Critical Vernacularism 2010

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Op Arch I NIHAL PERERA Ball State University

Since the late-1960s, the diversity of the built environment has become more apparent and its diversification has accelerated. The 1980s saw the development of intellectual tools such as critical regionalism to understand this phenomena in architecture; history-theory scholars (Kusno 2000; Hosagrahar 2005), cultural geographers (e.g., Kong 1997; Duncan 1990), and other scholars with similar interests have continued to develop more sophisticated tools to understand the production of the built environment and its meanings acknowledging local viewpoints. In regard to the understanding of diversity in architecture produced by architects, especially in the non-west, critical regionalism still plays a significant role.

Complementing and questioning this effort, the notion of critical vernacularism may reveal a different dimension of these distinct and diversifying architectures viewed from their places and cultures of production.

Difference and Vernacular Industrialization, European expansion, and Westernization of various types have all been noted for their erasure of much of the variation in the built environment across the world. The concern for disappearing ‘‘ordinary’’ environments is evident in the successive emergence of discourses on vernacular architecture in Europe and outside, beginning in the late-nineteenth century. This has been followed by the interests in preserving highend historic buildings and, recently, protecting ordinary environments from urban renewal in Asia.

Not only the historic environments that are disappearing, asserts Hassan Fathy, but also the locally produce differences, what he calls (architectural) signatures: until the collapse of cultural frontiers in the [nineteenth] century, there were all over the world distinctive local shapes and details in architecture, and the buildings of every locality were the beautiful children of a happy marriage

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Dispatch: 2.2.10

Journal: JOAE CE: Balaji Prasad

Author Received:

No. of pages: 2 PE: Saravanan

Critical Vernacularism A Locally Produced Global Difference

between the imagination of the people and demands of their countryside.... I like to suppose simply that certain shapes take a people’s fancy, and that they make use of them in a variety of contexts, perhaps rejecting the unsuitable applications, but evolving a colorful and emphatic visual image of their own that suits perfectly their character and their homeland. No one could mistake the curve of a Persian dome and arch for the curve of a Syrian arch [the signature]. (Fathy 1977, 19) These historic choices have been developed within particular material conditions and constraints, affecting each community’s cultural understanding of the world. In this sense, vernaculars are not simply a thing of the past, and such processes of producing identity and difference still continue. Moreover, vernacular buildings are not authentic, static, nor pure forms produced in insular environments. Almost all cultures have, from time to time, absorbed ‘‘foreign’’ elements, made developments within the particular culture, and ‘‘modernized’’ their worldviews (see, e.g., Kusno 2000; Hosagrahar 2005). In addition to bloody wars and colonialism, processes such as Thailand receiving Buddhism from Sri Lanka and Chinese merchants returning home from faraway lands have also been the vehicles of transfer of ideas about building. While the elements borrowed from another culture may have appeared strange at the beginning, they have been familiarized over time by both adjusting aspects of the host culture and by adapting the selected borrowed elements. Overall, the vernaculars are dynamic types of hybrid architecture.

Critical Vernaculars Contemporary architects are socially produced in educational institutions, originating in the western capitalist world, which provide them with the necessary knowledge and skills and also socialize them within the culture of the profession. As the architects practice their trade as an acultural

Journal of Architectural Education, pp. 76–77 ª 2010 ACSA

science, valid anywhere, almost all of them face social, cultural, economic, and climatic incompatibilities. The kinds and scales of their responses to the ‘‘local realities’’ vary from subtle to profound with a few designers producing architectures that can well be part of local cultures.

These include select buildings designed by Geoffrey Bawa, Charles Correa, Hassan Fathy, Antonio Ismael (Perera 1999, 145–50).

Limitations of modernist architecture in regard to its universal claims and the subsequent need to differentiate designs were recognized by even the modernists themselves.This is evident in the much discussed tropical architecture; the first paper on the subject was read at RIBA much earlier in 1869.

As I have highlighted elsewhere (Perera 1999), the west-European geographic categories such as the ‘‘tropics’’ not only replaced the former stereotypes, but the focus on the climate marginalized the cultures within which this architecture occurs.This ‘‘Climatic Other’’ was a subtle objectification of the subjects referring to more impersonal, material, and scientific factors than the ‘‘Cultural Other’’ which explicitly referred to their culture and the belief system.

Even the climate is not very well understood by most architects. As Rapoport (1969) has demonstrated, people’s responses to the climate is cultural; it is built upon the choices they make within the possibilities they see, and this is a significant process that shapes buildings, their internal spaces, appearance, and uses. Climate is a very strong factor that caused selected architects to think beyond Modernism. Correa emulated Corbusier in his first buildings in Anand, but soon recognized that—as in Chandigarh—brise-solelil captures a lot of heat in buildings in India causing the users to leave early due to the heat. Liu Thai Ker had his own problems of understanding rain when he returned home to Singapore and was helped by a local lady among others. In response to the lack of cement and steel during World War II, Fathy went to a nearby village to learn how its inhabitants build without these materials. Learning

Critical Vernacularism: A Locally Produced Global Difference

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by doing and from the locals has been essential for architects in the non-west.

Bawa who began designing before any formal architectural education and his partner Ulrik Plesner who came directly to Sri Lanka to practice perhaps had a headstart. They also consciously learned from historic and vernacular environments but did not reject anything based on any pre-conceived notion, nor did they emulate historic or borrowed forms.

Bawa opted: to regard all past and present good architecture in Sri Lanka as just that –good Sri Lankan architecture– for this is what it is, not narrowly classified as Indian, Portuguese or Dutch, early Singhalese or Kandyan or British colonial, for all the good examples of these periods have taken the country itself into account. (Bawa 1986, 16) The architect’s role is in the understanding of these architecture and using them as sources of inspiration to produce culturally compatible spaces and building elements. One might see shades of Chinese columns, upper level courtyards from Indian havelis, British colonnades, or doors recycled from old Sri Lankan buildings, but these architects have

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managed to incorporate these into their designs without descending into a caricature or pastiche; the articulation sought to capitalize upon the elements, traditions, and cultures without trivializing them or rendering them incomprehensibly abstruse.

The strong connection between inside and outside generated through the location, design, level changes, and elements such as verandas, courtyards, and pools make Bawa’s buildings ‘‘of the place’’ and culturally comfortable.

Unfortunately, I am unable to further problemetize this architecture by bringing in class, race, and other issues. Nor can I discuss examples of other architects and designers who have practiced critical vernaculars. Although I have leaned toward architects as authors to make a quick case, the focus remains on architecture. Despite producing a significant amount of critical vernacular pieces, Correa’s practice was modernist at the beginning and includes some traditionalism lately.

While it is hard, perhaps impossible, to draw a boundary defining which buildings belong to this genre, the core value of critical vernacular architecture is clear: from a local vantage point, I see the emergence of a hybrid (modern) architecture which is capable of supporting contemporary (modern) functions through culturally

compatible spaces with locally familiar —or easily familiarizable—esthetics. Although air-conditioning is used for cooling in many buildings in Colombo, the critical vernacularists opted to rely more on culturally desirable verandas and courtyards combined with the former. While critical regionalism can be employed to categorize these from outside, from a ‘‘local’’ vantage point, these are not modernist, for architectural modernists opted to ignore history and tradition and to transform society through architecture.

Critical vernaculars both cater to the society and transform it. One can observe Eastern, Western, local, and historic influences on architecture without having to identify with one category. Stepping outside of positivist epistemological structures; learning from the past, the locals, and distant cultures; and displacing East-West, local-global, and modern-traditional binaries, the critical vernacularists have produced ‘‘third spaces’’ for the creation and expression of local-modernities. Hence, the critical vernacular architecture has been instigated by, and responds more to cultural and historic rather than economic and stylistic transformations.

Although in regard to world politics, James Roseneau (1990, p. 303) conceptualizes event cascades as ‘‘action sequences ... [which] gather momentum, stall, and reverse course, and resume anew as their repercussions spread among whole systems and subsystems.’’ The image of cascades helps us to see how various histories and streams of thought, including indigenous, Eastern, and Western, come together, cross each other’s path, and influence each other creating particular moments in architecture and how these generate new streams that would influence new (hybrid) outcomes. In this, the concept of critical vernacularism provides us both intellectual tools and a space to view architecture not as authentic, but as locally produced differences, hybrids formed at particular crossings of histories, observed from the vantage point of the place and culture of production.

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