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13 December 2007
Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:45:43 GMTArchitecture Without Architects
Bernard Rudofsky
I’m on a bit of an architecture tear.
A wonderful black and white photo filled book detailing that which really isn’t considered (but sure should be) in the modern world to be architecture at all: traditional, ‘old world’ buildings. Here I go quoting stuff.
Vernacular architecture does not go through fashion cycles. It is nearly immutable, indeed, unimprovable, since it serves its purpose to perfection. As a rule, the origin of indigenous building forms and construction methods is lost in the distant past. 1
The tendency to build on sites of difficult access can be traced no doubt to a desire for security, but perhaps even more so to the need of defining a community’s borders. In the old world, many towns are still solidly enclosed by moats, lagoons, glacis, or walls that have long lost their defensive value. Although the walls present no hurdles to invaders, they help to thwart undesirable expansion. The very word urbanity is linked to them, the Latin urbs meaning walled town. Hence, a town that aspires to being a work of art must be as finite as a painting, a book, or a piece of music. 4
Above all, it is the humaneness of this architecture that ought to bring forth some response in us. For instance, it simply never occurs to us to make streets into oases rather than deserts. In countries where their function has not yet deteriorated into highways and parking lots, a number of arrangements make streets fit for humans: pergole and awnings (that is, awnings spread across a street, tentlike structures, or permanent roofs). 4
People who have not yet been reduced to appendages to automobiles find in them Italian hill towns a fountain of youth. 37
Niether the word arcade nor its many synonyms translate satisfactorily into the American language, perhaps because we have no arcades. Arcades are altruism turned architecture — private property given to an entire community. 67
The disappearance of age-old pleasures and privileges is the first unmistakable sign of progress. Whereas less than a century ago every Spanish town and village boasted miles of covered ways along its streets, today they are disappearing fast. 71
Pictures of a particular town in Pakistan show 2-walled towers popping out of every building with a diamond shaped ceiling at some angle greater than 45º – they’re all wind catchers, natural air conditioning, giant fans that funnel the air down a tunnel to the basement and then back up. 113
“Give a mason bricks and mortar,” writes Jamshid Kooros, an MIT educated Persian architect, “and tell him to cover a space and let in light, and the results are astounding. The mason, within his limitations, finds unending possibilities, there is variety and harmony; while the modern architect with all the materials and structural systems available to him produces monotony and dissonance, and that in great abundance.” 151
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05 October 2006
Thu, 05 Oct 2006 21:11:00 GMTBreathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well!
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,—
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung. -
Also somewhat recently
