Egypt and Spain: tradition and modernity

Egypt, 1945: Hassan Fathy (1900 – 1989) was in charge of the project for the village of New Gourna, a small foundation settlement near Luxor. The project represented for Fathy a field of experimentation of a series of already undertaken thinking about the search for an Egyptian architectural language, in which inhabitants could recognize themselves. A language which in nourished by forms, spaces and architectural elements found in the basin of the Arab tradition, rewritten and transposed into the contemporary. Six years later, in 1961, Ramses Wissa Wassef (1911 – 1974) established the Ḥarrāniyyah Waving Village, located along the road taking from Cairo to the archaeological site of Giza. Conceived as a village, of which it reproposes the structure, the Center was created with the purpose of passing on ancient knowledges in the field of applied arts, which, in that particular moment of the Egyptian history, were given a fundamental value within the process of reconstruction of a national identity. Spain, 1953: Alejandro de La Sota (1913 – 1996) published in the Revista Nacional de Arquitectura the project (later realized) for the new Pueblo de Esquivel near Seville. Part of a vast program of colonization of Spain undertaken by the Intituto Nacional de Colonizacíon, the project was used by Sota as an opportunity to reflect upon the relationship of contemporary architecture with tradition in search for a new architecture. In the project, recognized as a “transitional essay” for the works to come, the architect identified two different eventual paths in the declination of this relationship with regard to urban and architectural forms. In 1951, Josep Antoni Coderch (1913 – 1984) and Santos Torroella, in the section dedicated to Spain at the Milano Triennale Exposition, exhibited a series of furnishings combined with handicrafts, works of art and some shots of traditional architectures and works of the architect Antoni Gaudì and the photographers Joaquim Gomis and Joan Prats. What unites the work of these architects who, all born in just over a decade, worked in two countries – Egypt and Spain – so geographically distant from each other? What links them to other figures, such as Fernando Tavora or Dimitris Pikionis, who carried out similar operations in Portugal and Greece? Starting from these questions, the paper aims at investigating consonances of intent and linguistic differences of approaches that nevertheless express similar concerns in the search for an architectural language through operations of abstraction of cultural meanings.