (Sergej Michajlovič Ėjzenštejn, 1985). The assemblage is seen by Fathy as a tool to build a unity that goes beyond the mere juxtaposition of the parts; but it is also a tool to break up and recompose, to analytically dismember giving back an integrity, to assembly and resume pieces into a bigger picture. That's the transformation of a whole. The juxtaposed elements acquire a new meaning, which is not necessarily the original one, but an unusual one, the architect's meaning. The elements are always recognizable and in the same time they are active subjects, contributing to define a complex unity, whose coherence comes from the disposition of different parts.

At the urban scale the road system defines the areas where similar constituent parts of the ancient city must be settled down. In this way Fathy deconstructs and reconstructs the Arab city with a different logic, a need for rationality that creates a new order, defining new hierarchies and internal relations. At the architectural scale the geometry and the square grid are ordering the elements' disposition. A series of overlapping principles lies beyond it: the will of introversion, the quality of the space, the memory of types and established forms, the tension towards a new coding...

Ultimately, Fathy sees the assemblage as a transcalar technique, that determines the collocation of different elements and defines the urban form and its components. The Architect sees the assemblage as a tool of rewriting and synthesis of heterogeneous elements into a coherent language, which is in the same time his own stylistic trait and an attempt to express deep and universal values, in comparison to the cultural background.

So, what sets the Arab character of Fathy's architecture is not the fact that it is made of pre-defined parts, whose implicit value is, per se, the reason that justifies the choice. Indeed, it's the appropriate placement of the parts themselves, the way in which these are structured and assembled together, that defines it. Eventually, the “Dispositio” becomes functional to the definition of a language that wants to be representative of a precise cultural expression of an “Arab sentiment” (Fathy, 1998, 60). No matter if the amalgamation of different traditions that, as a whole, do not belong to any place, is a fiction. The artifice, which tells us of vernacular and Islamic, of Egypt and “Arabité”, of present and past, is a new foundation. Therein lies its value and, perhaps, even its relevance.

The destination is not Ithaca, but the journey leading to it.

Viola Bertini graduated in Architecture in 2009 at Politecnico di Milano. In 2012 she concluded, with honour, her Ph.D. in Architectural Composition at Iuav University of Venice, discussing a thesis on the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy. She is a contract professor at Politecnico di Milano and a research fellow at Iuav University. Furthermore, she collaborates, as research consultant, with the American University of Beirut.

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