Architectural education in the GCC

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What we need in the Gulf is a real commitment to a post-enviro revival of the educational core and an exploration and genuine deconstruction of our history. If this happens, it allows us to reconstruct our present and create our future, not as a mere replication, but as an evolving process to leave for the coming generations.

In architectural education, we need to bring together and convey different periods of time, which requires a deeply dimensional projection of human beliefs. At best, it can provide an echo of a spiritual universe which integrates humans in a meaningful order and provide them with the feeling that their small personal world is in harmony with a much larger reality.

The conflict between the traditional culture and modern systems of thought has to be seen in this wider context, for the controversial issue is the interpretation of ‘development’. For example: a) Should development enable the balanced realisation of the totality of human capabilities, or should it reduce reality to limited aspects of material life at the expense of other qualities? b) Should development promote an increase in quantifiable production only, or should it support a different type of creativity, which includes more fundamental forces and experiences?

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FEATURED COMMENT I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture & Planning, Dawood College of Engineering & Technology, Ka   2 Comments Read more comments »

As far-fetched as these questions may seem, they determine the cultural responses which eventually generate the built environment and its physical expressions. The way to achieve the built environment we seek is to explore and discover the potential continuity between past, present and future. To do this, we need to: a) Analyze and interpret basic urban and architectural patterns to determine how they can be adopted or reinterpreted in a contemporary context; b) Figure out how to deal with the problems and incompatibilities caused by the impact of time differences, both in philosophical and in practical terms; c) And identify the new alternative approaches, which could reconcile traditional principles, contemporary needs and the living future.

Furthermore, we have to develop our educational identity by tackling what we recognise to be our real problems. Identity is not a self-conscious thing; we find our identity by understanding ourselves, and our environment. Any attempt to undermine or shortcut this process – or to concoct – an identity, would be dangerous to us all. It would be manipulation; little more than mere gesturing.

A signal is quite distinct from a symbol, for it implies a reaction. If an architect, after travelling around the world, were to return to his origin, and attempt to reproduce there a glass building he saw in Boston, he would simply be transmitting signals. But if, on the other hand, he were to take the principles of architecture, and apply them to a completely different set of materials, customs, climate and traditions, he might put up a contemporary building which isn’t all glass but which is very relevant to its locale and identity.

Now that the built environment has become subjugated by a market system, and that commodity has become the goal and signifier of social life, it has become impossible to keep architectural education free of economic rationalisation.

Architectural education today finds itself having to function within boundaries of co-modification, relativity, and practical complexities as its defining precincts. This is a shame. For it to remain credible, architecture must return to its older, semi-independent and gallant model, whereby the architect was supposed to have a rounded education that allows him to be a master builder, artist and humanist.