El discurso arquitectónico de Hassan Fathy Lo vernáculo desde una perspectiva moderna

Abstract

The “alternative” architectural condition points to individualistic processes that give results far removed from the conventionalisms of context. The internationalization of the modern postulates led the critique to leave constructive procedures in the analyses of revitalization of an architecture considered as excessively identitarian, to one side. This article analyses the effort of the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900-1989) to defend at all levels, during a period coinciding with Western modernity, the wisdom of traditional inherited edification. The scarcity of iron and cement in Egypt, after the Second World War, boosted the recovery of a low-cost construction adapted to the climatic conditions and the material resources available locally. Popular architecture’s durability, especially its utilitarian aspect, preserved since ancient times and, in particular, its effectiveness in climate control, inspired in Fathy the desire to learn traditional constructive and spatial devices. The questioning of the figure of the “Muallim”, or Master Mason, which had become a source of inherited knowledge, with regards vernacular constructive systems, added to his own analysis of popular architecture, gave him a knowledge of autochthonous materials and passive mechanisms of environmental control that were reinterpreted with a modern reading in the materialization of both his domestic and urban projects.