The English summary below appeared verbatim on the printed page alongside the fuller Farsi interview. Both texts are by the author.
Ceiling, floor, wall and height are the four basic elements of architecture and they form the flesh, bone and brain of architecture just like basic vital cells. Whatever architects think of falls within the boundaries of these four domains. Any interpretation in architecture is inclined towards these four elements and there is no such thing as absolute function or content. Once the content was shelter and the opportunity for human being to protect himself against the cold and to have a place for his animals. During the thousands of years that man has lived on earth, there has been decades and centuries in which the content of life and human needs have not gone under much change, however, the forms have been countless and various. Thus, there is no connection between the form and the content. What is important today is to make sure floor, wall, ceiling and the floor height have sufficient flexibility to adapt themselves to the rapid changes today.
Introduction
In the previous issue you read the result of a Memar guests' discussion under the title "Function" in architecture, in the Negah ("Looking") section. The text you are now reading is its continuation — sent in by three of the architects present at the meeting. Mehdi Alizadeh, in a brief conversation, has further explained his view on this subject:
The matter of commission in any profession, including ours, is a foundational matter and the principal subject. In any age, the people of that age — given the structure and customs of their social life — seek a space in which to live. The human being has had the intelligence to construct a building and, by taking shelter inside it, to protect himself against the natural elements. Doubtless, if man had not had a roofed space in which to live, life would have been entirely different.
My mental picture of the subject of function rests on this foundation. The human being uses four elements for construction: floor, ceiling, wall, and difference of level. These elements are the foundational cells of architecture. They are the cells that, like the body's foundational cells, make up the flesh and bone and brain of architecture. The intelligence of architects is in fact concentrated on this matter: how to work with these elements, what changes to introduce into their known forms — just as, for example, Mrs Moussavi at the Yokohama project has tried to introduce changes in floor and ceiling.
In my view these elements are intelligent and expressive, and they adapt themselves to the function that is envisaged for them in any given project. For example, a floor for one type of use must be flat, and for another it must be sloped. Another example: a roof, for a certain kind of use, must have a slope so as to move rainwater along. Or, in floor, the difference of level is one of the necessities of human life — whether as a movable or fixed step, or in other forms. Therefore, the difference you see in an old adobe or mud building has no particular bearing on this discussion. There was a time when wall was only wall. Then, according to need, we put a niche in it. More important: we wanted to pass through the wall, and we placed a door in the wall. We wanted to look out through the wall, and we created a window.
In the past, the ceiling was made simply with a hole at the top through which light could enter and smoke could exit; in reality we ventilated the interior through that means. But today all these elements, while preserving their original existence, have changed. The ceiling, for instance, has become more expressive because installations and equipment for ventilation and lighting are placed in it. Owing to this very continual change in equipment, the ceiling has acquired particular importance. In this way the ceiling shows itself more than before. The wall too has changed, due to the requirements of our age — including the requirements of the new aesthetics.
Life is in constant change, and the implements of life change continually — like computers, which you must renew and change every day. A day may come when there is no longer a wall, and the human being can exchange the air outside and inside through waves — work that today is done with sound. Hence many pieces of equipment or instruments, with the change of time, lose their reason for existing. Like the rooster's spur, which remains as a vestige but no longer has function, and is therefore clipped so the rooster can move. The same event has occurred in architecture and will go on occurring — as has happened, for example, with the walls of office buildings. Perhaps a day will come when we make the wall out of waves as well.
It is therefore very important that we clarify our perception of these elements. In my view, content and function do not exist in any absolute sense. Once the content was for the human being to protect himself against the cold, to have a place where his animals could also be and not be stolen. Today the content is not stable at all. It is changeable and fluid; it has become fluid. Today you can have no ceiling, or your wall can be virtual and shaped like a wave. So how you define the form or shape of a wall on the basis of the function or content of the wall no longer carries any particular meaning. The meaning that can be put forward is that floor or wall or other elements should have the capacity to accept any content. Understanding of flexibility is very important — much more important than the elements themselves. The best example is sound. In the past you often tried to have sound heard clearly: the ceiling had to be like this, and the wall had to be like that.
If you look carefully, you will see that in the past too — when functions and content were stable and definite as today — even so, forms differed. The content did not change for 200–300 years, but the forms across all places were entirely different. This shows that there is no enduring correlation between content and form. Within the same content, you see entirely different forms. It is in attraction, or in modeling, that we pass from form to form — that is to say, it is our attraction that carries us from one form to another. Today, for example, the attraction in food is variety. A new concept called "fast food" has appeared, which, in deriving from the speed of life, has accepted a changed meaning — and its function is to deliver food, or nutrition, to the human being more quickly. Every new attraction certainly has, in every place, a different past. However advanced buildings may become, they still contain perception of floor, ceiling, wall, and difference of level; these elements are constant — what changes is our perception of them.
