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The Hassan Fathy Archives at the Rare Boo ks and Special Collections Library of the American University in Cairo is composed of three collections holding Fathy's documents and drawings, his personal library, and his household furnishings. A fourth collection consists of materials about arrangements of Fathy's work compiled by others. The largest of the four groups, the Papers, includes his architectural drawings, prints, and project files; his personal and professional correspondence; his manuscripts, awards, passports, appointment books and all the other materials customary in manuscript collections. The second group consists of about 1700 books and periodicals; many of them annotated and inscribed, and over 150 sound recordings. The third group is a gathering of equipment, furnishings, decorative works by others, and personal belongings. The fourth group contains records, or copies, of an unrealized project of the Aga Khan Foundation, begun in 1985. This documentation, kept with the collection and transferred to AUC in 1994 in the donation of the Archives by Fathy's heirs, provides useful processing and reference tools. Although portions of all four groups are now being opened to researchers, there are major sets of materials that remain closed, awaiting fuller levels of processing.
 The display, "Selections from the Hassan Fathy Archives," mounted on March 23, 2000 in the two exhibition areas of the RBSC Library was modest in scope. Its aim was not to make definitive statements about Hassan Fathy the architect, the planner, or the man, but to give viewers a sense of the rich range of the Archive and of the promise it holds for research. This extends to areas only loosely tied to architecture. The Hassan Fathy Papers, when fully inventoried, will aid social scientists investigating African cities at the mid-century; urban-rural population trends; housing and development programs of the United Nations; and consumer-nation perceptions of petroleum-exporting countries. At the same time, the Archive will equally serve investigators of more arcane issues, aestheticians tracking harmonies of the spirit and felicitous proportions found in mathematics, biology, the music Fathy loved, and the architecture he practiced.
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