Salvaging Socialism: The Role Of The Architect
Ruwan Jayakody
Architecture is the production of an idea, the physicality of which envelopes the lives of all who function within the interior and exterior spaces and fabrics of built environments comprised of various building types and construction projects including stationary human habitation forms, designed and constructed through heterogeneous processes. In addition, there is also the physical environment created by civil engineering.
In seeking to better articulate this idea of architecture against the backdrop of a universal right to housing, it can be said that in the context of the role of the architect, the forager and the scavenger intersect. The forager rummages among the detritus while the scavenger scalps the carrion, both, for purposes of nourishment.
In this context, dominated by urbanisation and globalisation, much has rightfully been made in architecture regarding the needs and plans of both, the client and the architect, as consumers:- concerning resources; services; the geographical and regional character of lands; locations and the placement of buildings; materiality and the adoption of materials including recyclable and biodegradable, recycled and second-hand items and materials, architectural salvage and reclaimed material, low-impact building materials, and man-made products including partially or completely synthetic ones; the practice of reusing and recycling; the biology of buildings; the origins of architecture; elements including structural components; languages; proportion; syntax; expressions; references; objectives; spatiality and structure; geometrics; sizes and scales; shapes; forms; patterns; models; systems; design methodologies; construction methods and techniques; the supervision of the construction of buildings; installations; estimations; cost accounting and management, purchase prices of building materials, energy and ecological costs, and social costs; the utilisation of energies and their flow; energy efficiency and self-sufficiency; cost-effective building; low energy or zero energy, and centralised energy; carbon neutrality; renewable energy for power generation; passive buildings; the use of technologies and computational techniques; traditions; norms; customs; practices; manifestations; motifs; styles or ways – national and international; theories; principles and philosophies; perceptions; perspectives; relationships; standards; consistencies; contemporariness; quality; liveability; trends; legislation; rules and regulations; building codes and controls; environmental and material sustainability; durability; feasibility; practicality; environmental friendly and green buildings; economic and organic looking designs; footprints – carbon and ecological; size and maintenance; waste management including disposal and rainwater collection; and environmental benefits; among a host of others.
Yet combined with wealth, most of these concerns have become anachronisms symptomatic of a new breed of greed and the flaunting of temporarily acquired wealth.
What are the roles of the contractors (clients) and the producers (architects) as members aspiring to the intelligentsia, in a country that purports to be a democratic, socialist republic? What ideas and concepts are to be communicated to the client through the architectural brief? What must they force humanity to see?
Firstly, the architect as the creator of both order and beauty, must exercise restraint with regard to the client’s requirements. What is practiced in short however is that when there is the articulation of even the slightest offence taken by the architect at a wanton display of wealth or waste and the architect subsequently intends to save the client’s wealth, a very shaky premise by itself, such expression if articulated is almost never to prove a point concerning the economics of scale even though it is made out as such, but to instead make a point about the practice of architecture.
It is fashionable to make a denouement of a certain brand of architecture, defined, venerated and even denounced under the umbrella terms of – modern regional architecture in the tropics, regionalism, tropical regionalism, Sri Lankan regionalism, neo-regionalism and/or new regionalism and tropical modernism – for it stinks of class and reeks of the monied; a faux world bloated from excess. It is an architecture of money for the monied, which is to be rejected and dismissed not just as elitist drivel whose beastly bellies (the interior design) are furnished and embellished by the semiotics of culture through expressions of cultured-ness masquerading and posturing as culture, which are mostly snobbish expressions of so called pseudo-bourgeoisie ‘high’ culture, an architecture bred for the rich by the rich, but also to be rejected and dismissed most importantly because it is a practice of architecture that is certainly not cognizant of the zeitgeist where most architecture is a case of constructing buildings of refuse for the refused by the refused, punctuated purposefully by the abject lack of historical value or interest and elements of style.
A sense of taste or culture cannot be bought but can only be developed through genuine appreciation stemming from seeking to uphold the experimentation of modernism and its sensibility, and cultivating a sense of irreverence towards what followed it.
