Hassan Fathy, the Egyptian architect known for his recognition of the potential of vernacular forms as a vital force in contemporary architectural design, sought to integrate the traditions of Islamic art with his modern visions for living. Guided by Fathy’s principles, Ahmad Hamid, an architect who collaborated with Hassan Fathy in the Institute for Appropriate Technology, identifies questions about the nature of Islamic art and its building culture, as well as the origins of modern architecture. This richly illustrated book provides new insights into Hassan Fathy’s profuse, pathbreaking design documents and built projects, while exploring the socioeconomic, environmental, psychological, and esthetic components of Fathy’s work in the light of a quest for a new universal modernity for the twenty-first century.

Anna Boghiguian, one of Egypt’s foremost contemporary artists, has traveled the globe and recorded her artistic reaction to each new place in drawings and paintings in the notebooks she carries everywhere. But her roads through India or Cambodia, Canada or France always come back to the land of her birth, Egypt. Her drawings of Egypt reflect her instinctive and emotional responses to the country’s many layers of history and myth, and to the people, ancient and modern, grand and everyday, who populate those histories and myths with such entrancing spirit. In this very personal presentation of Egypt, Anna Boghiguian shares both her visual and her verbal thoughts, as she leads us on a tour of this incredible land of fact and fiction, across space and in and out of time, through her words that paint pictures and her drawings that tell stories. This truly unique book is as much about the artist as it is about the land, and a treasure on both counts.