Architecture for the Poor Hasan Fathy

ARCHITECTURE FOR THE POOR HASAN FATHY 1 Prelude Dream and Reality Paradise Lost: The Countryside If you were given a million pounds, what would you do with them? A question they were always asking us when we were young, one that would start our imagination roaming and set us daydreaming. I had two possible answers: one, to buy a yacht, hire an orchestra, and sail round the world with my friends listening to Bach, Schumann, and Brahms; the other, to build a village where the fellaheen would follow the way of life that I would like them to. This second wish had deep roots, going back to my childhood. I had always had a deep love for the country, but it was a love for an idea, not for something I really knew. The country, the place where the fellaheen lived, I had seen from the windows of the train as we went from Cairo to Alexandria for the summer holidays, but this fleeting experience was supple- mented by two contrasting pictures, which I had got respectively from my father and my mother. My father avoided the country. To him it was a place full of flies, mosquitoes, and polluted water, and he forbade his children to have anything to do with it. Although he possessed several estates in the country, he would never visit them, or go any nearer to the country than Mansoura, the provincial capital, where he went once a year to meet his bailiffs and collect his rent. Until my twenty-seventh year I never set foot on any of our country property. My mother had spent part of her childhood in the country, of which she preserved the pleasantest memories, and to which she longed to return right up to the end of her life. She told us stories of the tame lambs that would follow her about, of all the animals on the farm, the chickens and pigeons, of how she made friends with them and watched them through the year. The only animals we saw close up were the lambs bought for Kurban Bairam, which as soon as we had made friends with them were taken to be killed, or the herds of young calves being driven through the streets to the slaughterhouse. She told us how the people produced everything they needed for themselves in the country, how they never needed to buy anything more than the cloth for their clothes, how even the rushes for their brooms grew along the ditches in the farm. I seemed to inherit my mother’s unfulfilled longing to go back to the country, which I thought offered a simpler, happier, and less anxious life than the city could. These two pictures combined in my imagination to produce a picture of the country as a paradise, but a paradise dark- ened from above by clouds of flies, and whose streams flowing underfoot had become muddy and infested with bilharzia and dysentery. This image haunted me and made me feel that something should be done to restore to the Egyptian countryside the felicity of paradise. If the problem appeared simple to me at that time, it was because I was young and inexperienced, but it was and is a question that has occupied the greater part of my thoughts and energies ever since, a problem whose unfolding complexity through the years has only reinforced my conviction that something should be done to solve it. Such a “something,” though, can only work if inspired by love. The people who are to transform the countryside will not be able to do it by large directives issued from office desks in Cairo; they will have to love the fellah enough to live with him, to make then-homes in the country, and to devote their lives to practical work, on the spot, toward the improvement of rural life. Because of this feeling of mine for peasant life, when I left secondary school I was led to apply for admission to the School of Agriculture. There was, however, an examination for students aspiring to enter this school. Now, my practical experience of farming was strictly limited to what I had seen out of the train windows, but I thought I could probably make up for my shortcomings by studying up on the theory of agriculture from textbooks. I carefully learned all about each separate crop and went to face the examiners (it was an oral exam). The examiner asked me: “If you had a field of cotton and wanted to plant rice in it, what would you do?” “What a silly question,” I thought, and answered, “Simple. I would pull up the cotton and plant the rice.” He said nothing, but asked me how long it takes maize to grow. Misremembering, instead of six weeks, I said six months. “Are you sure?” asked the examiner. “Wouldn’t seven months be nearer?” I thought about it. I had noticed from the train that maize fields could be very big, and I had never seen anyone in them. It must take a long time to harvest maize. “Yes,” I said, “perhaps seven months.” “Even eight months?” “Well yes, I suppose so.” “Or nine?” It began to occur to me that perhaps he was not treating my answer with the respect it deserved. They dismissed me politely, and I did not get into the School of Agriculture. I went instead into the Polytechnic, where T chose to study architecture. After I graduated I went one day to supervise the building of a school at Talkha. Talkha is a small country town on the river in the north of the Delta, opposite Mansoura. The site for the school was outside the town, and after the first day or two I made a deliberate detour to avoid going through the town. I was so disgusted at the sight and smell of the narrow streets, deep in mud and every kind of filth, where all the garbage from the kitchens—dirty water, fish scales, rotting vegetables, and offal—was regularly thrown, and so depressed at the appear- ance of the squalid little shops, fronts open to the smell and the flies in the street, displaying their few wretched wares to the poverty-stricken passersby, that I could not bear to pass through the town. This town haunted me; I could think of nothing but the hopeless resignation of these peasants to their condition, their cramped and stunted view of fife, their abject acceptance of the whole horrible situation in which they were forced to put up with a lifetime’s scrabbling for money amid the wretched buildings of Talkha. The revelation of their apathy seized me by the throat; my own helplessness before such a spectacle tormented me. Surely something could be done? Yet what? The peasants were too sunk in their misery to initiate a change. They needed decent houses, but houses are expensive. In large towns capitalists are attracted by the returns from investment in housing, and public bodies—ministries, town councils, etc.—frequently provide extensive accommodation for the citizens, but neither capitalists nor the state seem willing to undertake the provision of peasant houses, which return no rent to the capitalists and too little glory to the politicians; both parties wash their hands of the matter and the peasants continue to live in squalor. God helps those who help themselves, you might say, but these peasants could never do that. Hardly able to afford even reeds to thatch their huts, how could they hope to buy steel bars, timber, or concrete for good houses? How could they pay for builders to put the houses up? No. Abandoned by God and man, they dragged out their short, diseased, and ugly lives in the dirt and discomfort to which they had been born. Their state is shared by millions in Egypt, while over the whole of the earth there are, according to the U.N., 800,000,000 peasants —one-third of the population of the earth—now doomed to premature death because of their inad- equate housing. It happened that one of our farms was near Talkha, and I took the opportunity of going to look at it. It was a terrible experience. I had had no idea until then of the horrible squalor and ugliness amid which the peasants on a farm lived. I saw a collection of mud huts, low, dark, and dirty, with no windows, no latrines, no clean water, cattle living practically in the same room with people; there was not the remotest connection with the idyllic countryside of my imagination. Everything in this wretched farm was subordinated to economics; the crops came right up to the thresholds of the huts, which were crowded into their own filthy farmyard so as to leave the maximum room for money-making crops; there was no shade, for the shade from trees would inhibit the growth of the cotton; nothing had been done out of consideration for the human beings who spent their lives there. This picture supplanted that earlier one of a rural paradise with muddy streams. Yet perhaps it was fortunate that the farm belonged to us, for it brought home to me that we ourselves were responsible. The first bit of the country I saw was one of our family’s farms, and we had been content to live in ignorance of the peasants’ sickening misery. Of course, I urged my parents to rebuild the farm, and they did. But, besides the farm building and peasants’ houses themselves, I was most interested hi getting a house built there for our family.

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