An intemperate argument

Architectural Review, The, July, 1994

The buildings shown in this issue are a start in the search for appropriate models in hot and dry climates, which in the future may incorporate new technologies, such as photovoltaic modules, as well as traditional wisdom to harness the abundant ambient energy of the sun.

Modern architecture has its origins largely in the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere, and though there were excursions to other climates by some of the major figures of the '20s and '30s (notably those made by Le Corbusier to Rio de Janeiro and Algiers) most contemporary practice is based on designs made for climates without any great extremes in temperature or humidity.

For lack of appropriate models, standard solutions developed in temperate lands are applied without thought from the Equator to the Arctic Circle. For instance, there are endless instances of the glass curtain walled, air-conditioned office block across the developed world at every latitude. While the appropriateness of this building type is now being rightly questioned even in the temperate zones, it has always been demonstrably absurd in hotter and colder places, because it requires such a vast amount of energy to maintain equable internal environments, and perforce separates inhabitants from the external environment.

New climate specific planning and building types -- and new ways of building -- are needed to help generate environments that are ecologically sustainable, and offer human satisfaction in the way that, for instance, the traditional Mediterranean house and city, which we inherit from time immemorial, respond to climate and by doing so offer an armature that encourages the development of societies that are rewarding at every level.

Yet how little guidance there has been until recently. Though Corbusier's South American adventure produced the brise-soleil, which in one way or another has been re-interpreted over the decades, his Algiers experiments seem to take very little cognisance of the arid climate -- and his fascination with motorways has now been horridly realised in cities like Cairo, which is being strangled, Laocoon-like by a mess of ill-thought-out concrete traffic arteries.

A quarter of a century after Corbusier's first proposals for Algiers, and at the other end of the climatic spectrum, Ralph Erskine made some remarkable proposals for the form and life of settlements in the high Arctic of Sweden and Canada. These, with their deep understanding of the essence of life in the North, their analysis of lessons from the traditional dwellings of the Innuit and the Lapps, their understanding of the possibilities of using ambient energy, had (and still have) a real possibility of being the basis of humanly rewarding and ecologically appropriate townships. But too little has as yet been realised, because so much of the high North is still in the thrall of a psychology that oscillates between subsistence, and the rape of nature. So capital and political will are lacking.

Erskine's strategy of learning from traditional forms of construction has been pursued in many latitudes in efforts to find forms of contemporary architecture that can respond to non-temperate climates without using excessive amounts of artificially created energy and that can make relevant to our day the patterns of daily living of our ancestors.

Glenn Murcutt in Australia has rethought the model of the bush farmstead and used it mainly on small buildings, which, while drawing on the vocabulary of timber and tin verandas in the Victorian bush, understands the problems of the prototypes -- for instance the tendency of steeply pitched metal roofs to accumulate a body of hot air during the day that radiates heat downwards at night to make indoor conditions extremely disagreeable. His architecture, like its precedents, is lightweight, many layered and in close contact with nature. But behind it is a contemporary understanding of passive climate control, modern materials and abstraction that forms a model for work in hot and dry climates. His example (and that of his contemporaries) has enabled a new generation of architects to invent approaches to creating a wide range of buildings in Australia that can cope with most of a modern society's needs (pp30-40).

In the Middle East, where so much money has been spent in making huge volumes of building in the last 30 years, vast amounts of design energy have gone into prettifying standard temperate models with glitsy screens of Islamically derived decoration. Hassan Fathy, that great latter-day Morrisian, who tried to re-invent architecture appropriate for the climate of Egypt based on traditional models, accused 'the architect who builds a sort of solar furnace and then brings in a vast refrigerating plant to make it habitable [of] over-simplifying the problem and ... working below the level of architecture'.(1) How right he was, and how little his perception has been understood.

There, of course, have been splendid exceptions. Abdel Wahed El-Wakil has been exploring traditional Islamic forms for many years (AR November 1989). His work reminds us of the climatic and constructional excellence of the models, but, because of a Prince Charlesish addiction to representation, he seems unable to translate and abstract the lessons he has learned to contemporary building types such as offices or hospitals. Henning Larsen, in his marvellous Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Saudi Government in Riyadh (AR July 1985) set a standard for reinterpretation of traditional Arabic models for a highly sophisticated contemporary function but, partly because of the nature of the client, there was a reliance on air conditioning in the MOFA, which to some extent makes superfluous its deep understanding of the traditional climate controlling mechanisms of Arabic architecture such as the mushrabiyya and the shaded, conductively ventilated alley of the souk.