"[...]The Nile Festival Village Project was intended to be sited on the Tarh el-Bahr Island in the middle of the river near Luxor. Moving through three distinct permutations during a six-year period, each of the schemes are dependent upon a central docking area for the boats needed to bring visitors to the island. The first of these, dated May 1976, divides the landing areas between the island's northern and southern shores, with a series of pedestrian ways progressing at right angles toward the tightly clustered bungalows at the centre of the complex. A second scheme, done in August of 1977, reverses this arrangement by concentrating all boat arrivals at one main quay on the southern shore and puts the major guest facilities, such as reception, theatres, restaurants, banks, swimming pools and a crafts khan, in a band spanning the entire width of the island. These public facilities, in turn, displace the guest bungalows to the outside edges of the village, in what seems to be a more logical arrangement. A third and final design, done in March of 1982, refines this approach even further by greatly accentuating the interlocking of land and water at the main landing. The final result of this dramatic design decision is to make the entrance from the boat to the reception area even more ceremonial. For some inexplicable reason the contours of the island have changed in the third design, possibly due to the erosion of the shoreline in the intervening years, and in the interim, the need for easier access from perimeter bungalows into the central area has altered the distribution of the units once again. Regardless of all the time and care spent on these changes, however, this project, like another of the same type for the Shukri brothers on a site in Giza, has yet to be realized."
Source:
Steele, James. 1989. The Hassan Fathy Collection. A Catalogue of Visual Documents at the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Bern, Switzerland: The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, 55.
