ARCHITECTURE FOR PEOPLE_AN. /PB/ “TH&H“

This is a Thames and Hudson coffee table book: readable text, good photography, lucid groundplans, and the binding is strong. Hassan Fathy's most available major text is Architecture for the Poor (Univ. of Chicago Press). Here is an excerpt from a brief article in Al-Ahram Weekly (19-25 Dec 2002, Issue 617) written to coincide with a recent Fathy retrospective in Cairo: As American architect James Steele writes in his book An Architect for the People (1997), the standard work on Fathy, by defining tradition as 'the social analogy of personal habit', Fathy intimated that it is the responsibility of each architect to develop a heightened awareness of such habits, and to incorporate them sympathetically into each design... [Fathy's] determined attempt to reawaken a sense of cultural pride among his countrymen, and to make them more aware of their rich architectural heritage, has led many young people [to become] more informed about Islamic architecture in the mediaeval part of Cairo.