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Welcome to ARCHNET, an open access, interdisciplinary, intellectual resource focused on the built environment of Muslim societies.Focused on the built environment of Islamic civilizations past and present, we seek to:<ul><li>Facilitate excellence in scholarship and professional work by&nbsp;providing reliable information and ready access&nbsp;to vetted, high-quality textual and multimedia resources&nbsp;focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design,&nbsp;heritage&nbsp;conservation, economic and environmental sustainability, community development and resilience in the face of rapid change, and related topics.</li><li>Enable teaching and learning in these domains by providing educators with reliable, effective pedagogical material and teaching aids.&nbsp;</li><li>Serve as a platform through which scholars, practitioners, and institutions can bring their work to new global audiences.&nbsp;</li><li>Promote intercultural understanding and dialogue through reliable, high-quality, peer-reviewed material on the diversity of and pluralism within Muslim societies and the interaction between Islamic and other religious, cultural, and philosophical traditions as it relates to architecture and urbanism.</li><li>Enable easy access to a wide variety of resources via a custom-built, web-based, mobile-friendly platform optimized to minimize financial, infrastructural, linguistic, and other barriers to access.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul>Launched in 2002 after several years of development, ARCHNET is a pioneering digital resource that has proven a reliable authority on the built environment of Muslim societies, past and present.&nbsp;ARCHNET is a partnership between the <a href="https://www.archnet.org/collections/1342" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT Libraries</a> (AKDC@MIT) and the <a href="https://www.archnet.org/authorities/1903" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Trust for Culture</a> (AKTC), with support from the <a href="https://www.archnet.org/collections/50" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture</a> at Harvard and MIT.&nbsp;ARCHNET is developed and maintained by <a href="https://www.performantsoftware.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Performant Software Solutions</a>.

About

religious

mosque

This collection contains documentation on 124 of the projects, built and unbuilt, designed by Hassan Fathy during his influential career.&nbsp;Projects include residential housing, government offices, mosques, and the development of urban and rural communities. They are illustrative of Fathy's commitment to finding modern and innovative ways to employ traditional practices such as the use of mud brick in contemporary design. Fathy was truly an architect of international stature.&nbsp;He designed projects in over a dozen countries including Greece, India, Kuwait, Iraq, Spain, and the United States, but he was most passionately committed to his homeland, with over 100 of his projects designer for Egypt.&nbsp;

Hassan Fathy Archive: Sites

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digital graphic

IAA708596

Egypt

Import

adobe buildings

earthen architecture

mosques

mud brick

brick

adobe

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New Gourna Village Mosque

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"Using what he jokingly called his "itinerant band of masons', Fathy travelled to various farming villages such as Mit al-Nasara, testing his newfound structural system in the building of several groups of shelters. While largely utilitarian in nature, these projects were to provide him with the confidence he needed to use the Nubian vault and dome system much more extensively at New Gourna five years later." (constructed)  Source  Steele, James. 1997. An Architecture for People: The Complete Works of Hassan Fathy. London, United Kingdom: Thames and Hudson.

Fayyum Enterprise Farm

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architectural drawing

IHF2073

"The village of New Gourna, which was partially built between 1945 and 1948, is possibly the most well known of all of Fathy's projects because of the international popularity of his book, "Architecture for the Poor", published nearly twenty years after the experience and concentrating primarily on the ultimately tragic history of this single village. While the architect's explanations offered in the book are extremely compelling and ultimately persuasive, New Gourna is still most significant for the questions it raises rather than the problems it tried to solve, and these questions still await a thorough, objective analysis. The idea for the village was launched by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities as a potentially cost-effective solution to the problem of relocating an entire entrenched community of entrepreneurial excavators that had established itself over the royal necropolis in Luxor. The village of New Gourna also seemed to offer Fathy a perfect opportunity to finally test the ideas unveiled at Mansouria on a large scale and to see if they really could offer a viable solution to the rural housing problem in Egypt. The Village was meant to be a prototype but rather than subscribing to the current idea of using a limited number of unit types, Fathy took the unprecedented approach of seeking to satisfy the individual needs of each family in the design. As he said in Architecture for the Poor, "In Nature, no two men are alike. Even if they are twins and physically identical, they will differ in their dreams. The architecture of the house emerges from the dream; this is why in villages built by their inhabitants we will find no two houses identical. This variety grew naturally as men designed and built their many thousands of dwellings through the millennia. But when the architect is faced with the job of designing a thousand houses at one time, rather than dream for the thousand whom he must shelter, he designs one house and puts three zeros to its right, denying creativity to himself and humanity to man. As if he were a portraitist with a thousand commissions and painted only one picture and made nine hundred and ninety nine photocopies. But the architect has at his command the prosaic stuff of dreams. He can consider the family size, the wealth, the social status, the profession, the climate, and at last, the hopes and aspirations of those he shall house. As he cannot hold a thousand individuals in his mind at one time, let him begin with the comprehensible, with a handful of people or a natural group of families which will bring the design within his power. Once he is dealing with a manageable group of say twenty or thirty families, then the desired variety will naturally and logically follow in the housing." All of the architect's best intentions, however, were no match for the avariciousness of the Gournis themselves, who took every opportunity possible to sabotage their new village in order to stay where they were and to continue their own crude but lucrative version of amateur archaeology. Typically but mistakenly misreading the reluctance of the people to cooperate in the design and building of the village as a sure sign of the inappropriateness of both programming and form, many contemporary critics fail to penetrate deeper into the relevant issues raised by this project. These issues now, as at the time of construction half a century ago, revolve around the extremely important question of how to create a culturally and environmentally valid architecture that is sensitive to ethnic and regional traditions without allowing subjective values and images to intervene in the design process. In the final analysis, the portion of New Gourna that was completed must be judged on this basis." Source: Steele, James. 1989. The Hassan Fathy Collection. A Catalogue of Visual Documents at the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Bern, Switzerland: The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, 16-18.

New Gourna Village

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New Gourna Village Mosque
New Gourna, Egypt

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New Gourna Village Mosque
New Gourna, Egypt

Location

Images & Videos

Documents

Part of Site

Associated Collections

Events

Site Types

Materials/Techniques

Keywords

New Gourna Village MosqueNew Gourna, Egypt

Location

Images & Videos

Documents

Part of Site

Associated Collections

Events

Site Types

Materials/Techniques

Keywords

New Gourna Village Mosque
New Gourna, Egypt