Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:
From the mosque in this dusty desert village, you can see the wide terraces and austere columns of one of Egypt’s premier tourist destinations, the Temple of Hatshepsut, baking far in the distance. It’s late August, and by noon the temperature is already 103 degrees Fahrenheit and heading well north of that, enough to drive even the most intrepid tourists who visit the site back to their motor coaches and hotels.
But here in New Gourna there are no tourists, even though this village, placed on the World Monuments Fund watch list in 2010, may be as important to the future of our warming planet as the tombs and temples of Ancient Egypt are to the past. It was here that the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy began a social housing experiment in 1945, planning a town with traditional Nubian materials and design, defended against the heat with thick walls of mud brick and natural ventilation — passive cooling techniques that had, for millennia, been an essential part of the local architecture.
Fathy, a progressive architect with a deep respect for the past, broke with the dogmas of modernism, the generic boxes of concrete and steel, plugged into the electrical grid, that had become a universal symbol of Western progress around the globe. He was interested in something more radical, and better suited to Egypt: sustainable architecture, built by hand by local artisans and designed to be habitable even during the hottest days of the year.
I’ve come here to find what remains of Fathy’s experiment on the Nile in Upper Egypt, some 400 miles south of Cairo. It’s one stop on a longer trip to some of the hottest places on the planet, to see if the three basic elements of passive cooling — earth, water and wind — really function as Fathy and other architects say they do. Do the thick, earthen walls that Fathy built in New Gourna really keep a house cool? Can a fountain splashing in an Ottoman courtyard drop the temperature to bearable levels? Can desert winds be harnessed from above a house to wick the sweat off those inside it?
From the comfort of libraries in a much cooler climate, I had read about these buildings and the punishing climate they withstand. But when I visited them, it was my body, not my mind, that registered the magic of their design.
Passing under a soaring air shaft of a Cairo mosque, it felt like someone turned on the air conditioning. In New Gourna, I entered the darkened shelter of a simple mud-brick room and I imagined I was stepping out of a sauna, into a flood of cool, dry air. In a city in the arid zone of eastern Turkey, I watched the attendant of an old courtyard house water down the porous stone of its leafy, green courtyard, and the seasons seemed to change, from high summer outside to a burst of spring within.
All of these technologies have their contemporary equivalents: Electric fans, swamp coolers and insulation. But throughout the Earth’s hot zones, many of them in the Global South, the new technologies are expensive, and create dependence on erratic electrical grids and networks of production, commerce and transportation that are alien, and unsustainable.
The old technologies are also a resource: They offer a way forward, architecturally, culturally and climatically, not just for torrid zones in Egypt or Turkey, but for heavily populated regions throughout the world that rely on precarious sources of power. From Cairo to California, there are architects who are already incorporating these technologies in contemporary buildings. But there are multiple challenges: overcoming skepticism among people long dependent on modern systems, recalibrating what it means and feels like to be comfortable, and recovering and preserving the wisdom of vernacular systems.
