When historian Leïla el-Wakil stood before a room of Hassan Fathy’s closest admirers at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in 2007, she began with an apology as she had dared to call him ‘unknown.’¹ To those who had shared his company, the phrase seemed absurd, and even offensive. Outside that circle, perhaps her words carried a truth. Fathy remains a paradox of recognition, mythologised as a visionary figure through architectural fragments while seldom grasped in the totality of his practice.

Born in Alexandria in 1900 and passing in Cairo in 1989, Fathy remains Egypt’s most influential architect, celebrated for his advocacy of rural mudbrick construction, community-based design, and his ethical reconciliation of vernacular knowledge with modern socio-climactic imperatives. His canonical 1940s New Gourna Village garnered him international attention, rising to recognition as the architect of the poor. Whilst a fitting moniker, this paper pushes beyond the material realm of his built work to interpret Fathy’s vast — and overlooked — oeuvre of speculative drawings, gouache paintings, and fictional stories as active, autonomous components of the artist-architect’s philosophical trajectory. Attending to the interplay of form and narrative, I contend that the futurist sensibilities often associated with his mature architecture were already present in these multimodal early mid-century explorations.

Fathy’s career spanned nearly the entire twentieth-century, unfolding in tandem with Egypt’s own turbulent transformations. As both witness to and agent within the nation’s shifting political landscape, he operated amid the lingering imprint of successive colonial regimes, whose architectural legacies threatened to eclipse local typologies. Caught between the instability of Europeanisation and arabité, his work registers the psychic and cultural tension of a country negotiating its own modernity.

Rather than defining him through essentialist labels, I locate Fathy’s personal and polymathic dualities within the broader nahda, or the Arab Awakening, a period marked by postcolonial critique and creative renewal. Within this intellectual climate, Fathy translated the crisis of national identity into an idealistic architectural vision that sought to reclaim cultural memory through pieces of the past, projecting them into possible futures. Drawing on the vernacular ‘Arab house’ as both model and metaphor for his artworks and literature, he traced a lineage extending from Pharaonic precedents and Nubian huts, to Mamluk and Fatimid mosques and dwellings — forms he studied intimately through site visits to the Citadel, Aswan, and Luxor. These geographic encounters informed his lifelong project of reactivating indigenous knowledge systems as a radical proposition for envisioning modernity otherwise. I propose that Fathy’s utopian impulse to craft an ‘ideal’ world thus functions as a retrieval of a homeland of form — a territory that exists at once as memory and aspiration. When we embrace place as a socially constructed phenomenon achievable through imaginative engagement, imagination itselfbecomes constitutive of collective belonging and resistance.

Despite his Beaux-Arts training in a French-inflected cosmopolitan Cairo, Fathy’s outlook was transformed through a direct pedagogical engagement with Egypt’s rural countryside, where he encountered historic, local modes of spatial knowledge that reshaped his understanding of architecture’s social purpose. His paintings, in particular, reveal a sustained resolution between Western orthographic conventions and indigenous visual epistemologies. Drawing on Eastern techniques — such as the ornamental marginalia of miniature painting or various perspectival points within a single frame — Fathy employed a syncretic strategy that reimagined drawing as a catalyst for contemporary architectural representation. These experiments channeled his inherited methods toward inward reflection, and consequently, two mutually generative principles thread across his visual and literary work: the collapse of temporality and the multiplicity of experiential seeing. By engaging with his archival artworks as sites of theoretical production in their own right, this study expands the notion of architectural visuality, questioning what forms of making and representing are permitted to register within the discipline’s canon.

At times, Fathy’s compositions echo the symbolic precision of Pharaonic wall paintings or the rhythmic hieroglyphic inscription of form; at others, they adopt a restrained, notational clarity that allows affect to emerge through minimal means. His pictorial language is marked by a pared-down mise-en-scène, in which a few symbolically charged motifs — including botanical taxonomies, rural figures at work, cattle — enliven the central architecture whilst acting as its interlocutors. Their presence situates the manmade environment within a network of traditional socio-spatial practices and natural life. Central to this ecology is the fellah, the peasant farmer, whom Fathy casts as an active, central subject sustaining reciprocity between architecture and landscape. He therefore reclaims the vernacular gaze on indigenous terms, constructing an alternate vision of the Egyptian countryside as a site of cultural continuity, quiet resistance to Western urbanism, and ethical reflection for the architect-intellectual.

These non-practical, unbuilt works operate as atmospheric constructions — sites where perception and emotion are jointly produced, rendering the act of seeing inseparable from the act of sensing. The value of visual affect, here, becomes particularly generative. His paintings indulge in the expressive capacities of hue, often through washes of ochre, pistachio, and rust arranged around the luminous whiteness of a vernacular form, translating the fleeting play of daylight into permanent pigment. Indeed, the colour-consciousness of Fathy’s painterly imagination stands parallel to the monochromatic paleness of his realised buildings, which accept the pragmatic restraint of whitewashed adobe. However, I argue that they become participants, receptive canvases, in the daily rhythm of light and shadow, constantly reimagining themselves through their relationship with time — blushing rose at sunset and bleaching to near-translucence under the midday sun. Together, these modes construct a dialectic between ephemerality and solidity, material necessity and chromatic plenitude, situating colour as both a sensory and philosophical tool to conjure the tenderness and temporality of place.

Across his repertoire runs a sensibility both devotional and rigorously mathematical, where drawing becomes a meditative, almost sacred, engagement with space and community. Each line ritually structures relations of attachment, exclusion, and belonging. In Fathy’s hands, heritage and utopia are not fixed endpoints, but surfaces to be continually reassembled. Ultimately, his paradigmatic legacy suggests that spatial imagination is a sociopolitical act — a means of claiming agency over how place and identity are constructed.