Reflections on a Wind-Catcher: Climate and Cultural Identity
THE WIND-CATCHER (PART 1)
The wind-catcher is part of a natural ventilation system found in certain hot dry climate zones. It is a raised building element either facing in all directions, or facing the prevailing wind, in order to ‘catch’ it, bring it down into the building, and cool it with moisture from fountains, pools and salsabils (carved stone surfaces over which water runs). Once re-warmed by people and their activities, the air rises through a central tower and is pulled out of the top of the building by the same breeze that drove it inside in the first place. If there is no breeze available, wetted hemp mats can be placed over the openings of the wind-catchers. This moistens and cools the air as it enters. The cooling makes the air drop downwards, creating its own breeze. The wind-catcher is thus a very sophisticated piece of low technology and a characteristic element of an architectural style that seamlessly and elegantly combines performance and form, climate and cultural identity: traditional Islamic architecture. In a contemporary context, however, are the same means of preserving and perpetuating architectural identity available to the Gulf States, or to any other region where traditional built culture is colliding with the hegemony of a high and universal technology?
17.1 A typical traditional wind-catcher in Iran
17.2 Roman classical remains in Syria
Architecture has been debating identity ever since the ‘International Style’ hove into view, although of course it was hardly the first international style. Roman classicism reached right across its empire. Islamic architecture spread all the way to the Far East. The connection between built culture and so-called ‘globalisation’ is not one of style, but of western industrial technology, western financial might and western expertise imposing itself on the rest of the world. Globalisation goes deep economically but, I’d suggest, is only a veneer politically and culturally. The high-rise block housing for an Islamic family and that housing a Christian one neither helps nor hinders their very different ways of life. Human beings are far too entrenched in their ways, and far too adaptable, to allow one stage-set or another to interfere with their habits and traditions – up to a point, at least. The location of that point is the real question. When does the built environment impede the living out of a culture? And which culture are we talking about? Is it the culture of the past, or an emergent culture grappling with enormous external forces? The cities of the southern Gulf have grown so quickly in a few decades, they couldn’t possibly have produced a perfect synthesis of disrupted traditions and disrupting economics and technology in that time. The question is where do they go from here?
Once one slows the alarmed gaze, difference proliferates everywhere, and globalisation is seen to be pervasive but limited. There is, for example, an enormous difference between poor developing countries and rich ones. Poor developing countries find it very hard to resist western economic penetration. Rich developing countries have more control over what they do and don’t let in. The wealthy countries of the southern Persian Gulf region certainly fall into the second category, although in the realm of the built environment, western industrial technology has obliterated traditional material culture, even if it has to be said that it has done it more totally at home than anywhere else. We have, though, been here before. The discussion going on now in the Gulf States was going on in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in the developed and the developing worlds. Then, the architectural reaction to a universalising industrial technology, so-called ‘post-modernism’, was as heartfelt as it was ineffective. The first call to arms was historicist post-modernism, with its desire to ‘enrich’ architectural modernism with architectural history. It ranged from the mildly necrophiliac (for example, Phillip Johnson’s AT&T Building in Manhattan in 1979) to the entirely necrophiliac (for example, Quinlan Terry’s Richmond Riverside development in London in 1987), from pastiche to exact imitation, primarily of classical architecture. The second revolt was called ‘Deconstruction’, aka ‘Deconstructivism’, originally a philosophical assault on the construction of meaning in language, translated over-literally into architecture by Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau and others. Both rebellions against architectural modernism operated entirely within modernism’s dominant technologies and industrial ways of making, and did nothing to redirect its energies.
THE FIRST WAY: DEEP RETURN
At the same time, however, there was a much deeper resistance that would have dented a universalising technology and the global economic system that supports it, had it been able to compete economically. In Vandana Shiva’s book, Monocultures of the Mind, there is a strong connection made between biological and cultural monocultures, and between biological and cultural diversity:
Diverse ecosystems give rise to diverse life forms, and to diverse cultures.
The co-evolution of cultures, of life forms and habitats has conserved the biological diversity on this planet. Cultural diversity and biological diversity go hand in hand.1
For Shiva, ways of making and living arise from particular ecosystems and their particular climates and materials. Hence the existence of traditional vernacular architecture: a human adaptation to a particular ecology, which functions as part of that ecology. A deep return of this kind, with different ways of life contingent upon different physical habitats, therefore requires a return to vernacular craft economies, and in the 1960s and 1970s, just such a return was called for. In the developed world, it informed what the Luxembourg architects, Leon and Robert Krier, called ‘rational architecture’ – a name chosen in a deliberate challenge to the rationalism of architectural modernism. In the developing world, the work and writings of the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy appeared even earlier, in the 1960s. What united these two positions was both valid and unrealistic. If the style wars of architectural post-modernism were a superficial return to a lost past of visual identity, Fathy and the Kriers’ work was a return to ways of making and ways of organising space. The deeper the return desired, however, the more elusive it is.
17.3 Traditional sun-dried bricks in Egypt
Fathy’s intention was to recover, not just an aesthetic, but an entire way of life – the life before Egypt began to modernise under Abdel Nasser, when it lost much of its building craft culture and the identity it provided. The symbol of cultural recovery was, for Fathy, sun-dried brick construction, used in Egypt since the pharaohs, and until the advent of breeze blocks in the 1950s, the basis of every village in the land. The arches, domes and vaults natural to such a material gave rise to an architecture suited to, and characteristic of, its locality, but Fathy was forced to train up builders in the old techniques because there were so few traditional craftsmen left, and the majority of his countrymen weren’t with him. The Krier brothers, like Ruskin before them, also condemned the industrialisation of building technology as alienating and unhealthy for its workers, and destructive of the centuries-old fabric of European cities. It was, however, too late to go back, even with patronage of a nostalgic member of the British royal family.
Resistance had, for Fathy and the Kriers, another weapon in its armoury: typology. Almost forgotten now is the amount of heat and light generated in the 1970s by the revival of interest in historical building and urban typologies – the traditional urban grammar that made up the distinctive languages of cities worldwide, which architects like Leon Krier reproduced, much as so-called ‘New Urbanism’ reproduces them now.