Architecture

ARCHITECTURE

an area of great cultural creativity.

The architecture and city planning of the countries of North Africa and the Middle East are steeped in a history that has been marked by the development of Arab and Islamic culture since the seventh century. The architectural and urban traditions generated by this culture produced a remarkable built environment—composed of beautiful monuments of the Islamic art—and spatial typologies. Since the nineteenth century, this architectural inheritance has cohabited with and contrasted with a contemporary architecture that was produced on the one hand by an endogenous dynamics of "Westernization" developed during the Ottoman imperial period, and on the other hand by different forms of colonial domination (mainly French and British).

Since the independence of the region's countries, architecture has been the product of essentially two tendencies. In the vernacular, "minor" architecture, age-old traditions rooted in the materials, climate, and social structure of the local environment mark buildings in both rural areas and in new urban districts, where the self-construction is encouraged. There, the population produces an architecture without architects, and old forms cohabit, harmoniously or in a disjointed way, with modern structures. By contrast, in official, "major" architecture, buildings whose construction relied on governmental or institutional patronage have undergone a metamorphosis that has altered dramatically historical traditions and reflects the increasing impact of international styles and construction methods.

In addition to this influence, during the last thirty years the rate of construction in this part of the world has been intense, so architectural development has been rapid and buildings production radically transformed. However, as Udo Kulter-mann explained in Contemporary Architecture in the Arab States, this "rapidity and gigantic dimension of the transformation caused problems, among them waste, inefficiency, and misstated priorities, [and] the focus of international architectural activity shifted from Europe and North America to the Arab states as the world elite of the architectural profession competed with each other and with the emerging generation of Arab architects" (p. 1).

The Islamic Legacy

In the contemporary architecture, the influence of the Islamic legacy and local traditions is apparent not only superficially, in building forms and ornaments; instead, it affects the very design process. It "became, as the Aga Khan said, an instinctive manner of expression for any architect designing anywhere in the Islamic world" (The Aga Khan, 1979, cited by Kultermann, p.4). Old principles that governed the organization of space and the Isalmic aesthetic are actualized according to modern building requirements and are reintroduced to satisfy the religious rules and the climate. In addition, new buildings are least likely to complement the existing buildings so changes to the city environment are generally made house by house, block by block, and not by urban overhaul. If planned buildings are close to cities' historic districts, architects and governments build with care and sensitivity, but in cities' peripheries, they often propose buildings that do not correspond to the population's needs or lifestyles.

The Colonial Legacy

Even before the establishment of colonial empires in the Middle East, economic decline had reduced the quantity and quality of official patronage of architecture. Simultaneously, European styles influenced the building of European embassies and commercial concerns and the way that official patronage relied upon architects and builders who had traveled or studied in Europe, European publications on architecture, and changing tastes in Islamic courts. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, the Balyan family provided three generations of official architects for the sultans beginning in 1822, producing mosques, palaces, and other official buildings that reflected a mixture of European styles.

European governments, banks, commercial trading enterprises, and missionary institutions began to erect buildings in the European style. French styles prevailed in Algeria and later in the Maghrib; the style of the Balyans and later the Italian architect Montani gained currency in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (now Istanbul); in Egypt, Muhammad Ali (r. 1805–1848) favored buildings in a Europeanized Ottoman style, and the Khedive Ismaʿil ibn Ibrahim (r. 1863–1879), who had studied in Europe, imported European architects to build his palaces and to make over modern Cairo in the image of Paris under the Second Empire. Elsewhere on the Mediterranean littoral, and to an extent in Iran, French, Italian, and British architectural ideas left their stamp on museums and government buildings.

Nationalism and Architecture

By the end of the nineteenth century, European architectural ideas had provoked reactions from Middle Eastern architects and from Europeans who were sensitive to local traditions. Moreover, as the neo-Islamic building style gained popularity in Europe in the nineteenth century, it began to appear in the Middle East as well. In Egypt a substantial number of Islamic Revival buildings were erected by local and foreign architects in Cairo and in Alexandria; these used European construction methods and floor plans but were decorated with Islamic motifs. Examples include Alfonso Manescalo's Islamic Museum (1903–1904) and Mahmud Fahmi's Awqaf Ministry building (after 1898). In the Ottoman Empire a revival of governmental patronage in the late nineteenth century led to an early-twentieth-century Ottoman Revival style, whose chief practitioners were the architects Kemalettin Bey and Mehmet Vedat, and to a new-Islamic style that drew its inspiration from Spain and the Maghrib, exemplified by the Valide Mosque (1873) by Montani, and by the mid-nineteenth-century neo-Marinid gateway to what is now Istanbul University. In Casablanca, the Law Courts and other official buildings that were built under the French protectorate reflected an attempt to understand and to promote "appropriate" local styles.

Nationalist architecture in the Middle East emerged during the twentieth century. The Ottoman Revival under the Young Turks in the early twentieth century manifested a new Turkish nationalism and sparked a tradition reflected today in the neo-Ottoman contemporary buildings of Sedad Hakki Eldem, such as his many Bosporus villas (yah) and the massive central complex of Istanbul University. After the Atatürk revolution, German architects were invited to devise a city plan for modern Ankara; public monuments in European styles often drew upon what their designers believed were the pre-Islamic Hittite and Assyrian traditions of Anatolia.

Similar attention to the pre-Islamic past was seen in the architecture of Iran under the Pahlavis, where the monarchy stressed cultural continuity not only with the Safavid Islamic past but also with a Persian heritage stretching back to Cyrus the Great. The government of Reza Pahlavi spent vast sums on restoring monuments, especially those that had been built with earlier royal patronage, while largely adopting the modern international style in its new institutional buildings. The regime's Islamic successor has produced no significant architecture that indicates its own political and religious agenda, mostly because of the country's economic decline and the demands of its war with Iraq.

Morocco's independence from the French, gained in 1956, led to a pronounced nationalism in architecture, first expressed in the tomb complex of Muhammad V in Rabat, and in the 1990s in a series of laws that required that the construction budgets for all institutional and governmental buildings allot a substantial percentage of funds to strictly defined traditional Moroccan crafts.

In Egypt, by contrast, the revolution of the 1950s led to a socialist government whose official architecture often imitated the monumental style popular in the Soviet Union, best exemplified in the massive and forbidding Central Government Building in Cairo. National revolutions thus developed architectural patronage that reflected their own ideologies. For example, the secularist Baʿthist regime in Iraq, when it drew on the past for inspiration, typically looked to the neo-Babylonian period rather than to traditional Islam, a tendency that increased under the government of Saddam Hussein. In a parallel though far less pronounced tendency, Egypt has sought pharaonic inspiration for building styles and public monuments. In Central Asia, Russia first pushed its Stalinist architectural agenda, then later espoused the Soviet version of modernism. At the same time, the Soviet governments in Central Asia put significant effort into restoring Islamic monuments such as the giant mosque of Bibi Khanym in Samarkand, and religious monuments in Tashkent and Bukhara.

Contemporary Dilemmas

Middle Eastern attempts to adapt modern Western architecture often conflicts with the desire to bring about a renaissance of traditional architecture, or to produce a modern Islamic architecture that can keep its distinctive local or regional style while drawing upon the best of the new technology. There have been several institutional attempts to deal with this dilemma, but none has been more influential than the Aga Khan Awards, established in the late 1970s by the leader of the world's Ismaʿili Muslims. Beginning in 1980 an international jury composed of architects and others from the Islamic world, Europe, and the United States has periodically awarded prizes for contemporary Middle Eastern architecture that best reflects Islamic traditions and values combined with artistic distinction. The honored styles have varied widely, from the neotraditionalist architecture of Hassan Fathy in Egypt, typified in his buildings for the Wissa Wassef Foundation in Harraniya, near Giza, to the technically and formally avant-garde water towers designed for Kuwait City by the Swedish firm VBB. In general, the juries have shown remarkable breadth of vision and have taken an inclusive and eclectic (rather than ideological and purist) approach to the enormous range of distinctive modern Middle Eastern architectural styles. Awards have been given for domestic architecture, historical restoration, institutional buildings, adaptive reuse, and commercial buildings. The first awards were memorialized in 1983 in a publication edited by Renata Holod; subsequent years' awards, and other subjects of Middle Eastern architecture, have been featured in the periodical Mimar: Architecture in Development (up to 1994).

Three main issues confront governments, patrons, architects, and urban planners in the Middle East today. The first is how and whether there should be an ideology of architecture; the answer in Morocco has been an unequivocal yes, reflected in neotraditionalist building codes that emphasize traditional ornament and decorative crafts while utilizing modern technology to the fullest. For example, the mosque of Hassan II in Casablanca (thought of as a pendant to the impressive twelfth-century ruins of the Almohad mosque in Rabat), although constructed in classical Moroccan forms and proportions with classical decoration, is an outsized reinforced-concrete giant whose skyscraper minaret is surmounted by a huge laser that sends beams far into the sky. Its construction has been hailed for its Islamic symbolism and condemned for its extravagance during a time of financial difficulties. Similar ideology prevailed in the reconstruction of the two major pilgrimage shrines in Mecca and Medina by the Saudi government. Although they greatly facilitate the comfort and ease (if not the safety) of vastly increased numbers of pilgrims, these structures, lavish in size and decoration and traditional in style, raise more questions than they answer about the future of Middle Eastern religious architecture.

Examples of the opposite approach, which could be termed "creative pluralism," are found in Turkey and Tunisia, where many different styles, structures, and forms of decoration exist side by side in a creative mixture. The issue remains: Is appropriate architecture to consist of a traditional decorative veneer on what are essentially Western buildings in plan and construction, or is the new architecture of the Middle East going to be based from the ground up on the rich mosaic of social, environmental, and historical traditions? In fact, with few exceptions, local vernacular architecture is disappearing, replaced by undistinguished modern structures or by an equally alien homogenized national traditionalism that often consists of little more than employing the arch solely as a decorative device on building surfaces.

The second issue is curricula in architectural schools and colleges. The twentieth-century conflict about the role of teaching and learning the art and architecture of the past exists in the Middle East as it does elsewhere; the almost universal acceptance of Western-originated construction techniques and equipment (reinforced concrete, steel, glass, the tower crane, and so on) lends an almost surreal quality to some of these debates, and the issues often have been obscured as much as illumined by the polemics against the West exercised by individuals such as the late Ismaʿil Faruqi. The dialectic between historicism and artistic creativity is as old as art itself, however, and these debates are bound to survive as an essential part of the creative process.

The third issue is one that confronts architects and patrons everywhere. Even an examination of the record of the Aga Khan Awards demonstrates an impressive array of beautiful structures that are creative in design and impressive in sensitivity to tradition, but for the most part, whether they are private houses or public monuments, expensive to construct and affordable to few. Whether architecture in the Middle East can fulfill its implicit role—to provide decent housing and urban environments for exploding populations while reflecting its national and local traditions and remaining affordable—is a dilemma that will not easily be resolved.

see also atatÜrk, mustafa kemal; balyan family; baʿth, al-; eldem, sedad hakki; fahmi, mahmud pasha; hussein, saddam; ismaʿil ibn ibrahim; istanbul university; kemalettin bey; muhammad ali; pahlavi, reza; young turks.

Bibliography

The Aga Khan. Introduction of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Proceedings. Instanbul: Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 1979.

Akbar, Jamel. Crisis in the Built Environment: The Case of the Muslim City. Singapore: Concept Media Pte Ltd., 1998.

Evin, Ahmed. Architecture Education in the Islamic World. Singapore: Concept Media Pte. Ltd./Aga Khan Award for Architecture 1986.

Faruqi, Ismail al-. "Islam and Architecture." In Fine Arts in Islamic Civilization, edited by M. A. J. Berg. Kuala Lumpur: Alif International, 1981.

Holod, Renata, and Rastorfer, Darl, eds. Architecture and Community: Building in the Islamic World Today. New York: Aperture, 1983.

Kultermann, Udo. Contemporary Architecture in Arab States. Renaissance of a Region. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999.

Sakr, Tarek Mohamed Refaat. Early Twentieth-Century Islamic Architecture in Cairo. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1993.

Walter Denny

Updated by Azzedine G. Mansour