1.

"At all costs, I have always wanted to avoid the attitude too often adopted by professional architects and planners: that the community has nothing worth the professionals' consideration, that all its problems can be solved by the importation of the sophisticated urban approach to building. If possible, I want to bridge the gulf that separates folk architecture from architect's architecture." 2. When the full power of a human imagination is backed by the weight of a living tradition, the resulting work is far greater than any that an artist can achieve when he has no tradition to work in or when he willfully abandons its tradition. (p. 25) from Architecture for the Poor: 3. Development without self-help is an impossibility. But people whose surroundings are ugly and barren are apt to be unproductive and dispirited. This is not the idle speculation of a do-gooder. Any factory manager knows its truth. Workers in bright, attractive surroundings produce more than workers in ugly, drab surroundings. The human spirit is our most precious resource. Its ecology is our greatest challenge. From the foreword by William R. Polk: 4. in the architectural school they make no study of the history of domestic buildings, and learn architectural periods by the accidents of style, the obvious features like the pylon and the stalactite. Thus the graduate architect believes this to be all there is in style, and imagines a building can change its style as a man changes clothes. (p.20) 5. A conscious decision may be reached either by consulting tradition or by logical reasoning and scientific analysis. Both processes should yield the same result, for traditions embodies the conclusions of many generations practical experiment with the same problem, while scientific analysis is simply the organized observation of the phenomena of the problem. (p.23) 6. Certainly one may make something according to habit it will then be living and beautiful only by the residual virtue of the decisions one took when first trying to make that kind of object, and by virtue too of the minor decisions taken in the act of making the habitual movements of fabrication. Yet the best way to create beauty is not necessarily to make an odd or original design. How true this is even in the work of God, who does not have to change the design concept in order to produce individuality in men, but can span the whole scale of beauty between Cleopatra and Caliban simply by adjusting the position or the size of the elements in a face. (p. 23)

7. The responsibility for this degeneration of the patron to the status of client lies squarely upon the architect, who has himself degenerated from an artist to a professional. (p. 29, footnote) 8. in medicine no one expects the doctor when dealing with the poor to try to mass -produce operations. Why then, when a passing infirmity like a sore appendix is honored by careful personal treatment, should a permanent necessity like a family house be accorded any less? If you chop off appendixes by thousands with a machine, your patients will die, and if you push families into rows of identical houses, then something in those families will die, especially if they are poor. The people will grow dull and dispirited like their houses, and their imagination will shrivel up. (p. 31) 9. If you regard people as millions to be shoveled into various boxes like loads of gravel, if you regard them as inanimate, unprotesting, uniform objects, always passive, always needing things done to them, you will miss the biggest opportunity to save money ever presented to you For, of course, a man has a mind of his own, and a pair of hands that do what his mind tells them. A man is an active creature, a source of action and initiative, and you no more have to build him a house than you have to build nests for the birds of the air. Give him half a chance and a man will solve his part of the housing problem without the help of architects, contractors, or planners far better than any government authority ever can. (p. 32) 10.A peasant never talks about art, he makes it. (p. 40) 11.Because his experience of nature is so bitter, because the surface of the earth, the landscape, is for the Arab a cruel enemy, burning, glaring, and barren, he does not find any comfort in opening his house to nature at a ground level. The kindly aspect of nature for the Arab is the sky pure, clean, promising collness and lifegiving water in its white clouds, dwarfing even the expense of the desert sand with the starry infinite of the whole universe. (pp. 55-6) 12.Where a single may be a melody, a whole town is like a symphony, as in Wells, where the town squares ascend, movement by movement, to the climax of the cathedral. (p. 72) 13.With a few fateful lines on his drawing board, the architect decrees the boundaries of imagination, the peace of mind, the human stature of generations to come. (p. 73) 14.Hassan

Fathy - An

Architecture

for

People by James Steele, page 185.

- Tradition is the social equivalent of personal habit. 15. A Peasant never talks about art, he makes it. 16. -Tradition is not necessarily old-fashioned and it is not synonymous with stagnation.
17.