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many more excellent projects to
learn from, even if each provides a
creative solution to only part of
the problem.
Together,
these
projects
have much to say to enrich the
international debate about the
problems of rapid urbanization,
historic cities and the problems of
a growing urban underclass. But
these are only facets of the
solution, addressing parts of the problem. What is needed is to
bring them together in a framework that would engender the
positive processes needed to create a powerful upward spiral of
investments, social cohesion and rising incomes that gives
again to the old historic cities their inherent vitality and retains
their unique charm.
Architecture and Urbanism
Too frequently, the question of new building in historic
areas is fraught with polemics. Clearly, to insert new buildings
in a historic context is one of the most difficult things an
architect confronts. Yet the thought of preserving cities frozen in
time, just for their quaintness, would run counter to any notion
of the city as living organism. The museum city, such as Khiva,
is not likely to be the historic living city that we aspire to keep
alive.
But how to build in historic areas? This goes to the very
heart of what great architecture is all about.
The language of architecture is more than form and
esthetics. It evokes the past, prefigures the future, and articulates
the present urban reality for all people. The language of
architecture is therefore an integral part of manifesting a so-
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ciety‟s image of itself, while architects are both the custodians of
a past legacy, an architectural and urbanistic heritage of forms
and spaces, as well as the creators of the heritage of tomorrow.
Architecture is the most localized of the arts. It is rooted
to site. It must respond to functional realities and user needs.
Yet it is more, much more. To the extent that location provides
context and user needs provide the functional requirements,
architecture is specific to a particular society and locale. To the
extent that architecture responds to the universal and to the
evolving globalization and its challenges, it must transcend the
limits of the locale and provide more to the user, and the
viewer, than just the functional response to felt needs. It has an
emotive quality and symbolizes a state of being.
In the Developing world, the crisis of identity is manifest
in the choice of architectural vocabularies. These tend to either
reject contemporary or repeat the iconic forms of the past, a po-
sition charged with ideology by a type of architectural traditio-
nalist fundamentalism, or they try to break out of the locale and
import the westernized modern as an expression of “progress”.
Both of these approaches tend to be heavy handed and devoid
of sensibility to either time or space.
What is needed, and is still all too infrequent, is an
architecture that can reflect and enrich the critical discourse
about the contemporary architectural language and expression.
An architecture that reinterprets the past through contemporary
eyes, and sees respect for the heritage not in the slavish
copying of past form but in the respectful incorporation of the
spirit of the past in the new.
When that is done, we will have architecture capable, by
the quality of its innovative solutions, not only to protect the
historic district‟s character, but also to enhance the sense of
place that it engenders. Such projects make a real contribution to
architecture of humanism that transcends the boundaries of
place.
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Innovative Concepts
Progress is hostage to innovation. The incremental
improvements of past forms or solutions are seldom able to
respond to the needs of tomorrow. Such approaches do not
possess the liberating contribution of innovative concepts that
open the door to rethinking the content of the challenge of the
evolving world around us, and to the avenues that should be
pursued to find fertile grounds to plow. Such innovations, that
require breaks with the conventional, are seldom born in
perfection. The innovators are risk takers, who bring a sub-
versive creativity to challenge us all to rethink what we have
long taken as granted. The risk takers must be recognized for
what they do, arguably a far more important contribution than
just another well-functioning building.
The developing world today, the entire world, needs the
creative leaps of the imagination that dare to think what
remains unthinkable within the confines of the conventional
wisdom, which by definition reflects the experience of the past.
Intervening in historic cities
From the soaring language of architecture and form, we
must come down to the prosaic world of politics and finance.
Without finance there would be no projects, period! But Finance
and economics are dependent on a framework that brings
together the different actors, public and private, international,
national and local, formal and informal in a manner that the
whole is more than the sum of the parts. Such processes require
not only sound finance and economics, but also effective
political processses that bring all these actors together towards
working collaboratively on effective approaches to conservation
and socio-economic rejuvenation in historic cities.
In general terms, most approaches involve some combi-
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