The project that Hannah Collins presents at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, title "I will make up a song and sing it in a theatre with night air above my head",  focuses on the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900-1989). In these photographs, either mounted in sequence and screened as a film, or presented in large formats, Fathy emerges as the spectre of a forgotten modern vernacular legacy. The remains of large projects conceived in the twentieth century, such as that made in New Gourna (1945-47) or the one in New Baris (1965-67), are subject to a perspective that seeks formulas for the future.
 
Through photography, the architectural works of Fathy are redeemed from the decay and ruin that threatens them. The work that Collins has done around Fathy could be understood as a collaboration that is only possible thanks to photography. This move goes beyond a tribute to the memory of the utopian projects carried out by Fathy, recognising them as one of the most important contributions in the fields of architecture and urbanism in the Arab world.

Hannah Collins (London, 1956) has been recognised for the complex documentary dimension of her photographs, which are often presented in large formats or in sequences that bring together several images of the same place. Since the 1980s she has been considered one of the most singular photographers within the international panorama. Her cinematic installations have fused aspects of collective memory, history and daily life.
 

Description of project by Hannah Collins

Between 1946 and 1954 the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy designed and built New Gourna, introducing ecological principles for adobe architecture to the Middle East. He dreamt that rural populations throughout North Africa might have sustainable housing, clean water, schools and support for their culture.

Gourna, a settlement at Thebes on the left bank of the Upper Nile, was situated above the necropolis from which the residents lived by selling their contents. Fathy was commissioned to build New Gourna to which Gourna’s population were unwillingly moved. Fathy hoped that the new town with an open-air theatre, a covered market, a mosque, schools and clean water storage would become a sustainable living system that looked to the future rather than plundering the past. It was never popular with its residents who felt forced to adapt to a new prescribed existence. Inspiration for the new town came from local mud brick towns, Bedouin settlements, Roman temples and the Nubian villages at Aswan on the banks of the Nile. Appropriated ancient Nubian and Roman building techniques freed the builder from the need for expensive wooden roof supports for the adobe domed roofs and introduced air- and water-cooling techniques.

During the 1960s underground water reserves were found at the Kharga Oasis, three hours’ drive through the inhospitable desert from Luxor. Here, Fathy was commissioned to build New Baris, another adobe town that was to be a sustainable community growing and exporting fruit and vegetables from the desert. To help with the storage of perishables in the new settlement, Fathy added incrementally reduced airshafts and secondary towers to accelerate air circulation reducing outside temperatures by over fifteen degrees. New Baris remains unfinished, as construction was stopped during to the war in 1967. At New Gourna, restoration has been suspended since the 2011 revolution. The town is slowly disappearing into the decaying concrete outskirts of Luxor, where buildings are at least ten degrees hotter in summer and colder in winter.

As the need to rethink our use of readily available resources becomes ever more urgent, seeing New Gourna and New Baris is to revisit hope and optimism, a vision for the future and a possibility that we might find other paths forward. This work was made in collaboration with Duncan Bellamy, who created the accompanying soundtrack.

Read more
Read less

More information

Label
Curator
Text
Carles Guerra
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Venue
Text
Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Carrer d’Aragó 255. 08007 Barcelona. Spain
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Dates
Text
21.06–13.10.2019
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Hannah Collins (b. London, 1956). From 1989 to 2010, she lived and worked in Barcelona, exhibiting at Galeria Joan Prats since 1992, and today lives between London and Almeria, Spain. In addition to having obtained the Fulbright scholarship and having been nominated for the 1993 Turner Prize, she has recently received the SPECTRUM 2015 International Photography Prize, awarded by the Foundation of the Lower Saxony, which included an exhibition at the Sprengel Museum, travelling to the Camden Art Centre in London and the Baltic Centre in Newcastle. Among other museums and art centres, she has exhibited at Centre Pompidou Paris; FRAC Bretagne; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Museo UNAL, Bogotá; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; MUDAM Luxembourg; Tate Modern, London; Seoul Museum of Art; VOX image contemporaine, Montreal; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Fundació La Caixa, Madrid and Barcelona; La Laboral, Gijón; Artium, Vitoria; CAC, Málaga.
Read more
Hassan Fathy was born in 1900 in Alexandria, Egypt. He was an Egyptian architect, artist and poet who had a lifelong commitment to architecture in the Muslim world. Early in his career he began to study the pre-industrial building systems of Egypt to understand their aesthetic qualities, to learn what they had to teach about climate control and economical construction techniques and to find ways to put them to contemporary use.

Two such systems dominated his thinking: the climatically efficient houses of Mamluk and Ottoman Cairo, ingeniously shaded and ventilated by means of their two-storey halls, mashrabiyyas and courtyards; and the indigenous mud brick construction still to be found in rural areas. The latter consists of inclined arches and vaults, built without shuttering, domes on squinches built over square rooms in a continuing spiral, semi-domed alcoves and other related forms. The urban housing forms of Cairo could not serve Fathy directly as a replicable source because of the disappearance of the building traditions that created them. These fine old houses enriched his imagination, however, and were to become models for later large-scale work. The ancient mud brick forms, in contrast, were still being produced by rural masons unchanged. Stimulated by what he had learned, Fathy had what was then a revolutionary idea. He perceived that a connection could be made between the continuing viability of mud brick construction and the desperate need of Egypt's poor to be taught once again to build shelter for themselves.

Hassan Fathy devoted himself to housing the poor in developing nations and deserves study by anyone involved in rural improvement. Fathy worked to create an indigenous environment at a minimal cost, and in so doing to improve the economy and the standard of living in rural areas. Fathy utilized ancient design methods and materials. He integrated a knowledge of the rural Egyptian economic situation with a wide knowledge of ancient architectural and town design techniques. He trained local inhabitants to make their own materials and build their own buildings. Climatic conditions, public health considerations, and ancient craft skills also affected his design decisions. Based on the structural massing of ancient buildings, Fathy incorporated dense brick walls and traditional courtyard forms to provide passive cooling.

Awards
1959.- Encouragement Prize for Fine Arts and Gold Medal.
1967.- National Prize for Fine Arts and Republic Decoration.
1980.- Chairman's Award, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
1984.- Union Internationale des Architectes, Gold Medal.
Read more
Published on: June 22, 2019
Cite: "The great Utopias by Hassan Fathy, badly managed by governments, renovated under the lens of Hannah Collins" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/great-utopias-hassan-fathy-badly-managed-governments-renovated-under-lens-hannah-collins> ISSN 1139-6415
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...