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| Wednesday, 14 January 2004 |
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Buildings, Big and Bad by Rukshan Widyalankara Even at the risk of seeming to repeat the stale old 'The Brits knew best' the following has to be said. Certain British gentlemen would turn in their graves if they could see Colombo now.
These gentlemen travelled to Colombo in the 19th century knowing how 'in Europe a beautiful landscape is often shorn of its loveliness by the growth of a town'. Imagine their gratification upon learning that 'in Colombo with its rapidly growing flora of every tropical species the growth of a residential settlement transforms the luxuriant jungle into the more beautiful avenues and cultivated gardens. "Colombo', they wrote with feeling, 'cannot be too carefully guarded as the garden city of the east'. As they said, "No word indeed can give a correct impression of the wild and magnificent flora of Colombo or the scenes of city life so perfectly harmonising with it; nor can the best pictures which modern art can produce awaken the amount of admiration which the places themselves never fail to arouse'. Immense influence The immense influence that buildings have over the quality of our living experience has given architecture a status of the utmost importance. Lewis Mumford once said: "If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion." Charles, the Prince of Wales added to this, "if you find yourself having to live or work in a building that derives its inspiration from a purely mechanical or technological source there is something wrong with your architect." He went on further; "We cannot and should not ignore the possibilities that technology offers us. But we must be masters of our technology and not its tools". All along human history the leaders of human beings, good or bad, applied architecture of the day for their highest 'benefit'. This we see in practically all the continents. Architecture occupied and important place in the minds of even early European explorers. Subsequent to Captain James Cook discovering Australia in 1777 England planned the settlements. First it decided to solve its problem of the overflowing prison population by transporting them to Botany Bay in the newly-found colony of New South wales of Australia. More prisoners were transported and other convict colonies founded. Free settlers soon followed. Slowly, the land was explored and domesticated, in some ways parallel to the opening of the West in the U. S. Settlers in wagons followed the pathfinders to make homes in the wild country; pioneers and the Aboriginal peoples engaged in bloody conflict. Pivotal role Architects played a pivotal role in building many of the capital cities of the world as was experienced with regard to Canberra, for example. In 1908, the government of Australia picked a spot, named it Canberra and declared that it would be the nation's capital. Chicago architect Walter Burley was chosen to design the city, and after a few decades of fits and starts, Canberra came into being. Similarly when the colonialists made Colombo the capital of Sri Lanka they planed it according to their requirements. Professional urban architecture of the day was allowed to paly a key role in the city's development plans. But, the situation today is strikingly different if not serious. According to a recent proclamation by the Colombo Municipality and the UDA, only 5% of the developers and owners of buildings have sought expert advice or services of architects in their building programmes. Take a drive along Galle Road from Kollupitiya to Moratuwa, the number of architect-designed buildings alongside are less than 20. This is a statistic that will fail to raise a single eyebrow in Colombo. The absence of architectural involvement in the built fabric of our metropolis is glaringly obvious even to a casual observer. Proclivities A glance around most Colombo neighbourhoods reveals the proclivities of the non-architect developer. One can glimpse his shadowy presence on buildings that seem to stand quite apart from the landscape - alien intrusions instead of sympathetic and logical extensions of the local environment. He can be traced by the trail of Singaporean carbon profiles that he has left in his wake. They cover cityscapes like identical cancerous growths destroying urban diversity. The non-architect developer has put paid to the time when 'new building' wasn't taken as a byword for destruction or negation of beauty. What is worse, not only do these developers seem to have mislaid the ability to create beauty, but also to have set out to destroy what beauty there is left in the world. lrrevocable change An aerial view of most historic market towns and villages in this country used to display a fine blend of scale, layout, topography and materials. What remains of such aerial views now had better be captured in film and preserved as library shots before they too are changed irrevocably by new buildings that shatter the relationship between the building and the environment. There's no doubt that our cityscapes need to be saved. There is only one question. Who are the people best qualified to save it? Who possess the intelligence, integrity, vision and courage to be the white knights of the scenario? There is only one answer - architects. Often it is only doctors, lawyers and politicians who are credited with having critical power over mankind. The power of the architect is little remarked upon. Yet, it is awesome. An architect can undermine or enhance the quality of life of a community for generations to come through the way he shapes the built environment inhabited by that community. Close your eyes and imagine a Colombo where the buildings and the public spaces they frame are elegant instead of garish; where a love of natural forms and timeless lessons of the past are applied to the development of office buildings. Imagine a Colombo laid out with the modest, almost domestic architecture and the easy urban form of a historic town, no aspect loud or glaring, everything reflecting a marriage between highly localised needs and materials while retaining the character and flavour of a metropolis. Such a city would engender community wellbeing, urban order and vitality instead of frustration, discord and resentment. Being there would raise our spirits and brighten our lives. It would be the kind of place good architects consider their life's mission to create. The architecture of a city is ultimately determined by the people who pay for it. Nevertheless, an architect can and should make a cityscape celebrate more than commercial values. Rather than degrees and diplomas, it is this ability to create enclosed spaces inspired by public as well as commercial interest, that define a good architect in the last analysis. A good architect comes to light by what he does and does not do. A good architect following his craft does take into account the way people live, the environment they inhabit and the kind of community they form. When designing a building a good architect holds one consideration paramount over all others; creating surroundings that enhance the inhabitants' quality of life, generating what Ruskin termed 'Poetry of Architecture' - a poetry arising out of buildings in harmony with their surrounding. A good architect does not try to put his signature on the built environment by incorporating the same ensemble of design elements into each and every design he creates. A standard prototype signature building would look identical whether it's in Colombo, Kandy, or in Matara, as carbon profiles from Singapore without any meaningful relationship to the areas in which they are placed. Instead, he lets the design be shaped by functional and economic considerations and the spirit of the place. A good architect aspires for a certain poetic quality in his craft arising out of buildings existing in harmony with their natural surroundings. A good architect always attempts to transcend utility and technology and express something of greater human meaning. All this is not to represent architects as a noble tribe stranded in moral high ground, developers as pirates trying to squeeze maximum profit out of a minimum investment and the two parties as never being able to meet on common ground. Naturally the developers have every right to expect a reasonable profit and a development, which is attractive to investors. But if development is to be both a vindication of tradition, and a model for the next century, the developers' instincts have to be suspended to make room for real thought: the instinct to create as much undifferentiated floor area as possible - in the interests of 'flexibility'; the instinct to build quickly, cheaply and thinly; the instinct to go up as high as regulations will allow; and the instinct to develop unrestrained by the recognition of human needs. Recovering There is no alternative for the use of good architecture by the developers who are the decision-makers went it comes to buildings. It is they who will have to be educated and it is they who have to realise the folly of their actions. No Authority or organisation can enforce the laws, which are not realistic and which lead to further degeneration. Goethe once said "there is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste". In many cultures, and over many thousands of years, invasion of habitats would have been taken as sacrilegious. Whatever one's spiritual beliefs, it is clear that our wellbeing is deeply affected by the character of our man-made landscapes. And it this generation builds badly, then of course it mars both the present and the generations to come. Ruskin said that. 'When we build, let us think we build forever', a point worth making at a time when people speak widely about sustainability but less about its true meaning, which is about recovering that which is timeless - and, indeed, sacred. Developers may come and go but the chaos created by bad developers may be damaging to society forever. Would that developers were so developed as to let Sri Lanka become, once again, the pearl of the Indian Ocean in more ways than one, certainly in the way its buildings and environment are handled!. |
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