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Reprinted from:
Architecture & Urbanism magazine, No. 64 - 65
March 2002,
Tehran
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Research
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Architecture,
Global
Pluralism & Regional Crises
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Architecture
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The century, we have
just left behind, has been incomparable to the entire
past before it in terms of the ever faster pace of
changes affecting man's life across the world. The
population explosion, industrial growth, the
communication revolution, the end of direct
colonialism, the downfall of dogmatic ruling
ideologies, the urgent need of most countries for
national independence and true democratic self-rule,
the emergence of civic societies and respect for the
individual and for man's thoughts, the establishment
of relations between different nations owing to common
problems and the globalization of economy and
development, the materialization of optimized
solutions to myriad problems... no more allow the
present world to be one-dimensional, based on a single
ideology framed on a single behavioral pattern.
The accession of many countries to independence during
the 20th century, the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the breakdown of the Wall of the Berlin, the
unification of Europe, the cultural prosperity of
newly arisen countries of the South, the new economy
and, most importantly, the formidable information
revolution, are making people all over the world
realize in what ways current and phenomena are moving
and developing.
In Philosophy, established facts and conceptual
dichotomies have yielded their place to examination,
research, tolerance and dialogue. Many bi-polar
relationships of the past, such as East and West,
First World and Third World, right and wrong, essence
and form, subjectivity and objectivity, beauty and
ugliness, tradition and modernity, reason and
spirituality, progressiveness and stagnation, and many
other social, philosophical and political concepts, by
which the world has been run to the present, have been
abandoned to the benefit of interim investigation,
interstitial space, communication between minds,
polyvalent outlook and, generally speaking, all the
issues involved in the intricate process of
present-day interactions. Carrying on with Platonic
aesthetics has become as difficult as relying on
Kant's reason or Heidegger's stanch views.
The closure of the 20th century has been accompanied
by a kind of reversion to the wholeness of the world
and history, in whose long-term and tides one may
perhaps seek to surmise a new theory, which of course
reveals no new truth and only endeavors at studying
and furthering the present limits. Perhaps the best
theory in this domain belongs to Gilles Deleuze, who
believes in the horizontal and vertical motions of the
different forces of worldly phenomena; a whole made up
of immense networks of matrices in which we are
perpetually in motion, occasionally finding dynamic
requirements and embryos each of which gives us new
information about today's wide world.
Even as late as 50 years ago, architects and urban
planners still entertained the dream that they could
devise a new universal wisdom and build the
infrastructure of the ideal world by their views.
Those wishful thoughts were perhaps best expressed in
the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM),
held in the early 20th century. In the architect's
mind, he seems to be the supreme hero/artist, the
leader, the organizer, the orchestrate of forces... we
have often heard prominent architects repeating these
claims, whereas today, because the diversity of
factors involved, the wealth of data available, and
particularly economic and political international
exchanges, architects and urban planners have no
choice, but to join this immense wave to survive,
hoping that their adaptation to the new conditions
will not drown them and that they will wisely travel
aboard this ship.
We have seen a very similar variant of this problem in
our past urban planning, where the so-called planner
divided the land or city into plots, grids and areas,
for which he had imagined various functions on
2-dimensional plans that often ended up lacking one or
more essential elements and forbidding human life,
which should have thrived within them in the light of
all related human sciences.
A single person taking decisions or drawing lines in
an aberration today. In the 3rd millennium, planning
without exchanging ideas and taking into consideration
interdisciplinary entities involved in this social
network of relationships can prove just as
presumptuous and amiss, because today's world, in its
beauty of all-encompassing information, has sowed the
seeds of new artistic concepts in the minds of
designers.
Paying homage to such great figures as Descartes,
Bacon, Galileo, Kant, Hegel and other thinkers, who
transformed the superstitious society into the modern
world and promoted awareness of equity, reason and
righteousness -in one word, man, we can but admit that
the task is much harder today, because the social and
economic forces affecting the shape of human societies
and their interactions are becoming ever more
complicated, while political and economic decisions
impinge on the moral dimensions, the humanity, for
which many thinkers have fought in the course of
history and which is more often paid lip service to
appease consciences in different circles and soon
relegated to a file among the lowest priorities.
In modern sociology, we have come to realize that
globalization does not mean losing oneself and one's
regional wealth and does not imply cultural radicalism
and uniformity, and that each nation still has to make
great efforts in this complex world to contribute
something from its level across history that is
distinctive in the face of the existing diversity.
This, of course, calls for freedom of information,
freedom of expression and freedom of communication,
or, in other words, a paradigm likely to somehow
serve man's development.
In this progressive and, at the same time, complex
chaotic world, what will be the best approach for our
country to progress? And how will the inevitable
interdependence resulting from global development, on
which our future depends, effect Iran?
In today's world, views and theories concerning the
architectural design, form and identity of buildings
are highly complicated issues. The time to absolute
confidence in the modern architectural movement of the
early 20th century has passed and no one follows its
radical path and declarations anymore. Modernism, in
reaction to its preceding period, to tradition, to
aristocracy and bourgeoisie, adopted a new path, whose
examples and models we witnessed for 50 years in the
works of its adepts; works, which involved reason,
wisdom, attention to sociology, attention to new
materials and mass production, and the care for an
abstract geometric pattern in the architecture of the
world. But, excessive rationalization in the domain of
forms, which where to conform to functional and
rational criteria, and the fact that architectural
design was to be a serious and useful issue, brought
about the first signs of crisis in mid-20th century.
Attachment to memories, history, ecological issues,
contextual appropriateness... remain un-addressed
despite all the rational and scientific progress made
in solving problems, and many different factors gave
birth to movements referred to as post-modernist in
the history of architecture.
Various expressions emerge in the architecture of the
world from the relative formal freedom of the
post-modern period and issues of unity of form or
materials are replaced by initiatives aimed at
blending different identities and references and
gleaning elements from the past, from various lands,
without particular sensitivity, particularly in issues
concerning the compositions and aspect of building.
The works of this period are novel and eye-catching.
However, despite all their efforts at expressing an
environmental or historic mission, they never achieve
the strength of the manifest period and their products
look like experimental objects, which their architects
have conceived merely to break away from the models of
the modernist period.
However, notwithstanding their poignant humanistic
slogans, post-modern architectures often remain
limited to plays of colors, masses, forms and frills,
with little sign of such dimensions or mission,
originality or lasting qualities.
Although the rejection of the rigid models of
functionalism and the opening of new value vistas in
the modernist period could be considered a step
forward in architecture, in practice, the creditable
motive of combining diverse factors influencing the
form leads to nowhere. Thus, when we look at
buildings, erected in this period, practically in the
1970s and 1980s, we clearly perceive a reactionary
movement in their design, and also notice that,
despite the fame day acquired in their own time, they
bear little importance in the history of the
contemporary architecture of the world and merely rank
as peculiar stages of eclecticism and a period of
hybridization.
Today, when we look at these buildings, for example
the works of Portoghesi, Charles Moore, Hollein,
Michael Graves and many other post-modernist tifosi,
we immediately recognize the times in which they were
built and often fin an unpleasant taste of
obsolescence to them. This feeling is not strange,
because throughout the history of art, whenever man
has based his work and methods upon his own era's
conditions and popular styles, these have become
obsolete as soon as new ideas and theories have
emerged. The main reason is their lack of strong
fundamental thinking; their construction without
regard for temporal, local and environmental factors;
their lack of a true artistic and human feeling, which
is the exact opposite to fashion-oriented design, in
which the popular ostentation of adorned commercial
products is presented as true architecture. This
period, this era of post-modern architecture, as a
style, will also come to pass, and architects who have
always put forward ever more advanced philosophical
theories in their field, will seek new ideals, which
will somehow radically and utterly alter architectural
forms and models, thereby attributing a new status and
a new mission to themselves and their products.
Many deconstruction works of the last two decades of
the 20th century attest to this influential and
strange vision. Even the deconstruction works of such
illustrious architects as Tschumi, Eisenman and Zaha
Hadid taste as a challenge of projecting horizontal
surfaces, in which no center of gravity exists and
where the construction materials, which appears as
pliant, fluid mummified creatures, can be thrown
around and shaped in any direction.
Interestingly, these architects, i.e. the followers of
deconstruction theories, as are assertive about their
philosophical standpoints as their works are
incomprehensible, complicated and confusing, and their
effective aims begin with the preliminaries of an
almost abstract computer model and end with esoteric
philosophical declarations, which leave one wondering
about what existed and what happened, and whether a
real innovation has been made which we fail to
understand.
These formal architectural plays combined with
esoteric hybrid reasoning, even with the assumption of
freeing space and extending boundaries, may well
appeal to come marginal intellectual circles on the
international scene, but the reality of these
buildings' existence actually lies in the experimental
character of their creation.
One cannot understand why, dissatisfied with their job
of building and seeking to give a superior quality to
their profession, architects resort to philosophy and
try to soar among philosophers in the skies of
theoretical conjectures and pure science. Artists feel
in quandary about their own existence, whenever they
cannot fulfill themselves in their own creations;
whereupon they turn to condescending pretension in
every known domain of science and knowledge. Not long
ago, Williams-Ellis was describing the architect as a
kind of some demigod between heaven and earth, with
his feet in the clay of his foundation trenches and
his head amongst the stars.
Today, the more the work is hermetic, incomprehensible
and strange, the more it attracts attention, perhaps
causing many people, including specialists, to abstain
from reading its justifying literature. Here, a
question comes to the mind: Does a truth exist, and
can skepticism, hesitation and experience cause its
products to improve?
When discussions about deconstruction began a few
decades ago, particularly in the wake of Jacques
Derrida's theories and his very interesting lectures
at Yale University, we became conscious of a dynamic
new vision, based on the analysis of problems and the
rejection of dogmatism, empiricism and historic
categorical philosophical rulings. The
de-constructive procedure was an attempt to free
philosophy from its inbuilt constraints, the
"takings-for-granted", which for centuries
have stultified thinking; Derrida's issue of "logo centrism"
applied the belief that one can't get to the bottom of
things by logic, rational argument, revelation or
whatever and that investigation only could again a
conceptual paradigm for things and thoughts, In the
path, he joins those, who attacked and finally
destroyed "the myth of the given":
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine and Sellars, who
approved there are not, and cannot be "ultimate
foundations" to our knowledge. Generally
speaking, by scientific skepticism and inquiry, we
became conscious of efforts devoted to the discovery
of new conceptual horizons, which the reflections of
Derrida, Paul Recoeur, Ronald Barthes, Faucault and
many other modern philosophers greatly clarified,
allowing these concepts to be analyzed and their
constituent components identified. If a bridge truly
existed, is it still strong? It is not that, by the
force of construction, together with all its limiting
factors, such as materials, gravity, sunlight,
rain..., we are rather trying to relocate it forms its
own domain and, sitting behind our advanced computers,
bring into being intricate fluid graphical entities,
by which we can emit an intellectual sigh and soar in
the company of the most illustrious philosophers?
Those so-called progressive architects, who act in the
name of spatial freedom and the rejection of
architectural boundaries, must not forget that life
and earth have limitations of their own and that,
despite their pretensions to divinity, they too will
depart and many of these computerized creations will
remain marginal specimens stored on computer disks,
almost as mere drawings, alongside the real social
production of architecture. In the same frame of mind,
many architecture historians, such as Kenneth Frampton,
have already assigned them a limited, marginal place.
Folding's theories, in-between architecture,
cyber-architecture, virtual architecture, chaos
theory, fractals, fragmentation, cosmogenic
architecture and many other new titles pretending to
theoretical foundations for architecture are in fact
no more than computerized images and their virtual
three dimensions are nothing but attractive
science-fiction vistas, which occasionally result from
the accidental confrontation of lines and surfaces.
Now, perhaps we do not want to go as far as to say
that these virtual architectures are the products of
the rightwing ivory tower inhabitants of the world of
capitalistic trusts, who go on playing with their
computer images, oblivious to the people of the
world's urgent need for useful buildings and desirable
ecological models, but one can hardly say so today,
because objecting to these games and impressive
glittering architectural forms results in one being
classical as a reactionary, since the followers of
virtual architectures see themselves at the zenith of
all the progress of the world. And it is interesting
that, ever for the sake of enhancing their profession
by all possible mean, responsible architects have
always tried to take architecture a few step ahead,
because social responsibility has never been, and is
not, at odds with the desire of improving one's field
of activity.
Now, let us see what has happened in Iran in the face
of the world's phenomena and all the imported
architectural manners. Have we been as innovative and
expressive on national and international levels as
contemporary Japanese or Indian architects? Have we
really let imitation behind? Are our works now truly
environmental in essence and based on thought-out
theoretical principles?
Alongside all the contemporary architectural models of
the world, infatuation for Western architecture, in
its most distinctive forms, is still conspicuous. Have
we really been able to embark on a dynamic process
that will reconcile the science of the world with our
cultural environment? Has the time of Jalal Al Ahmad
really past and the fake Western mannerism of some
pseudo-educated personalities really come to an end?
If some architects believe that they now stand on a
higher platform and, as erudite authors, have
incorporated the essence of this country's ideals in
their writing, this has to be reflected in their
architectural realizations. One can hardly speak of
the essence of Rumi (Molavi) or Hafiz, if one ends up
with imitations of John Nouvel, Isosaki, Libeskind and
other deconstructivist architects. Today, one has the
impression that literary eloquence can hide
design shortcomings, or perhaps the clients, unable to
perceive the translation of literature into concrete
realizations, think that this literature, with all the
respect it expresses towards culture and the
environment, is actually reflected in the works
produced.
For various reasons, contemporary Iranian architecture
is obviously undergoing a crisis. Poor planning and
research, lack of useful social foundations,
inappropriate regulations and norms, lack of a
professional ethic social consensus, lack of
criticism, weakness of execution guarantees on the
part of construction organizations and guilds, low
professional service wages below international
standards, lack of specialized factories producing
advanced materials and equipments, low technological
levels, lack of skilled construction workers and
experts, poor execution of construction details,
wavering university education, flawed architecture
competitions founded on relations and influence, and
many other problems, have prevented our architecture
and urban planning from progressive as they should.
Our cities have become filled with buildings, which
neither say anything nor represent any enhancement in
terms of form, identity or construction. They are more
structures, whose areas and surfaces guarantee the
flow of trade and capital, yet they are built everyday
here and there in our cities by avis entrepreneurs.
These speculators and constructors, the so-called
"besaz-o-befroush" (build & sell), these
bureaucratic climbers, buying building permits and
architect signatures, buying density, height and
floors from municipalities, are and have always been
in the past decades the real mason master-wolves of
our built cities and environment, acting generally
without any consideration for human principles,
pollution, neighborhood, town equipments or the
citizens' right.
On the other hand, are renowned architects, just as
Western stars, spend their time designing striking
models and emulating the latest imported fashions, and
our young architects, having no access to true
architecture, have turned to computerized
three-dimensional images, to paper-based graphic
architecture, which can give them a sense of
progressive, international taste even if they cannot
build.
However, the effective urban and social architectural
production is done out of these two spheres, because
one is after renown and the other is slumbering in a
virtual world, whose very advanced spatial dynamism
can hardly be realized given the technological
limitations prevailing in the country and therefore
remains a pictorial aesthetic dream.
The inescapable fact is that many
"Southern", developing and Islamic countries
urgently need a socially useful, standardized,
progressive architecture, which they have
unfortunately been deprived of owing to political,
economical and managerial crises.
In the end, the globalization of related factors is a
reality that can no more address single-minded
behaviors, because another entity carrying all the new
phenomena and ideas of the world and embodying a
composite, pluralistic, present-day personality has
taken shape next to its own regional personality.
On the one hand, today's man is filled with elements
and memories of his own environment and, on the other,
he lives in a world, in which many philosophical,
legal and economical values have spread their hegemony
in a uniform process of development.
Our minds are faced with different layers of the
realities of today's world and equally concerned with
globalism, regionalism and glocalism. In the domain of
architecture, they are accompanied by images and
models that require a perfect knowledge of one's
indigenous issues, while they also need the evermore
refined scientific know-how and philosophical insight
of the world at large.
What will the identity of this architecture be? Even
in the name of pragmatism, will another world, or the
neighborhood output of different cultures, save us
from the perils of hybridization?
However, it appears that, at the end of the tunnel,
while embracing all the new scientific gifts and
thoughtful ideas of a larger world, we find light; not
only a social enlightenment, but at least an
architectural expression of our own, sincere and true
to the country.
Growing out of our hearts and bringing men across the
planet closer together, this bridge will eventually
pave the way towards an immense wealth, whose main
essence will be an exchange and multiplicity of view's
whereby phenomena will fly across different lands, as
so many birds of paradise, disseminating fresh news.
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Research:
Architecture |
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