He was influenced by Upper Egyptian and simple rural architecture, he designed a villa with the southern style for his wife along the Nile in Maadi, which was later destroyed to make way for the new corniche.

He designed nearly 160 separate projects, from modest country retreats to fully planned communities with police, fire, and medical services, markets, schools, theatres, and places for worship and recreation.

[5] Fathy's plan devised groundbreaking approaches to economic, social, and aesthetic issues that typically impact the construction of low-cost housing.

Despite the negative outlooks he had writing these books, he managed to make Gourna a community, and till this day is still preserved with only 40% of the original buildings being lost.

Through his work of the years, and especially after New Gourna, he targeted bureaucracy being one of the leading reasons that the experiment failed, which influenced later actions such as in 1957, frustrated with bureaucracy and convinced that buildings designed with traditional methods appropriate to the climate of the area would speak louder than words, he moved to Athens to collaborate with international planners evolving the principles of ekistical design under the direction of Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis.

He served as the advocate of traditional natural-energy solutions in major community projects for Iraq and Pakistan and undertook extended travel and research for the "Cities of the Future" program in Africa.

He left his first major international position, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, in 1969 to complete multiple trips per year as a leading critical member of the architectural profession.

He began to serve on the steering committee for the nascent Aga Khan Award for Architecture and he founded and set guiding principles for his Institute of Appropriate Technology.

Based on the structural massing of ancient buildings, Fathy incorporated dense brick walls and traditional courtyard forms to provide passive cooling.

[22][not specific enough to verify] National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C467/37) with Hassan Fathy in 1986 for its Architects Lives' collection held by the British Library.

[24] Fathy is featured in the documentary Il ne suffit pas que dieu soit avec les pauvres (1978) by Borhane Alaouié and Lotfi Thabet.

[25] Hassan Fathy's entire archive which includes his architectural plans, photographs and documents is housed at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the American University in Cairo.'