New Gourna, located in Egypt, stands as a testament to the vision of Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy. Designed and built between the late 1940s and early 1950s, New Gourna was intended to house the residents of Old Gourna, a village now largely uninhabited.
New Gourna Village. Source: Wikipedia
Historical Context
The name Gourna has ancient roots, with Émile Amélineau identifying it with ancient Pekolol. The name "Gourna" was first documented in 1668 by Protais and Charles François d'Orléans, Capuchin missionary brothers who traveled in Upper Egypt.
Old Gourna is situated approximately 100 meters east of the Temple of Seti I. Until the early 19th century, the community was integrated with parts of the Temple of Seti I. Travelers like Richard Pococke and Sonnini de Manoncourt mentioned a Sheikh of Qurna. However, by 1825, Edward William Lane noted that the village was abandoned. Resettlement began in the late 1840s, as suggested by Isabella Frances Romer.
The Vision of Hassan Fathy
Hassan Fathy was commissioned by the Egyptian government in 1945 to plan a village for the resettlement of the residents of Gourna. Fathy had high hopes for his design for New Gourna. Fathy sought to create a contemporary vernacular architecture for a post-colonial Egypt. The project was built between 1946 and 1952. New Qurna was built midway between the Colossi of Memnon and el-Gezira on the Nile on the main road to the Theban Necropolis to house the residents of the Qurna.
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Fathy aimed to design an urban space that would improve the lives of its residents. New Qurna served to relocate the villagers, but it also served to be an experiment. The goal was to make the low cost buildings, as well as environment friendly structures. The design, which combined traditional materials and techniques with modern principles was never completed and much of the fabric of the village has since been lost; all what remains today of the original New Qurna is the mosque, market and a few houses.
Fathy's book (later published also as Construire Avec Le Peuple: Histoire d'un Village d'Egypte), described the construction of New Gourna, a village he had designed almost three decades earlier, between 1945 and 1947 in Egypt. Its wide impact stemmed not only from the book's vivid description of an innovative design/planning approach, but also from its vigorous articulation of concerns that had already begun to influence architectural/planning thought and practice.
In 1945 Fathy was asked by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities to design mass housing in Upper Egypt near Luxor for the inhabitants of Gourna, who had, until then, lived on top of Pharaonic tombs in the area. The main objective was to create a prototype of economical and sanitary housing that could be reproduced around the Egyptian countryside, with the goal of regenerating it.
Well connected to the Royal family, Hassan Fathy was selected as the architect of the project and immediately saw it as an opportunity to advance his experiments with alternative construction methods that would not depend on imported materials. Fathy had already been performing such experiments with mud bricks and had attempted the construction of pilot homes with mud since the period of World War 2, when Egypt faced great shortages in wood and steel.
Fathy also aimed to nurture collaborations between architects and local craftsmen, not only to minimise cost but also to create a type of architecture sensitive to local rural lifestyles that would, in turn, cultivate peasants' pride about their own culture. Based on these combined objectives, then, Fathy focused on reviving pre-modern building methods with hand-made sun-dried mud bricks.
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Fathy envisioned a new village of mud-brick dwellings toped with domes and organised around central open courtyards. The cosy houses were arranged in clusters around small squares that were interconnected with streets of a semi-public character, and which connected the houses to the main public village square, defined by public buildings such as a mosque, a theatre and a village hall.
The formal character of the houses and public buildings reflected the architect's aesthetic sensibilities that combined the masterful joining of domes and vaults with a sensitive play of shade and light.
The project attracted some attention in the European press, which praised Fathy's aspiration to put physical design at the centre of social reform and also hailed his success in designing economic and comfortable housing without a monotonous and standardised appearance.
New Gourna’s architecture consisted mostly of modest mud brick structures, chosen for their simplicity and affordability. In addition, they could be constructed with local materials, without having to rely on international resources. The village’s focal point was a large central square, around which were placed important community buildings, such as the mosque and village hall. To develop an appropriate aesthetic, Fathy studied the architecture around him.
This was a moment in Egyptian history when, after decades of British occupation, the country was working to redefine its national identity. Fathy explored that identity through architectural history. His designs pulled from a variety of historical Egyptian sources, including Coptic and Nubian architecture.
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With Old Qurna, there was not many vegetation due to the difficulties in accessing water. New Qurna was designed to improve on Old Qurna and solved problems such as difficulties in accessing water. New Qurna was built near the Nile River resulting more in the use of vegetation.
Due to the village not having any electricity, cooling and heating techniques were implemented within New Qurna. With the weather being warm, it would still feel cool within the houses. When the weather would be cool, the homes would stay warm.
The project applied the ancient Nubian Vault technique, which Fathy is often associated with. This technique enables vaulted roofs to be built without the need for the usual timber framework and using only standard mud bricks. The technique itself is as simple as it is ingenious. Building off of a vertical wall, brick courses are laid in angled arches, inclining against the wall, each supporting the next. The first 5 courses are not complete arches (the first only consists of a single brick on each side) as they have to establish the incline.
Outreach & Education - Past, Present, and Future of Hassan Fathy's New Gourna, Egypt
Challenges and Interpretations
Despite the positive reception abroad, however, the Gourni refused for years to transfer to their new homes and they even resorted to drastic measures, vandalising the houses of New Gourna. The Gourni's stance sabotaged Fathy's proclamations for a village sensitive to rural lifestyles and the project was interrupted before its completion in 1947, leaving the main public buildings and more than a hundred homes which were already erected, empty for years.
Fathy alleges that the inhabitants of Qurna lived in poverty and thus were robbing ancient tombs as means of subsistence. Families of the villagers settled down on top of the selected tombs where they would build their houses. Villagers built alongside the tombs, as the tombs became a part of the house. Looted items would either be sold, or kept around the homes of the villagers. In order to stop the looting the Department of Antiquities expropriated the land on which the Qurnis lived and decided to move them to a new settlement, to be designed and built by Hassan Fathy himself.
A major issue with the new village was a design that failed to connect to the lives of its intended residents. For instance, Fathy made courtyards an essential part of the residences. Even more curious for the future residents was the inclusion of domes in the house designs. As architectural forms, domes typically held a spiritual significance; they were associated with mosques and tombs, not homes. Using them in residential structures wasn’t just unusual, it was disconcerting. And in the end, they didn’t live there.
The Gourni's reaction seemed like an incomprehensible mystery to Fathy, who blamed the peasants for failing to appreciate his noble attempt to improve their lives. In the midst of all this, however, the designer, too, had a share of the responsibility. First, one can easily detect an element of paternalism in Fathy's claim that he was trying to restore aesthetic qualities that the locals were incapable of appreciating. This attitude towards the peasants-reflected also in Fathy's statement that he wanted to build a village ‘where the fellahin would follow the way of life I would like them to’-differed little from the biases of a typical bourgeois urbanite of Cairo.
Second, Fathy's assumption that the villagers would willingly relinquish their own homes for a planned village was resonant of the arrogance that characterised many state-sponsored planning visions of the mid-twentieth century. One can also point to more specific pitfalls in the designer's approach. Fathy's rhetoric about reviving an ‘Egyptian tradition’ ignored the ironies behind a homogenising view that conflated many different formal precedents and building techniques from diverse cultural provinces of Egypt. For example, Fathy's key strategy to organise the house around a courtyard drew on spatial conceptions from the urban residential architecture of Cairo; but it had a very different reception among the rural population of Gourna, four hundred miles south of the Egyptian capital, where land was highly valuable for cultivation.
In the eyes of the Gourni, the courtyard was first and foremost a waste of space. Similarly, Fathy's choice to roof the houses with mud-brick domes, which drew on habits of building brought from Nubia-a culturally and linguistically distinct region-proved just as unsettling for the population of New Gourna, which associated domes only with the most sacred of spaces: mosques and mausolea. It is thus no surprise that several years later, when the village began to be inhabited, the users remodelled the houses, precisely to cater to their formal preferences.
The local inhabitants' reactions demonstrate that Fathy's insistence on internal courtyards or mud-brick domes, as vestiges of a forgotten Egyptian architectural tradition, imposed an homogenising conception of culture/tradition that did not in fact exist. Further, his zeal to exalt ‘tradition’ separated it from everyday realities and led Fathy to nostalgia for the past.
Many of the buildings that were built had foundations of salt stones. Due to the high humidity, the salt stones would dissolve, causing the structure of the houses to fail. Villagers would need to adjust and fix their homes every few months in order for the house to remain intact.
Table: Comparison of Old Gourna and New Gourna
| Feature | Old Gourna | New Gourna |
|---|---|---|
| Location | On top of Pharaonic tombs | Midway between Colossi of Memnon and el-Gezira |
| Architecture | Vernacular, self-built | Designed by Hassan Fathy, mud-brick structures |
| Materials | Local materials, adapted to the environment | Mud brick, domes, courtyards |
| Resident's needs | Tailored to specific needs | Uniform, failed to connect with residents |
Later Years and Restoration Efforts
Soon after the New Gourna experiment, Fathy was also confronted with dramatic political turmoil in Egypt, with the brutal demise of the monarchy in 1952 and the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser that eventually led Fathy to a self-imposed exile. He found a new home in the office of Doxiadis Associates in Athens to which he was invited by Constantinos Doxiadis himself, as a consultant for his firm's Middle East projects.
New Gourna acquired new life in the early 1970s, when, as mentioned earlier, Fathy published a book that described his experiment. In this climate, Fathy's position was particularly appealing, not only because of its aesthetic sensibilities, but also because it valorised cultural difference. Emphasising the timeless wisdom of particular building traditions, Fathy appeared as an apologist for any local knowledge system worldwide.
Construction progressed slowly over three years and in 1948, Fathy gave up on the project. Though he initially considered the project a failure, Fathy returned to it in the 1970s, recasting it as an alternative to the rationalist designs of high modernism. New Gourna is now celebrated for its design by architects and cultural heritage professionals alike.
For various reasons, much of the residential housing over the years was destroyed or abandoned, but in 2019 UNESCO teamed up with the Cairo-based non-profit Environmental Quality International, experts in traditional mud architecture, to renovate the town’s mosque, theater, and Khan, a crafts training center. The three buildings were completed in 2022 and have become an inspiring new stop in Luxor for travelers interested in design and sustainability, but the work to restore more spaces as Fathy intended is ongoing.
In response, a project titled “Safeguarding Hassan Fathy’s Architectural Legacy in New Gourna” has been undertaken through a collaboration between UNESCO and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, as defined by the National Organization for Urban Harmony (NOUH) for the period 2019-21. This initiative aims to conserve and repurpose the public heritage buildings while addressing the critical issue of groundwater. NOUH has now taken the project into a second phase (2023-24). This paper outlines the symptoms and causes of deterioration in New Gourna Village and reviews the restoration efforts applied to four major buildings: the khan, the mosque, the theater, and Hassan Fathy’s house.
Despite the failure of replacing the old village, the new Gourna still showcases the potential of traditional techniques as genuine solutions to some contemporary problems.
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