Spotlighting the political role of architecture in building new communities, this paper analyzes the work of the Egyptian architects Hassan Fathy and Sayed Karim, who sought to modernize the fellah (peasant) and his village in the 1940s. The paper argues that they generated a modernist approach of rational thinking contingent to economical, ecological, and political constraints that continues to shape the sub/urban planning condition to the present day. Fathy and Karim developed divergent approaches to improving the fellah’s deteriorated living conditions. Commissioned for New Gourna on the west bank of the Nile River in 1944, Fathy developed a low-budget architecture that was economical, sustainable, and oriented towards “rural-mass production” (in his own terms). He relied on indigenous materials such as mud-brick and traditional forms of roofing, like domes and vaults. He generated an experience of modernity under austere conditions. Accusing Fathy of being a traditionalist, Karim promoted the use of redbrick as a more hygienic, sturdy, yet an expensive alternative to mud-brick. He sought to sanitize deteriorating villages through cordoning them off, relocating peasants, and rebuilding in sites subject to expansion. Yet both of their projects, while sometimes traditional in form, were modernist in nature: Fathy and Karim emphasized building efficiency, optimization, and scientific-based research, such as Fathy's attempts to combat the disease Bilharzia. The chapter investigates the historical tension between Fathy and Karim’s divergent approaches to modernity and also contextualizes their projects within a larger political struggle against colonialism. Fathy’s project was doomed to failure. Funded by the Ministry of Antiquities, it was a collective punishment for the robbery of an old Egyptian tomb that the officials accused the peasants for. The peasants, feeling criminalized and demoralized, decided to resist by undermining Fathy's project despite his genuine efforts. Karim garnered more success in promoting his scheme of cordoning off and resettling peasants because it maintained the social hierarchy and capitalist mode. Karim was more successuful in organizing the profession, regulating the code of conduct for architects, and building an independent architectural society away from the hegemony of the Royal Palace and the British Mandate. To borrow Homi Bhabha’s term, Fathy and Karim became the subjects of “ambivalence” in the political arena; they occupied an ambivalent position, or liminal space, between the governed and the governing through a process of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. This chapter provides a useful historical-political context for the emergence of homegrown architectural modernity.