Under the hat of Globalisation we are experiencing a major economic boom which has an impact much like the “industrial revolution”. Although one understands the necessity of such an evolution in day-to-day life, but architecture is seeing a repeat of an era, much similar to the “International Style”.
Today, we see architecture as a necessity to provide shelter to the needed in the fastest way possible. This boom is majorly been experienced in countries like China( who have recently opened its doors), south east Asia and India, most of which are developing countries. Massive projects on urbanisation and housing, which was once in a lifetime commission for an experienced architect, today, is knocking at almost everyone’s door. The result is such that in our mission to achieve the Manhattan skyline, which given a choice the people of Manhattan would no longer celebrate, our cities are left for erosion.
But this is not the first time. When Louis Sullivan, an American architect, said “that form ever follows function”, many miss-interpreted and chose to “follow the function” and forgot the form. This suited the time of industrial revolution perfectly as more and more buildings arose without a thought and served true functionalism. It took many years for one to realise what Sullivan really meant - every object, he said, that exists in nature, has a form that is based on its function, yet a leaf of one tree is different from the next, although their functions are quite similar. The form is the ingeniousness of man and nature. It is the buildings soul and our creation. It can never be borrowed from a hospital to a school, just like a eucalyptus leaf would never fit a banyan tree. They are both part of a tree as both the buildings are part of our needs.
The presence of thought in architecture originates from the early cave-men who drew paintings on their walls to symbolise certain animals and methods of living such as hunting, cooking and human synthesis. No Pharaoh could have ever built a pyramid for his own selfish motive to obtain rebirth and enslave millions for such a personal cause. The reason lay in the belief of their civilization, in a ritual performed inside these huge buildings exactly at a time just before the flooding of the Nile valley, which showed citizens the proof of their belief each year. Similarly, no European church could have ever been built if it was a selfish motto of the Church to show its supreme power, rather it was the faith in religion that people could be organised in hundreds to perform such a collective act.
We are living in an era in which we strive for reasoning through our senses. Like all objects and matter, we too have limitations. Our imaginative universe exists in many layers and the observation from one layer is directly perceivable to the immediate interactive layers that lay above or below it. The rest is a belief or understanding, based on either derivations or perceptions or a theory.
The architecture that appeals to every one of us like the Great Pyramids, the Churches, the Temples, have a thought rooted in its design. Not just because they are grand structures but for an underlying thought which was formed by the understanding of various belief. These thoughts extended beyond our reasoning world which is why we visit them still today.
It is these thoughts that have gone missing. Today our only prides lie in the super high-rise buildings that to some extent signify the technical achievements by the reasoning man and nothing more. They remain just one-liners with no story to tell.
No matter whatever we build, architecture would continue to represent a time in every civilisation that we ever lived. It is always evolving, as the only constant that remains in our rational understanding of the universe is ‘evolution’. We have come through the industrial revolution and we will come through this economic one as well. But unless we give our thoughts into what we build as architects, it will not be worth and would remain just a mere impression like the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
-Subharthi Guha
21 April 2008.
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