During the months in which Casa Árabe is hosting the exhibition “Hassan Fathy: Against the current” in its exhibition halls, we will be holding a series of simultaneous events that will give us the chance to get more in-depth knowledge about this ingenious Egyptian architect, an icon of sustainable architecture around the world.

The presentation was attended by Rasha Ismail, director of the Egyptian Institute of Islamic Studies and cultural attaché of the Egyptian Embassy in Spain, Professor Serge Santelli, an architect and contributor to the book, and José Tono Martínez, the exhibition curator. Nuria Medina, Casa Arabe’s Culture Coordinator, was responsible for the presentation, which included attendance and speeches by Omar Ahmed Abdel Wahab Selim, Ambassador of the Republic of Egypt in Spain.

Hassan Fathy is one of the most controversial, exciting and complex figures in the history of contemporary architecture. He was a man of his time whose biography embodies the contradictions of the century in which he lived. His works show a great calling for modernity but without setting aside the wisdom that traditional architecture provides, paradoxically creating solutions for problems that today have become more relevant than ever.

The book is a bilingual Arabic-Spanish edition that presents not only the construction solutions created by Fathy during his career, but also the thorough, meticulous work he carried out to develop what he called “appropriate technologies” and achieve an architecture that respects and dialogues with the human and natural environments. Includes texts by: José Tono Martínez, Nadia Radwan, Serge Santelli, Leila el Wakil, María Pura Moreno Moreno, F. Vegas, C. Mileto, V. Cristini, Hannan Collins and Zsolt Vasáros  (published by Ediciones Asimétricas, 2021).