New Gourna Village

In the nineteenth century, Gourna was a small farming settlement at the foot of the Theban necropolis, near present-day Luxor. By 1945, it had evolved into a village of approximately 7,000 inhabitants that subsisted mainly on ransacking the many tombs dating back to the days of the ancient Egyptians. The Egyptian Department of Antiquities, in an effort to solve this problem, decided to move the village to a location closer to Luxor. Hassan Fathy was commissioned to design and build a completely new village for the resettlement of the Gournii.

Fathy felt that New Gourna could only become a success if his design took local custom into account and integrated the architectural typologies of the old village. Fathy therefore based his urban design on the badana. A badana is a community of people that consists of some ten to 20 related families – headed by a sheikh – and functions as a single socioeconomic unit. In the completed part of New Gourna, four districts can be distinguished that each accommodate one or two badanas. Open spaces are arranged hierarchically in each cluster. Fathy favoured gradual transitions between a dwelling’s interior and the outdoors and vice versa. The dwellings are therefore designed around small courtyards. In Arab culture, the courtyard is more than just an architectural resource to create privacy and protection: it serves as an outdoor room, with the four walls supporting the dome of heaven. In addition, it constitutes the first transition from the interior to the outdoors; from private to (more) public. The dwellings are clustered to enclose a small, semi-public space, which eventually joins onto a public street or square.

All buildings in New Gourna are built entirely of mud bricks – a cheap and locally available material. The pit dug to acquire the mud was integrated into the urban plan to serve as a lake. When building with mud bricks, it is best to choose domes and arches as construction elements: the rectangular rooms inside the dwellings, including the bedrooms, therefore have domed roofs. Each of the beds is in an alcove (iwan) fit with a special gutter that offers protection from scorpions. Many dwellings include an indoor space for livestock on the ground floor. The plan included the realization of both dwellings and countless amenities including a Kahn (an inn and trading place for caravans), a mosque, a primary school for boys and a separate school for girls.

Despite sincere attempts to design New Gourna in a socially responsible manner, the Gournii refused to move into their new village. To Fathy’s great disappointment, only onefifth of the village was ever completed and years later, in 1961, only part of the village was inhabited. Over the years, many new dwellings were added and Fathy’s houses fell into disrepair. Mud-brick structures require a lot of maintenance, which the residents simply could not afford. The groundwater level also rose, causing the salt from the sandstone foundation to dissolve and the dwellings to subsequently collapse. Alarmed by its worrisome condition, UNESCO initiated a project for the preservation and reconstruction of the village in 2009. Unfortunately, the project was temporarily discontinued in 2011 due to the Egyptian Revolution.

Many decades after the first attempt to resettle the population of the old Gourna, the government repeated the initiative on the basis of identical arguments (protecting tombs from being ransacked). This time, the new location is farther away from the old Gourna, in a suburb of Al Taref. The construction of the new development began in 1997 and the massive relocation of, by then, more than 20,000 Gournii began in 2006. And this time, to force the population to abandon their homes, old Gourna was levelled. The starting points for the design of the second New Gourna were nowhere near as social as Fathy’s: the rigidly planned neighbourhood provides every family with an identical standard two-bedroom dwelling.