Hassan Fathy Quotes

Beautiful Mud

Mud, besides being mercifully cheap, is undeniably beautiful: Structure dictates form and the material imposes the scale. Within the limits imposed by the resistance of mud and by the laws of statics, the architect finds a sudden freedom to shape space within the building, to enclose a volume of chaotic air, and to bring it down to order and meaning to the scale of the human being. In one's house there is no need for decoration slapped on afterward. The structural elements provide endless interest for the eye.

Adobe and Money

If houses have to be built at all, in sufficient quantity, they must be built without money. We must go right outside the framework of the monetary system, bypass the factories, and ignore the contractors.

From Architecture for the Poor, p. 25

One man's effort can bring about an altogether disproportionate advance, if he is building upon an established tradition. It is rather like adding a single microscopic crystal to a solution that is already supersaturated, so that the whole will suddenly crystallize in a spectacular fashion. Yet is differs from the physical process in that this artistic crystallization is not a once-and-for-all occurrence, but an act of reaction that has to be perpetually renewed.

Hassan Fathy (1900-1989)

Quoting Isak Dinesen:

Straight is the line of duty, curved the line of beauty.