“Architecture is successful if it blends with the nature. It comes with the least number of ingredients and the most amount of thinking”
Put some architects inside a room, they will talk about buildings and their designs. The text of their discourse is usually technical.
Put some great architects inside a room, they will take it to another level and talk about the very philosophy behind the construction of buildings and design. Their talk doesn’t just remain confined within the technical aspects rather reaches to a philosophical and poetic depth.
This is what happened during the recently finished Bengal Architecture Symposium where architects like Adele Santos, Peter Stuchbury, Suha Ozcan, Peter Buchanan, Byoung Soo Cho, Alberto Kalach and Kazi Khaleed Ashraf got together under the roof KIB auditorium in Dhaka for three summer days.
They talked about architecture-a technically demanding discipline-yet it was an audio-visual treat for even a commoner with no knowledge about the subject.
“That’s the purpose,” said Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, a Bangladeshi Architecture professor in University of Hawaii, “Taking architecture to the people; making them realise that it’s not about fancy design, rather it’s about human habitation in coherence with nature and modern amenities.”
Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements which organized the international architecture symposium under the banner “Architecture Now! Next”- was also established by the Bengal Foundation with same mindset-talking architecture to the people.
Understanding through past
Aside from taking architecture to the people, the purpose of the symposium was to understand new directions in architecture and city building, along with the kind of work that should be recognised as exemplary and instructive.
“The best way to understand the present architecture and the future of it is to look at the past,” said Suha Ozcan, an award winning architect from Turkey.
Tracing a brief history from Vitruvius up to the work of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, Ozkan asserted the changing relationship between architectural dictums and practice. Architecture, he contended, has never had a singular authoritative theory. Rather, innovation has emerged from the introduction and establishment of new certainties.
The bulk of Ozkan’s talk was oriented around lesser-known practices from around the world. As he passed through a litany of examples, he touched on the ways in which each seemed to introduce a new imperative into architectural thinking.
While many of his examples were from the last century, each seemed to fit within the parameters of “the architectural agenda” of the twenty-first century that he had previously laid out – namely, they involved a persistent concern with ecological and social issues.
In balance with nature
Peter Stuchbury, the great architect from Australia also said that the building’s purpose should be persistent with ecological and social issues of the surroundings. “Architecture is successful if it blends with the nature. It comes with the least number of ingredients and the most amount of thinking.”
In 34 years of practice, Stutchbury has mastered the art of creating architecture that speaks of the place it inhabits – buildings that are environmentally sustainable, culturally specific and locally embedded.
He however believes that a building or structure should have beauty and it should be a pleasantry to the eyes. “A building can evoke the same feelings inside a person that a good painting can. I always say it’s never architecture unless it’s beautiful.”
Alberto Kalach, the post-modernist architect from Mexico talked about the beauty of landscape architecture. He believed that the presence of green and garden could blend the structure with nature and ensure the ecological balance.
“I am interested in the garden from a sensorial point of view: to me, what it provokes is fundamental,” he said. He said that if we consider the garden as a part of the architecture, we can say that it is the most sublime part, because its only function is to please, to refresh.
“If you build a parking lot, the cars must fit, turn, circulate. If you make a building, the structure has to sustain it. But the garden is about paths, sensations, odors, freshness. Imagine designing only for that purpose. That part of the garden is what interests me most,” he said.
Kalach said that the green areas around most city buildings are terrible, but this speaks to a certain correlation: in those cities where gardens and trees and streets are taken care of, people are more civilized; they are happier.
Quoting Master Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, he said, “There is no architectural work so bad that could not be improved with a garden.”
Criticising modernity
Peter Buchanan, the Malawi born architect who is better known as a critic than an architect criticises the modern and post-modern architecture in his talks. He said that the origins of architectural modernism are closely affiliated with the progressive goals of the early Twentieth Century.
“Modern architecture is thus an energy-profligate, petrochemical architecture, only possible when fossil fuels are abundant and affordable”, he said. “Like the sprawling cities it spawned, it belongs to that waning era historians are already calling ‘the oil interval’.”
Buchanan said that the desire to increase sustainability actually results in its opposite. “One needs only to walk around a city to see traces of modernism, even in the design of condominiums. How many structures only put on the facade of being sustainable, using symbolic design features to fool even its architects?”