The Concept of Vernacular in Contemporary Architecture Discourses


Heinz Paetzold, Kassel and Hamburg


Whether we like it or condemn it we are living in a globalized world. If we ask how globalization exerts its impact on the culture of a given region we may discern two tendencies that are opposite and exclusive to each other.

On one hand, there is obviously the inclination to homogenization.

This occurs in consequence of increasingly accelerated communication and frequent cultural exchange. Whatever is brought forth in one place of the globe is rapidly known and admired or criticized and hated at other places and has in one way or the other some influence there. As many people fear, this leads to a growing homogenization and to the exclusion of “otherness”. As the Japanese sociologist Hisashi Nasu has written, “globalization can be characterized as a process of ... disappearance of 'otherness'“[1].
In contrast to the tendency of homogenization we discover in contemporary culture processes to save the peculiarities and specificities of the modes of living and the styles of designing in a given culture. In the field of architecture we observe at least three different attitudes and practices in this context.

First, heritage commissions have to be mentioned. Their task is to rescue the historical past by declaring single buildings, city areas or styles of housing monuments and giving them the official status of protected and recognized heritage.

Secondly, theme parks have to be listed here. Theme parks intend to make modes of architectural styling into museum-like spots. Since theme parks are invented to make the past easily accessible to tourists, they are related to what Adorno once labeled the culture industry. Theme parks are part of the contemporary tourist industry.



All these mentioned strands of dealing with the historical past are not the subject of my talk. I am concerned here with a third model of saving the historical past. The underlying presupposition of the model in question is that we only can rescue styles of former architectural design if we look to them as a source and reservoir for renewal. This sounds paradoxical. In order to have an adequate relationship to the past we are to look at change and regeneration and refurbishing. This paradoxical move has been baptized as contemporary vernacular.

I
Instead of going straight on in my talk I take one step aside and begin with outlining the changed role of architecture in postmodern theorizings.

In postmodern thinking architecture had received a new relevance among aestheticians. It was within this context that Kenneth Frampton has advocated critical regionalism. Referring to mainly European or US-American architects, such as Alva Aalto, Herman Hertzberger, Aldo van Eyck, Jörn Utzon, Vieira Silva, Mario Botta, Harry Wolf and the only one from Asia, Tadao Ando, Frampton underlined critical regionalism' twofold opposition.



It was (and still is) in opposition towards the 'international style' in architecture which had become predominant since the 1950's. International style means a flattened functionalism, a functionalism that had become shallow. Against this backdrop critical regionalism revitalizes regionally bound modes of erecting buildings without any nostalgic appeal. It’s not just a repetition of traditional styles of architecture. Rather it is innovative in that the tradition is given a new meaning.



In Frampton’s account critical regionalism does not just oppose the international style of architecture. It furthermore is in opposition to mainstream postmodern style.


Postmodern style in our context may be described as being in favor of scenographic episodes, the historicist narrative and double-coded language.

Critical regionalism, on the contrary, sticks to the tectonic rather than to the visual, to the site-specific aspects of light and of sound instead of neutralizing them.

Critical regionalism intends to rearticulate the “other” that has been excluded in mainstream modern civilization.



Critical regionalism, in a word, is an attitude of renewal rather than of nostalgia. Frampton himself was speaking of the “paradoxical creation of a regionally based 'world culture', almost as though this were a precondition for achieving a relevant form of contemporary practice”[2].

Critical regionalism does not abhor modern techniques such as prefab and concrete. It does though, pay more attention to the materials used, for instance, wood or steel.



For me a very convincing example of critical regionalism is the Bagsvaerd Church in Copenhagen, designed by Joern Utzon. In order to articulate the self-reflectivity and internal ambivalence of modern Christianity, Utzon does not use the traditional roof of a Christian church, but instead the vault roof has the shape of a shell. This shape alludes, as Frampton argues, in a certain way to the Eastern Chinese pagoda roof. But it is not just the reinterpretation of an Oriental shape into an Occidental concrete technology. Rather this shape testifies to the revitalization of a devalued Occidental shape (the Nordic stave church) by an Oriental re-casting of its essential nature. Utzon, furthermore, pays much attention to the materials used inside, the wooden fenestration and the slatted partitions[3].

All this contributes piece by piece to the sacred tuning of the nave.


II


Whereas critical regionalism mainly referred to Western architecture
 the concept of the contemporary vernacular points to Eastern architectural practices. It may be understood as the reinterpretation of especially Asian traditional attitudes, modes of building and designing in the face of globalization.


Similar to critical regionalism the concept of contemporary vernacular does by no means just repeat heritage. Rather it gives a new understanding of the tradition that, as we will see sometimes, is in itself complicated to be coped with.



We may start with a definition of the notion of the contemporary vernacular. William S. W. Lim gives this proposal: “The notion of a contemporary vernacular can ... be defined as a self-conscious commitment to uncover a particular tradition's responses to place and climate, and thereafter to exteriorize these formal and symbolic identities into creative new forms through an artist's eye that is very much in touch with contemporary realities and lasting human values.”[4]. This definition stresses the engagement in unraveling the historical past, the heritage, in order to find inspiration for contemporary practices.
The accent is not on looking back. Rather it is looking back and at the same time transforming the tradition so that it becomes explicitly topical.

It has to be noted that culture in the given context is understood as response to place and climate.

There were only a few philosophers in the past, among them Johann Gottfried Herder and Tetsuro Watsuji, who underlined the relationship between culture and climate. Just like critical regionalism is far from being mere nostalgia or narrow minded local patriotism, the concept of contemporary vernacular, too, sticks to the contemporaneous and wants to give answers to the challenges of today.







III







With Lim' s definition in mind, I would like to describe three architectural models that reveal specific aspects of the vernacular concept.



The first model is the Reuter House by the Singapore based architects William S. W. Lim Associates[5]. This design makes use of the traditional form of the “black-and-white-bungalows” built by the British during Singapore’s colonial past.

The house includes three blocks. The first one is a two-level front block with a pyramidal roof supported on timber columns. The second block in the rear overlooks a swimming pool. Thirdly, there is the service block housing a kitchen, the servants' quarters and the back yard. Whereas the front block harbors the more public areas of the house, the rear block is the private family domain.



The use of the fair-faced bricks and overhanging eaves gives a colonial touch to the building. The timber columns contribute to the sense of formality.
 The roof and the columns are independent from the inner concrete structure. The roof is like a parasol. Internal walls, floor slabs and the staircase are expressed as separate elements. The use of concrete testifies to the modernity of the house, whereas the timber refers to traditional material. We notice the use of steel at the upper end of the columns which gives a modern twist to the wooden construction.



The house generates a great sense of place. Although the house might appear at first sight as based on the colonial bungalow typology, innovative differences are apparent and are a shifting accent. The house has tropical design features in order to make air-conditioning unnecessary[6].


In sum, one could say that the house is an “exercise in the continuity of the spirit of the 'black-and-white' colonial bungalows”[7]. Lim uses the style of bungalow building that has been common in Singapore' s past and gives a new meaning to it.



My second paradigm refers to the well known and highly reputed Indian architect Charles Correa. Correa designed several Indian art musea, among them the “National Crafts Museum” in Delhi (1975-90), the arts center “Jawahar Kala Kendra” in Jaipur (1986-92), as well as the “Museum of Islamic Arts” in Doha, Qatar (1997). In my talk I shall concentrate on the “National Crafts Museum” and look very briefly at a complex of apartments in Bombay, the “Kanchanjung Apartments” (1970-83).



In his work National Crafts Museum Correa designed a village-like setting. It connects four parts devoted to village crafts, temple crafts, and durbar crafts as well as an amphitheater space by, as Correa calls them, “ritualistic pathways” through “open-to-sky-spaces”. Correa' s museum exposes the extraordinarily rich history of Indian crafts. The museum' s core collection of more than 25,000 items of folk and tribal art, crafts and textiles serves as an archive and reference collection for traditional craftsmen.



Correa interestingly uses the “climate” as it were as “a generator of form”, as well as the means of a “ritualistic pathway”[8]. The idea of the “ritualistic pathway” picks up the movement through the monumental temples of India and transforms it into the visitor' s way through the different parts of the museum. While meandering through the museum the visitor enjoys views across the series of spaces, the open-to-sky-pathways and the courtyards.



Lim’s Reuter House transforms the typology of the colonial bungalow into a form so that it fits in with contemporary urban domesticity.

 Correa' s “National Crafts Museum”, for its part, borrows from traditional Indian myths and religion while at the same time it introduces modernist idioms, such as the orthogonal grid in ordering the spaces. Both, Lim and Correa, are aware of the climatic demands of the sites of the buildings.



In his Kanchanjung Apartments (1970-1983) Charles Correa finds a solution to another problem caused by climatic circumstances. In Bombay, a building has to be oriented east-west in order to catch the sea-breezes and in order to capture the best views in the city, that is to say the Arabian Sea on one side and the harbor on the other. These, however, are also the directions of the hot sun and the heavy monsoon rains. The old bungalows gave a solution to such climatic challenges in that they were, as it were, wrapping a protective layer of verandas around the living areas. In doing so the heat was kept outside and the buildings remained protected against monsoon rain showers.



In his “Kanchanjung Apartments” of Bombay Correa applied the above mentioned principle to a high-rise building. It is a condominium of 32 luxury apartments of different types. The edges at the corners of the building are cut away in order to open up the double-height terrace gardens[9].



I would like to argue that Correa here, too, exploits the vernacular, that is verandas of bungalows as an intermediary space between the inside and the outside of a building. The architect, however, modifies this idea so that it is fits into the world of skyscraper cities today. Again, the climate functions as the generator of form.



The third model of contemporary vernacular which I would like to introduce is by the Japanese architect Kazuhiro Ishii. He designed the Miyagi Sant Juan Bautista Museum (1993). The museum houses the artifacts and all other forms of documentation of the 17th century ship called the “Miyagi Sant Juan Bautista”. This ship was the carrier of Japan' s first ever delegation to Europe. The 180-member group of the Keichou Delegation, led by Tsunenaga Hasekura, was dispatched to Europe by Masamune Date. The ship left from Tsukinoura in the Ojika Peninsula in 1631.



In 1993 the wooden sail ship was rebuilt. The museum was designed so as to showcase the ship as its central focus. The building picks up the shapes of the surrounding landscape’s undulating hills and the nearby sea. These existing contours became, as it were, the initial design inspiration for the architect.



The museum’s form can be described as follows. The exhibition hall and the entrance hall were given subterranean structures with the roof of the exhibition hall forming a green plaza on the ground level, so that unobstructed views of the ship, the sea and the hillsides are possible. The internal planning and circulation are simple and logical. A large staircase rising from the green plaza links it to the entrance lobby which is fully glazed. The ship remains visible from all positions in the museum.



The architectural language of the museum is developed by exploiting the constructional logic of timber and steel-and-glass detailing. “The structure, floor, interior walls and ceiling are all built of wood, echoing the early boat-building traditions associated with the ship”[10]. That is to say, Ishii draws from traditional Japanese boat-building as well as from timber construction techniques. The architect gives a new twist to them in that he introduces both in order to give shape to a museum whose central subject is a ship once used as a carrier of a delegation to Europe[11].







IV







The examples given in this talk do not at all exhaust the richness of the concept of contemporary vernacular. An analysis of works by Feng Jizhong (China) with his teahouse in Shanghai, Ernesto Bedmar (Singapore), Geoffrey Bawa (Sri Lanka), Yoshio Kato (Japan) among others would make for a more complete account.



At the end of my presentation I would like to give the following conclusion. Critical regionalism opposes mainstream postmodernism as well as the emptified “international style”. The concept of the contemporary vernacular revitalizes regionally bound architectural and design practices as they were developed especially in Asia. The difference between both is that critical regionalism is a more or less European affair. The concept of the contemporary vernacular, on the contrary, is Asian and is a valuable position of resistance vis à vis a globalized world. Just as critical regionalism in Frampton' s view did not leave behind modernity the concept of the contemporary vernacular does not escape the process of globalization. Rather it establishes a firm and solid position within it, although it does not follow mainstream globalization, if one may identify theme parkism as part of the architectural mainstream in the globalized world.



The concept of the contemporary vernacular is a pluralistic one. There is no all encompassing access to a singular past to which the buildings are referring. Correa in his design of the crafts museum relates back to an Indian religious and mythical past. In his view architecture recuperates its depth-structure only to the degree that it is aware of this dimension. It cannot be left out. The user of the museum should in one way or another remember this past of old India.



Under the umbrella of the concept of contemporary vernacular we find also the condensed memory of the history of erecting buildings. Both, Correa and Lim, pick up aspects of the bungalow typology. It is especially the veranda as an intermediary space between the inside and outside of the building. This space is important in order to cope with climatic givens, such as the extraordinary hot weather and the monsoon rains. This is more or less a pragmatic aspect since both architects do not refer to the colonial past in the sense of returning to colonialism as a system of ruling the country. For them, the bungalow was a rather successful model of architectural design since it was adaptive to the climate. If one is looking for postcolonialism in the concept of contemporary vernacular one must look to Correa's recuperation of the precolonial past of Indian culture.



The Japanese architect Ishii in his design relates back to modes of Japanese craftsmanship. The focus is the mode of boatbuilding and the timber construction technique. The design of his museum revitalizes these techniques in order to make the recollection of a special historical event symbolically more complete.



My thesis is thus, that international style in architecture and theme parkism are just the two sides of one and the same coin. The ahistoricity and the striving for independency of place of the international style produces a longing for memory and a longing for a sense of place. Theme parks are an answer to this desire, though in an artificial way. The contemporary vernacular, by contrast, balances valuable memories with the modern way of living. In the context of the contemporary vernacular historical recollections become part of the everyday life, rather than being put aside and becoming a life in an artificial museum. Contemporary vernacular eventually stimulates a real sense of place; that is, a geographically as well as a culturally determined space. It reacts more appropriately to the climate of the region than the international style in architecture did. In a word, the concept of the contemporary vernacular is in search of rescuing otherness in face of globalization[12].


Hisashi Nasu: “How is the Other Approached and Conceptualized in Terms of Schutz’s Constitutive Phenomenology of Natural Attitudes?” in Human Studies (2005).
[2] Kenneth Frampton: Modern Architecture. A Critical History, revised and enlarged edition. London: Thames and Hudson 1985, p. 327.
[3] Frampton, Modern Architecture, pp. 314-315.
[4] William S. W. Lim Tan Hock Beng: Contemporary Vernacular. Evoking Tradition in Asian Architecture. Singapore: Select Books 1998, p. 23.
[5] Lim Beng, Contemporary Vernacular, pp. 100-103.
[6] Tan Kok Meng, ed.: Asian Architects. 2. Singapore: Select Books 2001, p. 156.
[7] Lim Beng, Contemporary Vernacular, p. 101.
[8] Lim Beng, Contemporary Vernacular, p. 46.
[9] Tan Kok Meng, Asian Architects. 2., pp. 110-111.
[10] Lim Beng, Contemporary Vernacular, p. 64.
[11] Lim Beng, Contemporary Vernacular, pp. 62-65.
[12] Compare William S. W. Lim: Alternative (Post)Modernity. An Asian Perspective. Introduction by John Phillips. Singapore: Select Publishing 2003, pp. 130-135.