5 ideas
Fathy found that masons in Nubian villages built mud-brick vaults and domes with no wooden formwork, laying courses of brick on an incline so that each brick leaned against and adhered to the last. This removed the need for timber, which Egypt lacked and rural families could not afford, and it put the roof over a poor house back within reach of the family and a local mason.
No government can pay contractors to build the housing the rural poor need, so Fathy proposes cooperative construction. Families work on each other's houses, and master masons train apprentices, with recorded labor credits making the exchange of work dependable. Architects still design individual houses and continue to supervise the building.
Traditional features such as the courtyard, the wind-catcher (malqaf), the mashrabiya screen, and thick earth walls should be read as tested answers to heat, glare, and air movement, worked out over centuries, not as ornament or nostalgia. When a builder discards them for imported modern forms, the result is houses that are hotter and more expensive to live in.
Fathy built New Gourna to resettle villagers who lived over pharaonic tombs near Luxor and made a living by looting them. The Gournis did not want to leave, and they resisted and sabotaged the move. Bureaucrats also obstructed the project, funding was withdrawn, and the village was left unfinished and only partly occupied, which shows that a well-designed village can still fail when the people it is built for do not want it.
Fathy argues that every community has its own ways of using space, rituals, crafts, and social arrangements, and that a village should be designed out of these. If a designer imposes standardized plans, the resulting houses break the community's social fabric and erase the crafts it depends on. His method was to study each family's needs and customs so that the variety in a village comes from the lives actually lived in it.