Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt (Phoenix Books)

Book Description

Architecture for the Poor describes Hassan Fathy's plan for building the village of New Gourna, near Luxor, Egypt, without the use of more modern and expensive materials such as steel and concrete. Using mud bricks, the native technique that Fathy learned in Nubia, and such traditional Egyptian architectural designs as enclosed courtyards and vaulted roofing, Fathy worked with the villagers to tailor his designs to their needs. He taught them how to work with the bricks, supervised the erection of the buildings, and encouraged the revival of such ancient crafts as claustra (lattice designs in the mudwork) to adorn the buildings.

Customer Reviews:

A must read for any architect........2003-03-17

For those of you looking for a book on how to build a house cheaply this is not for you. This book is on how to give poor people the means to build homes, and communities, get educated, and develop careers all at the same time. All this can be orchestrated by an architect who understands the needs of the people he is designing for. Every architectural student should be required to read this book.

An economic revolution using mud.......2002-04-10

'Architecture for the Poor' by Dr Hassan Fathy

Sometimes a book is so ahead of its time it can sink beneath the waves before it's appreciated. Such a book was 'Architecture for the Poor', written in 1969 and originally published by the Ministry of Culture in Cairo. Written with the help of a fellowship from the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs it was published in America by the University of Chicago in 1973 and in a second impression in 1976. But even then it was only taken up by the fringes of the solar energy movement as a neat idea for a different culture and climate. Currently its out of print. The author died in 1989 having received some praise in his home country of Egypt but having seen no actions to take up his ideas for helping peasants take control of their lives by taking charge of the creation of their homes and communities.

Dr Fathy was officially an architect but his talents as an amateur anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist, inventor, and economist are what make him great. His holistic approach to solving the housing problems of a poverty level community (and his vision to see how they could be applied to a whole country) takes in the gamut from reviving the craft of mud brick making (along with the traditional masonry building of vaults and domes to roof simple mud structures) through to solving the problems of parasitic worm infections that debilitate entire populations infected through their water supply systems. Every aspect of village life receives his attention: how to adapt an Austrian heating system to make a cooking stove more efficient, how to share a house with cows more hygienically, where to do laundry, how to build a better school, how to provide an alternative income from tomb robbing for the peasants, and how to tactfully delouse peasants using the luxury of a Turkish bathhouse rather than the chilly chemicals of a government mandated cold shower.

His appreciation that some inefficiencies are functional within a society makes the changes he does make even more impressive. Fetching water from the village pump in water jars is one of the few occasions a girl has to be seen out in public in Moslem society. Providing running water to every house would derail the marriage process within that society. However he is happy to create plumbing inside the home ? running pipes to the kitchen from rooftop storage jars across the middle of rooms, so if they leak the occupants will have to fix them not ignore the drips until the wall is eroded. Fathy's changes are not just improvements to make a peasants life more like a modern westerners life ? that is impossible given the astonishingly low income of these people. They are changes that make life easier or healthier while striving to maintain traditions and strengthen society because they understand what is behind the tradition. For example splitting the village up into single home farmsteads would expose the individual families to roaming bands of thieves, so it's necessary to let houses huddle together for protection and for cows ? more valuable than children ? to stay inside the house.

Yet this book is not just about practicalities of house or village building ? it's also about the need for beauty in the life of even the poorest amongst us. Dr Fahey's desire to restore an appreciation for craftsmanship to all members of society especially by restoring the ability of the poor to control the creation of their own homes is inspiring. An architect can help the process along only if he or she can learn to see life outside the urban world of modern design. This book shows how an architect with an academic education can be of some help to a peasant faced with grinding poverty but only if equipped with the ability to move to the world of that peasant and see how alien western technological solutions can be.

Fahey's ideas are not just applicable to Egyptian society, reading this book made me aware of the similarities of problems faced by peoples in many middle eastern countries, particularly Afghanistan which is trying to rebuild itself and could use Dr Fahey's techniques to rehouse its population cheaply and empoweringly. It's even possible to extend his ideas to other hot dry climates such as Southern California, and the desert states of the US, to Mediterranean countries and to many parts of Africa, South America, and Australia. Wherever issues of building cost or those of insulation, shelter and energy efficiency in a hot dry climate need addressing Dr Fahey's solutions should be considered. This book needs to be reprinted; clamor for copies and see if we can make it the bestseller it should have been the first time around.

ISBN 0-226-23916-0

Principled Professionalism.......2000-03-21

This book should be required reading to obtain an Architect's license. Mr Fathy is far from perfect, but his message of democratic economy is desperately needed and eloquently stated, and his mixture of respect for and scientific evaluation of traditional building techniques is inspiring.

A new theory in architecture by a famouce Egyptian architect.......1998-02-25

This book sets a new theory in architecture by the famouce Egyptian architect Hasan Fathy. Fathy argues that you can build fancy buildings without using expensive materials. He practiced his theory in Upper Egypt, Mexico, and many other countries.

Architecture for the Poor. An Experiment in Rural Egypt.

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Architecture for the Poor. An Experiment in Rural Egypt.
Hassan Fathy
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OPHAG8

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Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt
Hassan Fathy
Manufacturer: University of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000PS8SXS

Book Description

First published in 1880, same year as Edgar Degas' The Dancing Lesson and Edouard Manet's solo show of brasserie paintings at La Vie Moderne gallery, these Parisian Sketches share the Impressionist fascination with the contemporary life of Paris, an exuberant Paris in the era of the Op?ra Garnier and the Folies-Bergeres. Like the striking images of the early Impressionists, whom Huysmans championed when it was unfashionable, Parisian Sketches is an assault on the visual senses. Composed of a series of intense, meticulously observed literary impressions û of caf? concerts and circus performers, of streetwalkers and hot-chestnut sellers, of run-down slums and forgotten quarters in the grimy, shiny `City of Light' -- Parisian Sketches recreates the Paris with an intimacy and an immediacy that confirms Huysmans as one of the masters of 19th century French prose.

Customer Reviews:

The Sights and Sounds of Paris in the 1870s.......2004-07-15

Pre A Rebours, this series of meticulously detailed vignettes conjures up not merely images, but, more enticingly, the tastes, sounds and smells of the rampant Paris of the 1870's. From the burlesque of the Follies-Bergere to the melancholy of a Parisian bus ride, the reader can drain the absinthe from an unattended glass, or smudge the generously applied make-up of a cigarette girl or a lascivious whore. For every odour of affordable perfume, there is the smell of a sweaty armpit, for every pair of pretty ankles, there is the less becoming sight of a pair of tattered shoes or a stained dress. Indeed, Huysmans descriptive indulgences is the scintillating genius of a pure prose artist, where any plot or morality have been tossed from the window of a poplar inn, into the stagnant, stinking pools of the dried up Bievre.

But only a gross misreading would label the work of Huysmans as that of a man fascinated only with decadent whims and amoral extravagances. An admirable thinker, Huysmans impressions of the shameless and grotesque weekend excesses of his fellow Parisians cannot fail to call to mind our own even more rotten contemporary society.

This series of sketches represents a Huysmans who still held within him love/hate fascination with Parisian life, before he would turn his back on Paris, and Zola's naturalist movement, in A Rebours and the guidebook like novels charting the adventures of Durtal, his alter ego. If these Parisian Sketches are Baudelairean in one sense, where beauty and pleasure are drawn from deviance and repugnance, and the city dweller's manipulation of nature in order to match his bloated requirements evokes his own beautiful downfall, they just as easily evoke the colourful world of Renoir and Monet. They are impressions that precede the delight of Jean Renoir's "French Can-Can" as much as the bourgeois hypocrisies of Bunuel's "Belle de Jour".

Peppered with the original illustrations throughout , this volume is translated with subtlety by Brendan King and is a must for admirers of Huymans' work.

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Parisian Sketches Letters To the New Yor
Henry James
Manufacturer: COLLIER BOOKS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000UDRI7A

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Parisian sketches: Letters to the New York tribune, 1875-1876 (Collier books)
Henry James
Manufacturer: Collier Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0007EQ8LO

Book Description

A collection of Henry James' Paris letters to the Tribune.

Rendezvous with Paris: Sketches of Parisians (Moody colportage library)

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Rendezvous with Paris: Sketches of Parisians (Moody colportage library)
Fran Johnston
Manufacturer: Moody Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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Henry James Parisian Sketches
Edel/lind
Manufacturer: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000Q5XS8A

Paris: Including a description of the principal edifices and curiosities of that metropolis : with a sketch of the customs and manners of the Parisians under the old regime

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Paris: Including a description of the principal edifices and curiosities of that metropolis : with a sketch of the customs and manners of the Parisians under the old regime
Louis-SeÌbastien Mercier
Manufacturer: Printed by J. Hill ... for C. Taylor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875-1876

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Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875-1876
Henry James
Manufacturer: Collier Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000MB0IAO

Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875 - 1876 (edited By Leon Edel & Ilse Dusoir Lind)

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Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875 - 1876 (edited By Leon Edel & Ilse Dusoir Lind)

Manufacturer: Rupert hart-Davis
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000GSE8C2

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Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875-1876

Manufacturer: Rupert Hart-Davis, London
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HUGO6M

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Sketches of Paris and the Parisians
Samuel G Goodrich
Manufacturer: Ward and Lock
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0008BND6E

Book Description

Are you in sales? Want fast results selling more? Then this book is for you. The sales methods given in this book apply to salespeople of all kinds—from clerks selling in retail stores and servers in restaurants to sales representatives in high-end golf communities selling homes for millions of dollars. Veterans and beginners alike will benefit from this new approach to sales that gets fast results. Thousands have already gained the benefit of the methods given in this book. It is a great advantage to anyone wishing to improve their selling techniques and earn more money immediately. Numerous golf course communities, new home and real estate companies, and manufacturers’ representatives throughout the United States have been using these techniques for years, generating billions of dollars a year in new revenues. Now you can apply these proven techniques to say less and sell more with fast results today.

Shut Up and Sell! Tested Techniques for Closing the Sale

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Shut Up and Sell! is a Classic

Shut Up and Sell! Tested Techniques for Closing the Sale
Don Sheehan
Manufacturer: Amacom Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Think and Grow Rich

ASIN: 0814476155

Customer Reviews:

Shut Up and Sell! is a Classic.......1999-11-10

I rediscovered this book recently, since reading it over ten years ago. It is amazing how many good ideas on closing the sale are contained in this book, still very relevant today. I highly recommend this book - search it out and read!

Shut Up and Sell: How to Say Less and Sell More Today

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Shut Up and Sell: How to Say Less and Sell More Today
Craig Lawn
Manufacturer: iUniverse
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

General | Real Estate | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Book Description

Numerous golf course communities, new home and real estate companies, and manufacturers’ representatives throughout the United States have been using these techniques for years, generating billions of dollars a year in new revenues.

Now you can apply these proven techniques to say less and sell more with fast results today.

Book Description

A tranquil pregnancy is the first step in making a "baby sanctuary," according to author Roni Jay. In this appealing guide, she shows expectant moms how to attain that tranquility by preparing a soothing atmosphere in the nursery and throughout the home. Combining and harnessing the forces of feng shui, space clearing, color, aromatherapy, mood music, peaceful blessings, and positive thought, Roni Jay offers a model for a family oasis where sensory stimulation and emotional relaxation coexist and thrive, making baby feel safe, cherished, and confident. The book includes advice on everything from managing a busy pregnancy, planning a baby shower, and babyproofing the home to preparing siblings - and parents - for the new arrival. This lavishly illustrated book contains 100 color photos and 50 color illustrations, making it a perfect gift for expectant mothers.

Book Description

The last major Republican offensive of the Spanish Civil war, the Battle of the Ebro was a vitally important episode in the Spanish conflict and, although ultimately a Republican defeat it proved a severe setback for the Nationalist forces under General Francesco Franco Bahamonde. According to many historians it extended the war for an extra year. Ultimately however it was probably the death knell of the Republic; their armies lost vast amounts of men and materials and they were left incapable of defending their remaining territory effectively. The consequences for Europe were immense.

Customer Reviews:

Highly recommendable.......2003-09-15

I heartily endorse this book. It is a comprehensive and detailed description of the battle of the Ebro in 1938, as well as the events that led to the Spanish Civil War.

One of the main reasons why I find this book appealing is, that it is the only Osprey book on the Spanish Civil War I have read so far that can be described as neutral in a political sense. Most other books such as Patrick Turnbull The Spanish Civil War 1936-39 (MAA 74) - appear to automatically portray Franco and his followers as the good guys in the conflict, on the grounds that their adversaries consisted mostly of anarchists and various socialist fractions.

Historians who attempt to rehabilitate Franco's reputation often tend to overlook the fact that whereas the Republicans generally tried to avoid unnecessary acts of brutality during the war, the Nationalists did exactly the opposite. Mass killings, rapes, looting and wanton destruction were commonplace as they terrorised the civilians in the newly conquered areas, trying to discourage them from putting up a resistance. The repression of political opponents continued virtually throughout the duration of the Franco regime.

The fact that Franco fought communism is no reason to glorify him. After all, Hitler did the same, but the homicidal aspects of his politics are so blatantly obvious that it would be quite impossible to depict him as anything resembling a heroic figure. In my opinion, defending Franco is as outrageous from an ethical point of view as it would be to defend Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin.

The Ebro 1938 does not deal with war crimes in any sense on either side of the conflict but neither does it attempt to side with the Francists. That's good enough for me.

The Ebro, an unknown battle.......2001-12-20

I thought this book dealt pretty well with an unknown battle from the Spanish Civil War. Up to now there are few books on the military campaigns and this one plugs the gap.
There are a few errors in the text but judging by the bibliography the author has attempted to look at a wide range of sources.

The Ebro 1938: Death Knell of Scholarship.......2001-09-19

Many of the newly-released Osprey titles are delightful to read or expand our knowledge of less well-known subjects. This entry is neither. Its text is undistinguished, its color illustrations poor, and its technical content execrable! The latter is particularly annoying in light of claims that the author is a "curator at the Royal Armories at Fort Nelson." Obvious errors abound. Some are typographical -- "7.62mm" mortars, "60-pounder" cannon, 1910 transmuted to 1901 in the same paragraph, and the "Write" airplane engine (invented by the Right brothers)-- but this begs the question, doesn't Osprey have any editors? Weapons/equipment data are awful: one photo shows a Model 93 Mauser rifle "in 7.65 mm, the standard" (caliber). In point of fact, all 93's were made in 7x57mm which was the standard; another shows a (1937) "Lanchester submachine-gun copy." This would be a remarkable feat, since the Lanchester was invented in 1941! (The gun is a copy of a German Bergmann). Some weapons are pure fantasy: the "Czech 7.62mm Mannlicher," for example. Likewise, aircraft and tank data differ from that found in easily accessible references. Since the numbers/types of aircraft used are at variance with other sources, this makes his Order of Battle (strengths and organization) information highly suspect. If the author has a real understanding of the strategic significance of this battle, he does not make it clear to the reader. His battle analysis is awkward, and its accuracy is highly suspect. Overall, the book has no credibility and should owe several stars!

A good account of the most famous battle of the Spanish Civi.......2000-11-07

The book is well writen and documented. The Ebro is possibly the most famous battle of the Spanish Civil War, and some of its images are classical icons of that period of history as the Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" or the Robert Cappa's picture of the fallen militia men. Its very clear in its explanations of the strategies and the development of the actions from both parts. At the same time, it had a lot of pictures from the places were the fight took place, so the reader can grasp a very good idea of the battles.

Nevertheless it has some flaws. The most important in my opinion is the low detail of the campaing main map in page 30. Some villages, mountain ridges and roads that are later named in the text, are missing in this map. Even for a spaniard is difficult to locate those places without the help of a map. The explanation of the objetifs of the Republican side is confussed due to this lack of detail. Another is the few pictures of the leaders from both sides. In other Osprey books the leader section usually depicts a lot of pictures of the leaders, but here you can see only three and in one of them only the back of a nationalist leader instead of his face. Finally, if has the typical english mistakes with the spanish names (Is so hard to check an spanish atlas?). The most funny is the name of the source from some pictures. You can read "Partido Comunista Española" instead of "Partido Comunista Español". Well, in spanish language as opposed to english language, some things and its adjetifs have gender. For example "a red table" is in spanish a "female" thing (una mesa roja). A political party is a "male" thing. So it was delightful to check that a posible translation for the PCE is the Comunist Party of Spanish Woman.

Book Description

The last major Republican offensive of the Spanish Civil war, the Battle of the Ebro was an attempt to restore communications between Catalonia and the rest of Republican Spain. It was a vitally important episode in the Spanish conflict and, although ultimately a Republican defeat it proved a severe setback for the Nationalist forces under General Francesco Franco. According to many historians it extended the war for an extra year. Here, the author investigates how, ultimately, it was probably the death knell of the Republic; their armies lost vast amounts of men and materials and they were left incapable of defending their remaining territory effectively. Additionally, under pressure from France and Britain, the International Brigades were withdrawn from Spain during the battle, ending direct military support for the Republic. The consequences for Europe were immense. Franco's ultimate victory created another fascist state; Britain and France's failure to intervene effectively convinced Hitler that the liberal democracies would not oppose him and hastened his invasion of Czechoslovakia, and ultimately the outbreak of World War II.

The Ebro 1938 : Death Knell of the Spanish Republic (Praeger Illustrated Military History)

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The Ebro 1938 : Death Knell of the Spanish Republic (Praeger Illustrated Military History)
Chris Henry
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MUFD5U

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A History of the Modern World. Vol.1. 6th Edition
R.R. & COLTON DALEMER
Manufacturer: Random House USA Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | World | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0394335996

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