Architecture, space and culture
IT WOULD NEVER OCCUR
to most people to compare palm reading with the architectural plans for a house or residential neighborhood. But I was born next to Taos Pueblo, in what was then the almost all-adobe town of Taos. Then I worked in Egypt for Hassan Fathy, winner of the Aga Kahn prize for earth architecture and author of “Architecture for the Poor.” I traveled with a team of his disciples through Egypt and observed the lifestyles and architecture of Muslim Egyptians. Then I moved to the wildly eccentric architectural city-sculpture of Guanajuato, Mexico.
That is the city you see in the window Then take the Taos Pueblo site plan, behind this self-portrait, entitled, and imagine the human relationships “Me, My Bones and My Roses.” Guanajuato imposed by the architecture – and was built in the 17th century compare it to the suburban site plan. in a steep funnel, a town with no level Like a cookie sheet of brownies, the ground. There are no houses without suburban site is cut into squares, one stairs, some of the streets have almost house plunked in the middle, isolated 45 degree inclines. from its neighbors, space is privatized Guanajuato has and used to separate people. There is more stairs than any no commonly used connecting space, city in the Western as if the point is not to know your Hemisphere. Its neighbors. builders lavished The Pueblo site plan, and the Hispanic the city with the incredible wealth from village site plan both tend to the silver mines – located at the bottom cluster around a central plaza. The of the funnel – and the result is a villages of Ranchos, Questa, Trampas breathtakingly beautiful city where 80 and Ojo Caliente, to name a few, were percent of the streets are inaccessible enclosed for defensive purposes, but to cars. the plan also promoted social cohesiveness,
In all of these cases the human mutual support and community. relationships, hence the culture, the This pattern of plazas is generally worldview, the daily patterns of life are consistent in Central America, including all revealed in the floor and site plan Guanajuato where even individual – just as the lines in a palm, the leaves barrios have their own plazas. This in a teacup, or the Tarot cards reveal pattern that centered on shared, communally-used the character and surrounding circumstances space, was designed precisely of the questioner. for collective events and private
To connect these superficially farflung loitering. See how architecture imposes dots let’s start with the house plan lifestyle? of Fathy’s houses in Gourna, the symphonically My intuitive reading of the new, proposed beautiful village he built for housing development is that it is the Egyptian government to relocate a urban, and fundamentally individualist village of fellaheen [native peasants or in nature. There is no land reserved for laborers in Arab countries]. agriculture or food sustainability, and
Every house had an oblique entry there is not only an absence of communal that would permit women to veil use, but architecturally-imposed themselves before strangers entered obstacles to community and sharing. private domestic space. Rooms were When the county thinks of affordable arranged so the women could go about housing – why not cluster houses their domestic duties without being in a corner of the available land, share seen by male guests. Every house had walls, plumbing and utilize roof runoff a back patio, like the patio de servicio for some trees? Why not create an in Mexico, with doors opening onto enclosed, plaza where perhaps a garden, little alleys so women could access the a safe place for children, for even village laundry sites in privacy. It is not a little park with trees and flowers? Why difficult to see how the lifestyle of a fellaheen not leave the rest of the land for farming, family would be dramatically wildlife? Think of the security benefits changed if they found themselves in a and cost-effectiveness of a cluster suburban housing development. of houses designed along the lines of a giant hacienda around a little plaza. It would be so much more beautiful and historically relevant.
Taoseños my age witnessed an architectural landscape that was communally-built from locally available, non-industrial, renewable resources, almost all-adobe, non-polluting, outside of or marginal to the cash economy, requiring a minimum of tools and that women could use. A basically free building material that requires investing in labor instead of capital is anathema to capitalism. It’s the system, not the material that makes adobe the building material of the rich. And it’s the system that is now making industrial building materials frighteningly expensive.
The present housing situation nationwide and locally is not sustainable, and the construction industry’s consumption of unrenewable, extractive and polluting materials is coming to an end too. Like it or not, we have to re-think housing and construction.