The confrontation of the two so-called traditional and modern or contemporary trends in architecture, once again, appeared in the competition for designing an extension to the Hazrat Massoumeh (peace be upon her) Shrine in Qom.
According to what the entry designs themselves present, two — “traditional” and “contemporary” — trends and an intermediary one are perceptible, with their particular characteristics and the extent of the attention and energy spent in each. But could we find this categorisation and confrontation in the general practice of architecture in the society, and through a proper analysis of the trends within it?
The opposition between traditional and modern does not belong to the serious and authentic movements of architecture — neither in the West nor in our own country. The first protest against industrial modernity in the West was an Arts-and-Crafts protest against the abandonment of the handmade, which ignored the emotional relation of the human being to the things of life. That protest — still deeper today — remains in force; and, despite the indifference of factory mass-production to the emotional relationship between the human being and the tools of living, it still strives to inject into machine-made goods (for the home above all) the emotionally rich qualities of hand-crafted things. In architecture, too, a voice of protest rose when some — in obedience to the main requirements of industry: simplification, reduction in form, the removal of ornament, and in general any element devoid of functional weight — first stripped architecture bare and gradually deprived it of its “buildingly” quality. That protest, likewise, remains in force today: the defence of the “buildingly” quality — with which architecture stepped onto the stage of human life — is still in a serious struggle against the abstraction of the human being's presence on the earth and its re-creation in abstract pictorial displays.
These protests did not mean to stop industry or to freeze architecture in its past. The architects of the new style were not indifferent to them either. Architecture based on new materials and methods of construction, and on the formal idioms that follow from them, ended by delivering all the qualities and merits of earlier architecture — along with its unprecedented supporting equipment and services — to its own age. The works of modern architects such as Le Corbusier, Wright and Alvar Aalto earned the same admiration and reverence that the masterpieces of the older history of architecture had earned. The grandeur, beauty, proportion, emotional force and creativity of those works owe nothing to earlier works.
In our country, a return to the past was neither a choice between two existing experiences nor a reconsideration or correction of method. With the necessary groundwork laid, it began in the time of Reza Shah — with the aim of opposing ancient Iran to Islamic Iran, of ascribing all greatness and honour to the ancient and all decline and weakness to the Islamic, and so of excising the Islamic period from Iranian history as a decadent and alien one, preparing the stage for a new era that claims to renew the grandeur of antiquity. The policy was not peculiar to architecture. Its effect on cultural and literary production, on historiography, and on the very way this period saw things was so great that its influence has not yet dissipated. Orientalism — originally a branch of the study of nature and man, geography and history, in the service of Western domination — became for Easterners and Muslims themselves a way of looking at their own history and so turned their intellectual and political life into a reactive, following one. A culture — and within it an architecture — made reactive is the product of this abdication and collapse into an outward-looking current that drained the intellectual force and productive resources of non-Western societies, and, by turning their cultures into passive, giving cultures, prevented the emergence of active, receiving ones.
With the end of Reza Shah's period, the policy of Aryan antiquarianism lost its first intensity and the confrontation of Islam and the West took on global dimensions, opening room for the rise of Islamism. But Muslim intellectuals, accustomed to orientalist methods, remained within the same orbit of reaction, under the influence of the school of Western Islamic studies which had taken the place of orientalism. That school, drawing on the sociology of religion, treats Islam as a human and civilisational achievement belonging to the past — one in need of modernisation. Western modernity, taking its own way of governing man and the world as absolute, treats the East and Islam as one further object of its research, as it does anything natural or human within its unchallenged dominion; and so it imposes its own research method — a method in service of the conquest and government of the world — on the history and culture of Eastern and Muslim peoples. The Eastern and Iranian intellectual — bound to imitating the form and method of “subjectivism” and of “subject-making for research,” and unaware that the modern Western scholar and researcher is first a practitioner and only then a scholar, and that he seeks knowledge in the service of practice — in the whirlpool of inaction does nothing but react to subjects, and in the end does not even acquire the method of research itself, which is born of practice.
One of the experiences that seemed in the 1960s to offer a way of reconciling new building materials and methods with the past — and that has parallels in other Eastern countries, going under the names of traditionalism and the quest for identity — began with the works of Nader Ardalan and his theories, which he ascribed to Sufism and which were supported by so distinguished a scholar as Dr. Seyed Hossein Nasr. The continuation of that experience proved that the strength of Ardalan's work lay not in the fit of his Sufi references but in his professional effort and his will to practise. In other words, a return to the methods and principles of the past will be useful only if architecture has first stood firm in the territory of practice. In this new experience the aim was to pay attention to the spatial organisation of historical architecture rather than to its formal system, and then to test that organisation with today's construction technology. The practical result was a step forward, and in some cases produced fresh, up-to-date versions of traditional spatial organisation. But, as we saw, once the practitioners left the scene the theories stopped evolving, the new experience did not generalise in the country's architecture, and room was again made for a current shaped by international experience and the theories that justify it to prevail. That dominant current continues in the country's general building output, and no one challenges it; but as soon as it is reflected in somewhat more cultivated forms in state commissions, it runs into the encounter between tradition and modernity and is paralysed. And the so-called traditional architecture which, on the stage of architectural production, devotes its energy to a merely verbal and formal opposition to contemporary architecture — in teaching and in the profession — has, for all the slogans of traditionalism, arrived neither at a theory nor at built examples that truly command attention.
The lesson we learn from this experience is that the intentions of architecture are defined and determined within architecture itself, and not outside it. In the end, architecture is what gets built. Even if ninety per cent of what is built is poor and rejected, those examples worthy of care and support are to be found within that great built body, not in writings and speech. No course of architecture ever proved its competence before being built.
The free or, in the slogans of the day, non-traditional designs submitted to the Qom competition did not shine as brightly as the reputations of their designers — reputations that have for years been locked away behind the walls of practice. We should make it possible for the cultivated forces of our country's architecture — regardless of any division between traditional, modern or contemporary — to earn their due renown through the practice of architecture.
1. The designs, at the time this article was being written, were on public display in the lobby of the Building and Services Execution Organisation of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, which held the competition. Several of them are also reproduced in this issue.
