A living culture.

Hope for the future of architecture in the Middle East lies as much in reinterpreting traditional culture as with a desperately needed understanding of ecological imperatives. There are signs that at last the tide is turning, and that the area may have started to have lessons to teach the rest of the world.

Why is so much modern architecture in the Middle East so problematic? Many prosperous cities in the area are overgrown with thickets of rank towers jostling for light and attention over an undergrowth formed by some of the flashiest and most meretricious malls in the world. There is a competitive coarseness and lack of scale in much of the work rarely paralleled elsewhere.

Such observations from a Western critic will doubtless be thought impertinent by many and hypocritical by others. For instance, in the West, we have La Defense, where all the worst buildings of modern Paris have apparently been collected to keep them from spoiling the rest of the city quite as bad as anywhere in the Middle East. We have the decayed horrors of conurbations like St Louis and the squalid mediocrity of most commercial buildings in the City of London. Aren't critics of the modernization of the Middle East merely hankering back to nineteenth-century engravings of old Stamboul and Cairo, full of people and intimate, secret places which can have no role in the world of cars and computer-controlled air conditioning? Aren't we jealous of the new wealth of the area? Wouldn't we prefer to keep the whole area as a series of picturesque stage sets? Aren't we being chauvinist, if not racist?

Clearly, I hope not. But it would be wrong to refrain from criticizing Middle Eastern architecture because the cultures from which it emerges are different from those of the West, and are themselves changing extremely rapidly. They are not so fragile, new or insecure that we should turn tactfully away and hope that something better will eventually emerge. In any case, much of the worst work (and some of the best) is designed and built by expatriates and we must surely be able to criticize them.

One of the most difficult problems for Westerners in understanding the cities of the Middle East is their relative lack of public realm: or at least public spaces as they evolved in Europe. Of course mosques, hans(1) and madrasas(2) often have wonderful courtyards, and there are some open markets (particularly for vegetables), but the climate tended to encourage the creation of enclosed bazaars, and as Jim Antoniou points out (p74), the principle of al-Fina meant that the streets themselves were colonized by private commerce. Domestic buildings turned in on their courts and gardens, and allowed few if any glimpses of internal delights from the street. Houses, public buildings like hospitals and hans, commerce and religion were all intimately mixed in a highly sophisticated and tight spatial matrix which worked extraordinarily well when spans were determined by the width of a masonry arch, the length of a timber beam or, exceptionally, the span of a dome. Integrated, delicate and coherent hierarchies of form and space, monumentality and the quotidian resulted.

They have largely been destroyed - blown apart by the Modern Movement with its reverence for object buildings, functional separation and new forms of structure and construction. Whereas in the West, where public buildings are traditionally often to be found surrounded by urban space, the Movement's obsession with detached structures was bad enough, in the Middle East it was disastrous. Once the complex coherence was eroded, each building could speak (or rather shout) for itself: indeed it is almost necessary in modern capitalist societies for it to do so.

The languages in which the buildings shriek at us and each other are primitive and almost gibberish. Khaled Asfour identifies a key cultural problem in his analysis of the cut-and-paste mentality which encourages the wrenching of images and ideas from one cultural context and arbitrarily sticking them into another (p52). Collage culture is of course not limited to the Middle East. It is characteristic of both the Modern and Post-Modern worlds. But its effects have been particularly obvious in cultures and economies which have become prosperous rapidly.

Ismail Serageldin has described the effect as 'a process of disassociation [of ruling elites] from their cultural roots. This has led to the dichotomization of cultural perception, where the historic heritage - cultural, religious, spiritual - is identified with the past, backwardness and poverty, while the image of "progress" is borrowed from elsewhere, namely the West'.(3) Serageldin calls on architects to attempt to 'convince the elites . . . to replace their imported image of progress with a more coherent and effective one', if they cannot, 'there is going to be little chance to reverse that widespread degradation of the urbanistic character and architectural expression that is so prevalent throughout the Muslim world'.(4)

Yet, however much they may wish to reverse the Middle Eastern tendency to import inappropriate second-rate imagery, critics like Asfour and Serageldin are far from being primitivists, trying to return to an idealized Middle Ages. They have welcomed inventive Muslim interpretations of modern building types like office blocks and airports and re-evaluations of traditional types like mosques and housing. But Serageldin in particular looks to tradition and Muslim morality to find principles of action for today. He points out that the Koran requires humankind to be 'the stewards of the earth'(5) and suggests that this implies that, though we should not be ashamed of 'cultivating its resources and increasing its bounty', the pursuit should be 'that of a steward, not a rapacious exploiter, ie it is balanced with limits imposed on greed and personal ambition, to nurture the underlying sustaining system'.(6)

It is difficult to think of systems of architecture and planning which do less to nurture the eco system than those which are being promoted in much of the Middle East. The glass towers and motor-ways of the West are ridiculously polluting and energy wasting in temperate climates. Pasted into hot, humid, desert and violently fluctuating climates, they become much worse. It is completely absurd, for instance, that in places blessed with abundant ambient energy from sun and wind, buildings seem designed to use almost as much irreplaceable and polluting fossil fuel as they can, partly to show how progressive and thrusting they are, and partly because in many places the stuff comes up out of the very earth. It may not yet be possible to use ambient energy to provide all the cooling and heating that buildings need to offer modern comfort conditions. But the latest generation of designs shows (see, for instance, Al Khobar headquarters building by DEGW, p34) that we are getting nearer to that ideal, and environmentally responsible cladding and control systems are improving all the time.

Serageldin holds out other forms of hope, for in Islam 'all that is not expressedly forbidden is allowed';(7) in other words, he argues, public interest can be judged to be 'justification for changing the past forms and coping with an ever-changing present and future'. He contrasts the 'flexible formalism' of Muslim architecture and contrasts its 'ability to let individualism express itself, sometimes idiosyncratically' with 'the formal ideal of urban form dominant in many Western societies'.(8)

He believes that this underlying attitude should lead to the generation of appropriate forms of Middle Eastern architecture as sustainable as were those of tradition. Looked at the other way round, the injunction that everything is permitted except what is forbidden clearly makes planning and its law very complicated. It has in many ways sanctioned foul rashes of Modernism and the destruction of irreplaceable traditional structures. But coupled with the underlying Muslim belief in humanity's overriding duty to act as stewards of the earth, it could produce works of great and appropriate invention, which can draw from the past without copying it, as well as using the most sophisticated contemporary technology. There are some signs here and there that, at long last, the tide may be turning.

1 A han is an urban caravanserai, where caravans spent the night and the animals were kept in the courts.

2 A madrasa is a collegiate mosque or religious college.

3 Serageldin, Ismail 'Architecture and Society' in Space for Freedom, ed Serageldin, The Aga Khan Award for Architecture/Butterworth Architecture, London etc, 1986, p256.

4 Idem.

5 He quotes:

'Behold, thy Lord said to the angels: 'I will create a VICE REGENT on earth. . . .' (Koran 2:30) and says that the Arabic word Khalifa (Vice Regent) implies the concept of stewardship: 'Then We made you heirs In the land after them TO SEE HOW YE WOULD BEHAVE' (Koran 10:14) Serageldin, op cit, p214.

6 Ibid, p215.

7 'He hath explained to you in detail what is forbidden to you' (Koran 6:119). Serageldin, ibid, p218.

8 Serageldin, Ismail, 'Watering the Garden' in Architecture beyond Architecture, Aga Khan Award for Architecture/Academy Editions, London, 1995, p12.