Being local beyond Architecture | Critical Regionalism - Mini Essay

Modern building is now so universally conditioned by optimized technology that the possibility of creating significant urban form has become extremely limited”

Critical regionalism, Kenneth Frampton

Technology has made globalization more affordable and hence, it is more economically viable to be a part of the consumerist-based, mass production fabric that characterizes most metropolitan cities today, than to strive to retain the local texture of the place. Can we be local while trying to cope with the ease offered by technology? And secondly, is it possible to strike a balance between a design bearing peculiarities of the place (symbolism, culturally relevant forms or spaces) and location (light, topography, tactile experience, ere) as well as the bland and increasingly common dynamic that is ‘world culture’?

The phenomenon of universalization, while being an advancement of mankind, at the same time constitutes a sort of subtle destruction, not only of traditional cultures, which might not be an irreparable wrong, but also of what I shall call for the time being, the creative nucleus of great cultures, that nucleus on the basis of which we interpret life, what I shall call in advance the ethical and mythical nucleus of mankind.”

History and Truth, Paul Ricoeur

Understanding the Local Fabric

Jeremy Till’s article goes on to add another dimension to Frampton’s writing leading me to question whether architecture alone holds the responsibility of resisting this rise of globalization. Accordingly to him, Kenneth Frampton provides a ‘comfort zone’ for architects to operate within and believe that physicality of the built form alone can help towards this goal.

Till’s contention is that beyond the architecture itself, it is the people that embody the sense of the place and tie the local culture to itself. The ‘local’ fabric of a place is made of the people themselves, and hence would differ from place to place in terms of the history of the people, how they are rooted to the place, what their aspirations are, ere. This aspect of local v/s global suddenly adds a whole new set of agencies and networks to the picture in terms of the physical, social, economic structures that are embedded in fabric of a locality. These networks of sustenance and collaboration which are intangible and may not be visible to the uninformed observer, actually help better perceive the patterns that characterize the culture and local inhabitants.

In their concentration on the 1:100 (the composition and making of buildings) architects tend to eschew the dynamics of the other scales and the rich interplay across them. Their main loss is an understanding of buildings and the places between them as the settings for the social and political life. We therefore introduced human experience as the common thread of our urban register, taking the role of people in the understanding and making of cities as a central concern, confronting architecture’s tendency to abstract the human, the social and the political.”

Jeremy till

Understanding the Vernacular

I see the study of local vernacular architecture as another way of getting closer to the answers we are looking for. When this discussion was first opened to us during our History and Theory course, I began to reflect on my past experiences with vernacular architecture.

Eight years back, I was first introduced to vernacular architecture in a small town in Gujarat. Through the Louis I. Kahn Competition organized by the National Association of Students of Architecture, India (NASA), I had the opportunity to document, analyze and study in depth, the beginnings and growth of the Merchant village of Bharuch along the Western coast in India. Within the course of my 5 year undergraduate degree at Mumbai University, I had the opportunity to visit settlements located in different parts of India including a temple town settlement in Melkote, South India and a hill-town settlement in Almora, North India.

Melkote, set in the rocky hills of Karnataka exhibits the remains of a water system designed by the ancestral inhabitants of the region. This system was pivotal in surviving drought during the time of low rainfall. The ingenuity of the system in carving wells and collection ponds (kolas) into the terrain to help collect water and feed the ground water table while functioning as areas of community celebrations seem remarkable. While studying the growth patterns of the city through the ages, it becomes apparent that the local community was rooted in this water system and still bears signs of those networks in their daily life, their homes and the organization of internal and external spaces. 

The hill town of Almora begins to display an even stronger sense of regionalism by way of the organization of living spaces within the houses, integration of mercantile spaces and using materials favorable to the region and climate, acquired from the nearby forests and mountain quarries. A study of the growth of the settlement brings to light how human intuition guided the original settlers to build along the south side of the ridge and thus maximizing solar heat gain to keep warm during the winter months.

All this is not to say that vernacular architecture is THE solution to all of mankind’s problems. I believe it is a step towards beginning to uncover the complexities of the original configuration and then using it as a basis to dig deeper into the urban fabric to find further clues in this process of understanding the bones of a local community. It is necessary to take a step back from the mass-production based, consumerist surroundings we are engulfed in and look at examples of architecture that are well rooted and successfully connect with the essence of the cultural spirit. We need to understand that the transition from vernacular to contemporary architecture must take place with a wide understanding of the strengths as well as limitations of traditional means of building.