Understanding Islamic Architecture

Attilo Petruccioli, Khalil K. Pirani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136851384
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The ongoing debate among practitioners and in academia about the meaning and understanding of Islamic architecture will be energized by this book. It contains essays by architects and academics from various parts of the world which clarify how the carious disciplines of the design profession can be employed to build in the spirit of Islam.

Divided into three sections the book covers:

*meaning from Faith, which draws meaning from the Islamic faith in order to propose a built environment that is universally beneficial
*analysis of History, which examines historical buildings and planning concepts, and suggest how to apply lessons learned to contemporary practice
*contemporary Trends, which discusses current trends in architecture, education and socio-economic aspects of various Muslim countries.

Illustrated throughout, this book will appeal to students and scholars, practising architects and planners alike.

Section III

CONTEMPORARY TRENDS

Essays in this section discuss the current trends in architecture, education, and the socioeconomic aspects of various Muslim countries. Suha Özkan discusses the effects of colonization on Muslim societies and raises issues such as how Modernism and Western models have dominated design concepts in Muslim societies, what were and are the reasons for the rapid adoption of Western models in Eastern societies, and what role regionalism plays in diverse Muslim cultures. He also outlines the contributions of a few prominent architects in Muslim countries. Ali Shuaibi emphasizes the need for architects to draw meaning from the local vernacular built environment and take advantage of tools such as computer systems. He also cautions architects not to imitate Western models blindly. Along similar lines, Rasem Badran encourages investigating local cultures for design guidance, supporting his arguments by providing examples of projects from current practice. Eugenio Galdieri discusses the “confusion” in oil-rich countries of the Middle East and, with the intent of guiding practicing architects, raises issues such as imitation versus innovation in Muslim societies. Kamran T. Diba provides his version of what type of buildings do not or cannot belong in Muslim societies and Arif Hasan discusses the latest socioeconomic and development trends in developing countries and how architects can help direct this rapid development in the proper direction. Kausar B. Ahmad alludes to problems faced by educational institutions in Muslim countries and outlines why education is important for the future of architectural practice and what measures can be taken to address these problems.

Modernity and Tradition: Problem or Potential

Suha Özkan

In architecture, as in most forms of artistic expression, any analysis must be conditioned on temporal boundaries; in other words, societal and economic factors can only be formulated and validated when placed within the perspective of time. When discussing contemporary architecture those temporal boundaries include both colonialism and modernism.

Colonialism has two aspects: political colonialism, which can be placed within a particular span of time, and intellectual colonialism, which remains outside temporal bounds and is not so simple a matter as political colonialism.

With two exceptions political and economic colonialism have governed the Islamic world for the last two centuries—the exceptions are Iran and Turkey, which were themselves colonial powers. Beginning in the fourteenth century, the Ottomans began their conquests that ended in the colonization of the fertile lands of Eastern Europe with the mission of expanding Islam, and occupation of the Holy Land and northern Africa, where they remained for centuries. When the Ottomans failed to adapt to industrialization in the nineteenth century, their military and economic power weakened, and their territories were effectively ceded to the European colonial powers—Italy, France, and Britain—who became the new colonizers of the Middle East. The rest of the Islamic world, from Pakistan to Indonesia, was mainly colonized by the British, the Portuguese, and the Dutch. Iran, however, remained within its own historical boundaries and its influence was more intellectual and cultural than political.

Colonialism imposed a pattern of cohabitation of local population and colonizers; they not only had to live together and share the same environment, but were committed to the yields of the same lands and seas. The only differences lay in their backgrounds and identities, and ultimately their loyalties.

Where architecture was concerned, in contrast to the political and economic controls of the colonial setting, colonial approaches were rather considerate of the cultural values and climatic requirements of the occupied lands; colonial Dutch architecture in Java and colonial British architecture in the Indian Subcontinent yield evidence of architects trying to understand the architectural heritage and vernacular settings of the new lands and using them as inspiration for a new architecture. The results were an often-intriguing synthesis of the values of the Western heritage and the overpowering environment of the East.

With the end of colonialism in the twentieth century, the next wave of influence from the West was modernism, with its new values for living in an industrial society, which not only contrasted with existing traditions, but also distanced itself as much as possible from traditional societies and values, often to the point of denying or suppressing cultural continuity altogether. The dictates of newly developed modes and expressions of Western societies that modernism imposed were not limited to architecture or design, but also affected music, literature, drama, and the plastic arts, but obviously architecture was the genre that most affected people’s lives.

After World War I expressions of modernity were introduced without much difficulty into traditional Islamic societies, along with new technologies such as photography and motion pictures, which enormously strengthened the impact of new influences by directly communicating real-life images and sounds. For the most part the transition to modernity caused little disruption since it did not seem to conflict with traditional values and even seemed to offer improvements in comfort and efficiency. In some cases, however, modernism was introduced as a strategy with a strong political agenda: it was the centerpiece of governing politics for Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Gamal Abdul Nasser in Egypt, Habib Bourgiba in Tunisia, Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran, Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Pakistan, Jawaharlal Nehru in India, and Ahmad Sukarno in Indonesia, all of them forceful leaders who uncompromisingly placed modernity at the core of their political discourse. Their conception of modernism implied industrialization, efficiency, and the improvement of living standards; “progress” would be the reward. In a political context, most of the values that had been cohesive in these societies were overlooked and, in many cases, suppressed and denied. Communism, the most forceful of the new doctrines, and its leaders Lenin and Stalin in the USSR and Mao Zedung in the People’s Republic of China, disregarded cultural plurality, especially of those peoples with strong ethnic roots and traditional values. The new political doctrines replaced them with ideological uniformity and the homogenization of values. Tradition, history, and geography had no place in the modernist discourse, which instead focused on uniformity, equality, and a universally valid mode of life.

Countries which had gone through painful struggles to gain independence from colonial powers saw modernism as the only viable avenue, and with this forceful and persuasive objective in mind, the appropriateness of modernism was not challenged, either politically or technically. Whole sectors of society took its value and validity for granted.

Architecture played a major role in this transformation. In the 1930s the overpowering spread of modernism in almost all cities, East and West, was represented in the beginning by the iconic modes of building professed by the Bauhaus and such pioneering modernists as Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. The principles of functionality and of quality with simplicity were initially adhered to. During the reconstruction period following World War II, however, when demand for new building was very great, it was most often met with simplistic derivations of badly understood and badly interpreted “modern” architecture. New built environments were carelessly transformed by this mundane and worthless architectural idiom which purported to be modern, but which in fact violated nearly every tenet of modernism. Alongside this simplistic uniformity, meaning in the built environment was further diminished by the gradual but massive demolition of the surviving architectural heritage and with it the symbolic content and meaning it had always provided.

The phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration that affected nearly all third-world cities, beginning in the 1950s and continuing until today, greatly accelerated the transformation of environments in the Islamic world. Novel modes of building for urban survival became widespread, and squatter settlements and unlicensed or informal building added a harsh new reality to the rapid transformation of the urban fringes, even as their historical cores were being destroyed from within.

Whose fault was it? The question remains permanently unanswered. Is it the modern movement in architecture which caused this degeneration, or is it modernity itself and its licensing of meaningless uniformity? Or did it come about as the result of hidden forces in society that pursued selfish or political short-term goals and disguised their efforts in the name of modernity? Since the late 1970s, these questions have been endlessly debated, and the debate will probably continue indefinitely, perhaps because architects and architectural thinkers like to adopt strong, partisan attitudes rather than try to understand the forces that brought the situation about.

Charles Jencks, one of the most profound and prolific of the modernist critics draws an analogy to religion: “Modernism is one of the strongest religions—indeed in the nineteenth century it was the most potent of Post-Christian faiths. With the rise of secularism, Darwinism and atheism and the attacks on Christianity of Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche, most intellectuals become skeptics.”¹ This conviction may be the reason why many of the proponents of modernism like Gropius and Mies van der Rohe gave lip service to the right-wing politics of the time. Perhaps they recognized that building with modernist conviction required a heavy-handed political power, and yielding to that they violated the ethical aspect of modernism, which is perhaps its strongest point.

Jencks also challenged modernism as a basis for constancy and its aspirations of predictability: “…the Modernists with their mechanistic models emphasize predictability, but the cosmos is much more dynamic than either a pre-designed world or a dead machine.”² One cannot disagree with Jencks on the aspect of predictability which modernism demands; the parameters of that predictability are what is at issue, especially in the view of its long history, during which modernism has endured many challenges.

It is important to distinguish first between bad or thoughtless architecture and modernism. The modern movement has never represented or condoned bad architecture. On the contrary, its simplified but extremely demanding and sensitive criteria for quality require the highest standards from designers. Simplicity is a goal, and functionality is a required rationale, but the great strength of modernism lies in its respect for structure, materials, and site; honesty of expression is perhaps the most important criterion but also the most difficult to attain.

Regionalism and the Islamic World

It is not easy to discuss developments in the Islamic world as a whole, since each setting has its own dynamics and priorities. However, a number of categories can be formulated for consideration, and examples from each discussed. In the 1980s, once the hype and the noise of post-modernism had subsided, serious thinking about relating the built environment to cultural context began to emerge. This focus on regionalism turned into a search for architectural identity within a given cultural, historical, and climatic context.³ Regionalism was not conceived as an approach to challenge modernism, but as a contemporary discourse that the internationalist vein of modernism did not address. Noted architects such as Charles Correa, Balkrishna Doshi, Geoffrey Bawa, and Hassan Fathy among many, declared the importance of context over art (i.e., over building). Serious critical thinking on the topic of regionalism, such as Kenneth Frampton’s “critical regionalism,” began to appear, culminating in a debate in which my own contribution aimed at situating regionalism within the intellectual tenets of modernism,⁴ As the use of earlier styles in architecture—Neo-Classicism, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, etc.—receded, modernism became the common language of the architectural profession. It developed a valid and consistent model for architectural education, building design, and criticism, and was successful in formulating the concepts of time and progress, in integrating architecture and industry, in its emphasis on function, its search for subtle aesthetics, honesty of form, and logical reasoning. Most important, and in contrast to such short-lived fashions as Post-Modernism, modernism was erected on a strong and noble ethical foundation and a commitment that are hard to challenge, and perhaps impossible to disagree with.

In a subsequent attempt to catalogue regionalism,⁵ the taxonomy conceived of it within the framework of history and classified various approaches as historically derivative or transformational. Derivative approaches are those that build upon vernacular architecture and, by definition, historical precedent; all the norms, technologies, and patterns of spatial organization have their origins in historical architecture. Design efforts aim to distinguish between historical forms that are still valid and those that have now become obsolete. Derivative regionalism, or, in simpler terms, vernacularism, had the work of Hassan Fathy (1900–89) as its inspiration.

Early in his long career, Fathy designed in a modernist idiom,⁶ but he later came to doubt the validity of the movement, and began to advance a notion that he expressed as “building of the site” as opposed to building on it.⁷ His village planning and architectural experiments were not entirely successful sociologically, since he was in no position fully to understand the mentality of the inhabitants; as a consequence, villages such as New Gourna and Bariz remained under-occupied for many years, and their failure was used against Fathy by his opponents. However, Fathy’s ideas attracted adherents internationally, and successive generations of younger architects adopted his pioneering approach that challenged the validity of modernism, especially the use of imported materials, and the disregard for cultural differences and common identity.

Fathy wholeheartedly believed that materials to build with were available on any site; he thought that it was the responsibility of the architect to figure out how to use and develop appropriate technology to transform local materials into buildings. According to Fathy, an architect is the person who brings the expertise to assist people in creating their own buildings. To prove his theories he used ancient Nubian techniques for the construction of vaults and domes in simple, readily available, and inexpensive materials. This technique did not require wood for formwork, and was therefore also viable ecologically and ethically, as well as architecturally. These ancient construction techniques were successfully applied, but provisions for infrastructure and maintenance were unfortunately poorly considered.

Fathy’s commitment was political and ethical as well as architectural, though his talent and professionalism were always in the fore; he demonstrated his versatility equally well when buildi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section I Meaning from Faith
• Section II Meaning from History
• Section III Contemporary Trends
• Biographies