#hassanfathy

[sierenegordon]

Holy grail.

[anoldfashionedlife]

Cairo

To spend time in Cairo is to spend time in traffic. It’s inevitable in a haphazard city designed, over centuries, by the invisible hand of time: a medieval town is established, it’s population grows and pushes against–and then beyond–the perimeter walls; the town grows; so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

Early one morning while in traffic en route to Coptic Cairo–one of the oldest parts of the city, the original medieval town—I thought to myself: chaos theory seems like it might be a helpful guide to understanding Cairo. I began to read A Very Short Introduction to Chaos Theory, which says more about me than it does about Cairo. As I read, the opening sequence of A Day in Cairo unfolded just beyond the window pane, eloquently captured in Egyptian literature by Naguib Mahfouz. “It was not a quiet street,” he writes in Palace Walk:

There were the loud cries of vendors, haggling of shoppers, pleas of crazed beggars, and wise-cracks of passerby. People conversed as though delivering a public oration. Even the most personal discussions ricocheted everywhere, flying up to the minarets. To this general commotion the Suarès omnibus added its clanking and the donkey carts their clatter.

Or, in Chaos Theory: “After a short interval, the system effectively becomes unpredictable."

Mathematically, chaos is defined as nonlinear behavior that exists in a realm somewhere between periodic and random. That is, somewhere between not-random-at-all and very-random. Hassan Fathy, an Egyptian architect and urban thinker, describes a typical Arab city: "the houses and the streets are like the marble mosaics of the Sultan Hasan Mosque: different, but composing one composition.” The marble mosaics of the mosque are characterized by varying parts made up of geometric shapes, each with a pattern of its own but a pattern that differs from the adjacent part. Despite the risk of introducing yet another reference, they resemble a collection of Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass windows. In other words, somewhere between periodic and random.

In the context of Cairo, chaos is two cars squeezing past one another on a narrow street that wasn’t designed for two cars to squeeze past one another; it wasn’t designed for cars at all. Chaos is a collection of one-way streets with no discernible logic: a drive from one end of the city to the other covers a route resembling an aimless doodle from above, generally moving in a single direction but often crossing back on itself.

In describing the Arab city, Fathy continues:

The only geometric pattern that normally goes with town planning is the gridiron. Here the streets would be straight with parallel lines—in which case the only nodal point would be the vanishing point, which takes place at infinity. To feel that you have to go to infinity would make you feel tired before you have taken two steps. This kind of pattern would suit the automobile but not man on foot.

From this point-of-view, predictability is chaos: the chaos of ceaseless knowing, of boredom.

Traffic became a metaphor that accompanied me during my travels around Egypt. Despite being the world’s oldest travel destination—the pyramids and temples were visited by ancient Greeks on holiday—places outside the essential archeological sites were difficult to navigate and, like the traffic, frequently stop-and-go. More than other places I’d visited, in Egypt I was at the mercy of the kindness of strangers.

One evening at a popular restaurant I was stopped by my inability to speak Arabic and the lack of an available table. The sizable restaurant’s only server told me to wait—I think—and was then reasonably perturbed whenever I got in his way, which was often in the crowded restaurant. And then, a fellow patron—an Egyptian who once lived in New York and spoke English perfectly—offered me the empty chair at his table. And even though the restaurant sold one thing—grilled squab stuffed with rice perfumed with cumin, cardamom, and other spices—he intuited my predicament and offered to order for me.

On another day I ordered a falafel sandwich from a roadside stand and ended up with four falafel sandwiches. (I was far from disappointed: it was the best falafel I’d ever had, having smelled it from a couple blocks away and following my nose into the residential neighborhood where I found the stand situated between two apartment complexes.) On yet another day I ordered a falafel sandwich and didn’t get falafel at all; instead the waiter brought me fuul, a traditional fava bean stew.

In chaos theory there’s a concept known as sensitive dependence, or more commonly the butterfly effect. Small uncertainties when fed into a chaotic model quickly become large uncertainties. By way of explanation, the effect of a butterfly fluttering its wings, over time and distance, becomes a typhoon on the opposite side of the world.

For example, one day I was traveling to Alexandria. At the train station in Cairo—a beautiful, art deco building, chaotic in the way that train stations tend to be with commuters coming and going and going and coming—I needed to buy a train ticket. I first wandered around the station looking for a bank of tellers and a queue of people, and when I couldn’t find one I asked somebody, in English. They replied, in English, but directed me to the train platform thinking I’d asked where to board.

I walked back into the main terminal. I passed beneath an enormous light fixture—an inverted sundial hanging from the ceiling of the gargantuan space—and towards the exit. There I found a ticket machine, and it spoke English. And it was broken. But next to the ticket machine was the queue I’d initially sought. Of the ten lines, I figured out which one to queue up because I knew what time the train to Alexandria was departing—and because I learned Arabic numbers, one through nine, while I waited. At the head of the line, after a few false starts and quite a bit of ad hoc sign language, I bought my second-class ticket to Alexandria.

A few days later at the Alexandria train station when it was time to return to Cairo, I went to apply all that I’d already learned. But in Alexandria the rules had changed. There was no English-speaking ticket machine. There was no board with departure times and line numbers to cross reference. There was only chaos, and the challenge started anew. Luckily, a nice woman at the tourist office helped me buy a ticket.

Chaos Theory concludes: "the role of uncertainty and the rich variety of behavior that mathematically simple systems reveal is still largely unappreciated.” I suppose that’s true when describing chaos theory, but the role of uncertainty in travel is utmost. The challenges one encounters when abroad—especially in a place like Cairo—are our primary teachers.

On my last night in Egypt I went to the rooftop bar at the Odeon Palace Hotel, ten stories above downtown Cairo. The low-slung, concrete city spread out below me. It was Friday evening and quiet; most families were indoors having their weekly meal together. It rained briefly and for a time the only movement was the waiter periodically bringing me another Stella local. But as the sky gave way to darkness, the quiet gave way to the cries of vendors, the haggling of shoppers, to the crazed beggars, to the passerby.

[mtoler-archnet]

Popular on Twitter: Hassan Fathy Archive https://buff.ly/2J1OOm1 #hassanfathy #residentialarchitecture #vernaculararchitecture #egyptianarchitecture https://www.instagram.com/p/BnAESBZFVrw/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1jfm1743qnr49

[mtoler-archnet]

In designing Dar al-Islam in Abiquiu, New Mexico, US, Hassan Fathy adapted techniques of Egyptian vernacular architecture to the conditions in New Mexico to take advantage of natural lighting while also maximizing climate control. https://buff.ly/2HNZeQN This 2014 photograph by @rachid_idir is an interior view of the library. #Archnet #islamicarchitecture #modernarchitecture #vernaculararchitecture #HassanFathy (at Dar al Islam)

[atelierdetroupe]

#hassanfathy

[erittonio]

Alberto Ferlenga . Le strade di Pikionis . LetteraVentidue . 2014 #pikionis #ferlenga #lestradedipikionis #hassanfathy #hansvanderlaan #fernandpouillon #jozeplecnik #dimitrispikionis #ideadelfica #angelossikelianos

[alovelyvaguery]

Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy's New Gourna project, built in the 40s to rehabilitate excavators atop the royal necropolis at Luxor ultimately unwilling to shift from the lucrative space they occupied. Erected with sustainable materials, now fallen into disrepair, but being partially restored through World Monuments Fund. Hassan Fathy is the author of Architecture for the Poor.