The TRADITIONAL

1969 – Hassan Fathy

Architecture for the poor

A book title Gourna: A Tale of Two Villages, the book is about an account of the planning and new construction of New Gourna, a rural village near Thebes and Luxor in Egypt. Fathy was the architect and coordinator for the project, he used traditional forms and methods of construction to accommodate the needs of community. The advantages in using traditional methods is bringing back the craftsmen back.

An architect is in position to revive the peasant’s faith in his own culture. To begin, one is to let your buildings grow from the daily lives of the people who will live in them, shaping the houses to sit the people. Architecture must be the visible and permanent expression of the character of a community. The new village shows how an architecture made one with the people was possible.

1977 – David Watkin

Morality and Architecture

An old belief- human nature does not alter from generation to generation. Moreover, artists develop traditions which are capable of interpretation and development by other artists. Yet, Zeitgeist-inspired belief that human nature has changed radically, that a new man has been born who must either learn to express himself in a radically new way which is externally dictated by economic and political conditions.

Pevser is insistent that every feature of every building must have tangible material use, and he emphasizes that in building where shapes and forms have a functional justification. Pugin argued the functional justification of wrapping a glass wall around the exposed spiral staircase at Werkbund building. The only answer for that has to be aesthetic justification.

An art-historical belief in the all-dominating Zeitgeist, combined with a historicist emphasis on progress and the necessary. On the other hand, appreciation of imaginative genius of the individual and importance of artistic tradition is needed.

Discussed above is the continuous dialogue between the two, opposing attitudes, in relation to architecture, the one represented by Gadamer and the other by philosophers as Lyotard or Deleuze, is fundamental. Besides, contemporary Avant-guard architecture is greatly indebted to philosophy for providing it with means of communication and interplay with other fields of human expression and action within our society.

1986 – Alexander Tzonis & Liane Lefaivre

Critical Classicism: The Tragic Function.

A classical building, a world within a world factored by the rule- based actions of its architect, contains a set of abstract general relations that represents a large number of phenomena of reality. Formal patterns of classical buildings might have originated in depictions of specific events and specific objects.

A classical building also relates to reality in a diametrically different way from the way it does when it reproduces it mimetically. This relation call foregrounding and estrangement. The world of the building in this case is not only about the truth and knowledge but also about goodness and morality. It is difficult to disentangle how much classical leads to strange making and its imitation. It depends on how the work is being used, on our intentions as much as on the structure of the work itself.

“Citationism” of classical motifs or so-called free-wheeling classicism. Under citationism belongs the ‘classicism’ of design, of consumer products, of propaganda and of even more ambitious cultural objects, ‘prestige’ buildings and in several occasions some of the so-called post- modernist buildings. ‘Syncretism’ and the use of classical fragments in architectural ‘metastatement’. – are used as means of questioning the rigid, routine application of classical order.

The world of classical architecture today is a world of scattered forms that in their incompleteness can be seen as icons of decomposition. In classicism, a thinking that struggles for consistency and completeness can be seen.

Overview

As the world is based upon impersonal images was substituted for the real world of emotions, two distinct but related visions shaped our built environment. We must understand the weaknesses of twentieth century design in the light of new insights into the rich connective structure of nature, a structure also seen in pre-modern design and urbanism around the world. Only then can we do what all great designers throughout history have done: learn from the past, borrow liberally from it, and synthesize those lessons for our own time and place.