Attitudes in art fields have always been divided between two concepts: functional necessity and aesthetic pleasure. After this division took its historical extent, only a few artists were able to overcome it and present an integrated model for it. And if we wanted to represent those few architecture fieldwe will find Hassan Fathy (1900 – 1989) the most prominent architects of Egypt and the Arab world, perhaps during the twentieth century.
On the level of another artistic field, cinema, the name of the Lebanese director comes to us superscript (1941 – 2021) – the first anniversary of his death passed a few days ago – who dealt with cinema as a tool of change that does not compliment reality, but rather exposes it in a strict realistic manner, but this method also did not abandon the initial perceptions of aesthetic awareness, and at the same time he was not fascinated by it, Despite the direct and blatant effects in the cinema that lead to consumption and laziness.
Both names Fathi and Alawia come together in one documentary film, the first subject and the second director, entitled: “It is not enough for God to be with the poor” (1978). The work that the closing session of the seventh session of the “Beirut Art Documentary Film Festival” recalls on the twenty-fifth of this month, and broadcast via “Zoom”, is the result of a trip that Alawia took to Egypt, to meet Fathi and shed light on his school and his understanding of architecture, as a first and last. The Architecture of the Poor,” which is the title of his book, which was published in 1969, and soon became a label that summarizes Fathi’s architectural approach.
The show is also followed by a discussion with the Yemeni researcher Salma Samar Damluji, who previously worked with Fathi in the beginning of 1975, and following that 1984, and is the author of the book “Hassan Fathy: Earth and Utopia(2018) published by Lawrence King Publications in New York, with Italian Viola Bertini.
Fathi tried to present an architectural experience different from the dependent modernist model
The documentary chronicles Fathi’s attempts to present an architectural experience different from the dependent modernist model, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, following the majority of southern countries gained their independence, and he was inspired by elements of heritage in the “Al-Qurna Project”, in the 1940s, in which it relied on mud bricks. This is where his advanced environmental awareness emerges at the time, but he suffered a great failure, and then his ideas were described as utopian.
Then he stopped working inside Egypt, to return later with a new project in the village of Paris in the New Valley Governorate, but his fate was also not better than the first, and he himself tried to explain that failure sarcastically when he talked regarding the trilogy of owner, contractor and architect that governs modern architecture, and its transformation into The architect, the peasant and the bureaucrat, in reference to the backwardness of administrative systems.
The evening of Sunday the twenty-fifth of this month, which is available online, will be an opportunity to rediscover Fathi’s project anew, as he personally narrates in front of Burhan’s camera the problems and challenges he faced, and an opportunity to learn regarding one direction in architecture as well as cinema, away from the commoditisation trend popular in these two fields today.
