Luxor4u

UNESCO to save New Qurna village in Luxor

On Thu, 29/10/2015
Al-Masry Al-Youm

Mohamed Sameh Amr, Egypt's ambassador to UNESCO, said the organization is dispatching a team of experts to restore and maintain the New Qurna village, which was built by renowned architect Hassan Fathy in Luxor.

The village has a unique heritage value and reflects the grandeur of Hassan Fathy’s architecture, which is taught in many universities abroad.

It offers a global model as to how to build housing that commensurates with the surrounding environmental conditions and gives solutions to housing problems for low-income social classes.

Amr said part of the project will be financed by UNESCO’s Nuba Fund.


Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm


http://www.egyptindependent.com//news/u ... lage-luxor

This does feel like rather old news because this was first announced about 4 or 5 years ago. However, I guess the revolution forced it to be put on hold then. Good to see it is being picked up again now.

I find it very difficult to understand what they can possibly do to save this remarkable place.

I have a friends who live there, one was the chief security officer at the Winter Palace, though long retired now. His home was very comfortable and room for the whole family, but even way back then, the place suffered from rising damp, almost up to two feet in some places. When this village was first built I think it was expected that the surrounding land would dry out, but as we all know this is not so, being that it is constantly irrigated. This of course is quite common today with many modern built properties in that area, but homes built in the old traditional fashion, I fear there is little hope.......but then again, if you have an organisation with limitless funds, then anything is possible.

The whole thing is a rather sick and twisted irony. The village was built to house people who were to be kicked out of their homes which eventually were regarded as worthless and were bulldozed, but the people refused the Hassan Fathy homes as they did not suit the local lifestyle and were a strange import based on Nubian homes. The entire project actually was a failure, and the homes were eventually squatted in by people who came from outside Luxor.

The Hassan Fathy homes were falsely promoted as pharaonic style traditional architecture when the homes the people had been inhabiting in Old Qurna in reality owed a lot more to traditions handed down from ancient times.

And now, UNESCO wants to save these rejected, non-traditional homes, after the original village was bulldozed and its traditional architecture obliterated, while UNESCO stood by a did nothing. Because this whole preservation project is being supported by a bunch of architects who live in Switzerland who revere an outsider architect like Hassan Fathy more than they do real vernacular architecture built by nameless locals.

The only successful projects by Hassan Fathy were a few mudbrick homes he built for rich people. All his "architecture for the poor" was a complete and utter failure. No wonder, read the first page of his book and you will see his inspiration for the village in Luxor was a visit he made as a child to his wealthy family's ezba in the Delta and seeing how the people there had to live in hovels because his rich family treated them like ****. Not because he felt sorry for them. But because he was disgusted by them.

A fitting tribute to Hassan Fathy's work would be to let it all crumble to dust.

Ouch!!

No mincing of words there!