Hassan Fathy was born in Alexandria in 1900, to an Egyptian father and Turkish mom.

He trained as an architect in Egypt, graduating in 1926 from the King Fuad University (now Cairo University). Fathy married once, to Aziza Hassanein, sister of Ahmed Hassanein. He designed a villa for her along the Nile in Maadi, which was destroyed to make way for the corniche. He also designed her brother’s mausoleum (1947), along Salah Salem, in Neo-Mamluk style.

He began teaching at the College of Fine Arts in 1930 and designed his first adobe buildings in the late 1930s.

With regard to aesthetic issues, Fathy placed emphasis on traditional Nubian architectural designs which he observed in a 1941 trip to the region (enclosed courtyards; vaulted roofing), yielding what Fathy described as “spacious, lovely, clean, and harmonious houses.” He also made use of traditional Nubian ornamental techniques (claustra, a form of mud latticework), as well as vernacular architecture techniques of the Gourna region. Some critics have observed, however, that Fathy’s project for Gourna is not a superlative example of hw to prioritize vernacular architecture in an urban plan, given that the domed architecture Fathy championed is traditionally used for funerary architecture rather than residential or domestic spaces

Fathy’s New Gourna project was applauded in a popular British weekly in 1947 and soon after in a British professional journal; further articles were published in Spanish, French and in Dutch. Later, Fathy would author a book on the New Gourna project, initially published by Cairo’s Ministry of Culture in a limited edition in 1969, entitled Gourna: A Tale of Two Villages. In 1973 it was republished by the University of Chicago as Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt.

In 1953 he returned to Cairo, heading the Architectural Section of the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1954.

In 1957, frustrated with bureaucracy and convinced that buildings designed with traditional methods appropriate to the climate of the area would speak louder than words, he moved to Athens to collaborate with international planners evolving the principles of ekistical design under the direction of Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis. He served as the advocate of traditional natural-energy solutions in major community projects for Iraq and Pakistan and undertook extended travel and research for the “Cities of the Future” program in Africa.

Returning to Cairo in 1963, he moved to Darb al-Labbana, near the Cairo Citadel, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He also did public speaking and private consulting. He was a man with a riveting message in an era searching for alternatives in fuel, personal interactions, and economic supports.

He left his first major international position, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, in 1969 to complete multiple trips per year as a leading critical member of the architectural profession.

His participation in the first U.N. Habitat conference in 1976 in Vancouver which was followed shortly by two events that significantly shaped the rest of his activities. He began to serve on the steering committee for the nascent Aga Khan Award for Architecture and he founded and set guiding principles for his Institute of Appropriate Technology.

He was part in 1979 of a colloquium entitled in his honour ‘Architecture for the Poor’ in Corsica (France) Alzipratu.

In 1980, he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Architecture and Urban Planning and the Right Livelihood Award.

Fathy designed the mosque and madrasa, constructed with adobe, at Dar al-Islam, an educational center near Abiquiú, New Mexico, USA. The main buildings were completed in 1981, and Dar al-Islam opened in 1982.

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C467/37) with Hassan Fathy in 1986 for its Architects Lives’ collection held by the British Library.

He held several government positions and died in Cairo in 1989.