In his widely-cited collection of essays on morality, Lectures on Ethics— transcribed by his students between 1775–80—Immanuel Kant issued an aphorism on the nature of human dignity: “Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.”[1] Kant was advancing a growing body of Western philosophy on human rights, moving one step beyond the material rights of air, food, water, and shelter to say that every human being not only has the innate right to live, but also the right to live a life free from instrumentalization towards an end. In other words, every life has intrinsic value.

This Enlightenment sentiment began to gain global currency throughout the eighteenth century, paving the way for reform movements in the nineteenth and twentieth. Indeed, before the modern period, “dignity” was a word utilized to connote the state of being worthy of honor and respect; it was largely conceived as a quality either hereditary or earned. Kantian dignity upended this anti-universalist conception and put forth the tenet that, in theory, all human life—irrespective of class or achievement, race, or gender—deserves dignity. This intellectual lineage may explain why our thinking about dignity over the last two centuries has been primarily philosophical, not material, in nature. By the twentieth century, in fact, dignity had become so widely entrenched in humanist philosophy that it transfigures into a legal concept in the constitutions of modern nation-states and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But this legal enshrinement patently does not translate into the preservation of human dignity on the ground. World wars, everyday hatred, and xenophobia have stripped millions of their dignity when they have not stripped them of their lives. Moreover, while poverty—the most pernicious dissolver of dignity—has decreased, overall inequality has ballooned, manifesting its own egregious indignities.

Today, the world faces new challenges to the preservation of human dignity, perhaps most loomingly, the spectre of a climate catastrophe that threatens our ability to ensure dignity intergenerationally. For one, it is an injustice that the carbon emissions unleashed on the world by the industrial Global North are the same emissions that will most radically alter the lives of those in the Global South. Moreover, consequent to the myriad climate catastrophes that we and our built world now face, it has become clear that the Global North must curb its material consumption. The climate crisis and the anthropocentric changes it demands raise the spectre of a future world full of architectural sacrifices: of the spaciousness of our homes, of creature comforts like climate-controlled rooms, the further densification of our towns and cities, and more. After all, the building sector has accounted for 40 percent of global carbon emissions.[2]

As we develop new ways of living, how can the concept of dignity guide us to lifeways that demonstrate both the value of a human life and the value of our environment? Dignity is a threshold concept: the most emancipatory tool we have at our disposal for understanding how to balance the fallout of climate change while maintaining a commitment to human dignity. Surprisingly enough, it is two architectural projects tethered to the rhetoric of dignity that can illuminate the ways in which history informs our understanding of this threshold condition of dignity. The first such project is in New Gourna, in Upper Egypt; and the second are the projects of Rural Studio, in Hale County, Alabama.

New Gourna, Luxor

Any discussion of utopianism in the twentieth century necessarily involves mass housing. Any discussion of mass housing is, in some measure, informed by dignity theory, whether or not the architect realizes it.

New Gourna was a settlement in Luxor, commissioned by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities in 1945. The goal was to relocate the residents of Old Gourna, a longstanding improvised settlement, so as to repristinate the Pharaonic sites adjacent to it, including Hathshepsut’s Temple, Valley of the Queens, and Valley of the Kings, among others. In so doing, the sites would become primed for more tourism. Depending on what one reads, the residents of Old Gourna are alternately identified as looters and “amateur archaeologists.”[3] Regardless of what the residents are called, Old Gourna had been home since at least the nineteenth century to antiquities traders who made a living digging in the numerous valley tombs for treasures—most of which reached international buyers looking to develop Egyptological collections in the West.

The architect of New Gourna was Hassan Fathy, an architect born and trained in Egypt. He was tasked with not only constructing new homes for the residents of Old Gourna, but also redesigning the entire social and economic infrastructure of their livelihood. In his plan, Fathy sought to retool the careers of Old Gourna’s residents from that of “amateur archaeologists” to that of craftsmen who would make handicrafts for tourists, trinkets, and souvenirs out of alabaster, onyx, basalt, and other local stones. New Gourna contained workshops for these activities as well as a market from which to sell them. The settlement also included communal structures Fathy saw as necessary for a village of several hundred: a mosque, a school, even an open-air theater. However, political and financial complications, as well as the residents’ opposition to relocation prevented completion of Fathy’s full masterplan. Moreover, today, only about 30 percent of what was completed of the original village remains.[4]

New Gourna’s architecture consisted of modest, user-built mud-brick structures, chosen for their simplicity and affordability. In addition, they could be constructed with local materials. Fathy’s designs pulled from a variety of historical Egyptian sources, most prominently Coptic and Nubian architecture, resulting in his own vernacular style. Yet despite the originality of its design, New Gourna was a massive failure. Fathy, for instance, made courtyards an essential part of the residences, even though courtyards were rare in Upper Egypt. When they were present, they were used as work areas by the residents, and not a spaces for leisure as Fathy intended.

The most rudimentary secondary literature on Fathy[5] naively paints him as a benevolent utopian seeking to better the lives of his countrymen. More sophisticated analyses, and his own archive, paint a more complex picture: one of an architect intent on improving the lives of the poor through good architecture, but also of a man with a deep-seated suspicion of the rural poor who, in his mind, lacked dignity through a combination of their living conditions—something they largely cannot control because of their indigence—and something they largely can control, which Fathy describes as their “peasantly insolence.”[6]

Fathy left behind an extensive written record, including his book on New Gourna, Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt, first published in 1969 as Gourna: A Tale of Two Villages by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.[7] His archives at the American University of Cairo reveal even more discussion of dignity in his letters, manuscript drafts, and in his own literature collection. One of the key measures of dignity was the destandardization of mass housing. Fathy writes in Architecture for the Poor (1973), “How can people so poor that they cannot even afford to buy ready-baked bread, but have to make their own to save the baker’s profit, even dream of a factory-made house? To talk of prefabrication to people living in such poverty is worse than stupid, it is a cruel mockery of their condition.… We cannot house them cheaply even when we do standardize, and we cannot house them with any semblance of human dignity unless we destandardize.”[8]

If destandardization was one pillar of dignity for Fathy, another was the environmental quality of the home, and the third was the activation of a kind of autodidacticism in his clients. Most tellingly, Fathy describes New Gourna holistically as not an “end in itself” but rather as a heuristic for a better architecture writ large.[9] This description of New Gourna as non-instrumental is precisely the kind of language that defines Kant’s conception of dignity. Fathy’s articulation is effectively a transposition of human dignity onto architecture. When imbued with dignity, architecture and human beings retain intrinsic, spiritual value. 

However inventive and beautiful, we cannot ignore the failure of New Gourna to deliver on Fathy’s tall ambitions to alleviate poverty and retrain the amateur archaeologists of Luxor. The residents, by and large, did not become as enamored with New Gourna as critical regionalists and architecture critics did. Residents were unwilling or unable to participate in the labor-intensive investment needed for the upkeep of mud-brick structures; one could argue that this mandate of perpetual labor was itself an indignity; and they were generally loathe to jump in wholesale to the more “dignified” business of souvenir makers rather than that of “tomb raiders.”

At the root of this schism, I suspect, is a peculiar collision of values where, on the one hand, the state wishes to make honest men of tomb raiders and, on the other, the tomb raiders had themselves been part of a lineage of generations of tradespeople with a certain measure of pride that conflicts directly with Western and museological morality. This tomb raiding work, however problematic, was the livelihood they knew. It would not surprise me if their reluctance to be domesticated into “dignified” citizens was, in a sense, also an opposition to the profound assault on their dignity. If architecture was the primary—and to some degree only—tool for this domestication, it is not a surprise that the would-be residents of New Gourna were indignant.

Rural Studio, Alabama

Rural Studio is a satellite campus of Auburn University’s School of Architecture. It is located in Newbern, Alabama, in Hale County—one of the poorest counties in the United States[10] and at the heart of the so-called Black Belt in the American South. The term “Black Belt” originally referred to the region’s rich, black soil. The term took on additional meaning in the nineteenth century, when the region was developed for cotton plantation agriculture executed by enslaved African Americans. After the American Civil War, many freedmen stayed in the area as sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

Founded in 1992 by the late Samuel Mockbee, a white Mississippi native, Rural Studio is a design-build program that, as part of its educational experience, immerses students in the design and construction of innovative, low-cost buildings for communities.

While Rural Studio’s and New Gourna’s objectives share many similarities, Fathy seemed to revel in the role of the architect, while Mockbee regularly demonstrated scorn for the profession’s entrenchment and bent towards theory: he described American architects as “house pets for the rich” and was known to regularly quip “screw theory” whenever he was privy to a conversation that ventured into conceptual territory.[11]

But what Mockbee was really denouncing were the discursive and exegetic traditions of the profession. While Mockbee was not the prolific writer that Fathy was (he was, in fact, more of an artist), he did manifest a robust and recognizable theoretical domain of his own. “Everyone rich or poor deserves a shelter for the soul,” he said, evincing what is clearly an articulation of a universal idea of dignity.[12]

Eschewing ambition or careerism, Mockbee noted that “compassion is more eventful than passion,” another clear indictment of what he perceived to be the architecture profession’s ambivalence towards socially driven architecture.[13] He manifested this philosophy with a sort of kit of parts of vernacular assemblage, drawing inspiration from “overhanging galvanized roods, rusting metal trailers, dogtrot forms, and porches.” The term “citizen architect”—lying somewhere between design and civic duty—was also credited to Mockbee and remains the proud moniker of Rural Studio.[14]

Since’s Mockbee’s death in 2001, Rural Studio has been directed by the English architect Andrew Freear whom I visited in February 2024 along with more than twenty Rural Studio projects in Alabama. The visit afforded me the opportunity to ask the architect directly about what role dignity plays in his work. He told me that while dignity plays a central role, as it did for Mockbee, his understanding of the term is neither “academic,” nor fixed.

Freear has had to address certain criticisms of the Studio that Mockbee did not in its early years. Foremost among them is the exploitation of power relations inherent in gift-giving and, as architecture critic Patricio del Realwrote in a 2009 Journal of Architectural Education article, for “making elitist architectural and middle-class values, rather than the process of political emancipation and self-determination, as a way to improve the lives of the poor.”[15] Another criticism is the racial dynamics of a predominantly white corps of students building for near exclusively Black clients.

To these critiques Freear deploys his “intuitive” idea of dignity, a quality he believes is not afforded by a process that privileges recycling and cutting costs. Though he seeks to train his students to work with manageable, off-the-shelf products, he does so without obsessing over costs; doing so likens valuing people to valuing materials. Sublimating the tacit economics of the Studio is thus a means to focus on what Freear believes is the true measure of dignity: a refined and unique spatial creation that lifts the client’s spirit and empowers them to live with self-respect and a sense of ownership and dominion.

Freear also sees maintenance as a measure of dignity. Student builders are not specialist contractors, he admits, so some work needs remediation a few years later. In addition to new builds, a major component of the Studio’s work is doing such maintenance work on a growing list of structures, some now thirty years old. This is the reason that Rural Studio does not build beyond a twenty-mile radius.

* * *

Fathy, Mockbee, and Freear all assert the worthiness of dignity by articulating the moral obligations of supporting the indigent in both word and deed.

But what do these places tell us about the nature of architectural dignity? I am still working on the answer to that question, but I do know this: No matter how we must modify our lives, buildings, and cities for the future, human dignity must remain a primary goal of architecture. Dignity in living, and the resources it requires, are not at odds with a just climate future with fewer resources and habitable parts of the Earth. History is pregnant with the potential to point to the ways in which governments, if they are indeed committed to human dignity, must themselves incentivize the growth of renewable systems and regulation. Individuals must insist on having what they deserve—dignity—and governments and industries must in turn figure out how to manifest dignity for all citizens in a way that also fundamentally addresses a growing population in a world with dwindling resources.