Preface
Architecture Beyond Design
Hasan-Uddin Khan
Architects are essentially optimistic people.
They are problem solvers who look for ways in which to improve people’s lives.
They also tend to be somewhat egotistical in the belief that problems have
solutions. Their training is often quite broad—it includes looking at history,
culture, and sociology in the search for design expertise and technical
competence. Unfortunately, often the public’s understanding of what an
architect does is limited to the aesthetic, and their work is usually for those
who can afford their services. There are, however, exceptions where architects
work pro-bono for the greater good. ASA embodies these qualities.
ASA was founded by brothers Arshad and Shahid
Abdulla in the 1970s on the back of a design practice set up by Pyarali Merali,
which they joined and expanded upon their return from university in the United
States. Arshad, the older brother, was the primary architect; Shahid, the
designer; but they collaborated on projects and made decisions together. After
Arshad’s untimely demise in 2009, Shahid continued the firm and grew it,
expanding his team into sections—architecture, residential design, interiors,
etc.—each with its own departmental head, who he watched over and guided. He
continues to focus on design materiality, interiors, and social endeavors. It
is a narrative that deserves to be better known and understood, which I hope
this publication will achieve.
As with most professional practices, ASA
started with a standard practice, first designing houses and interiors, then
commercial and institutional projects. A sample of their work is illustrated in
this volume and provides a good window into their architectural production. What I would like to do here is set their work
in a broader, and perhaps more theoretical context, and focus on some of their
socio-cultural projects.
Having been acquainted with the brothers since
we were in high school together in Karachi in the 1960s, our paths sometimes
crossed but essentially diverged. My own concern as a researcher and
academician in the past three decades has been to explore and search for
expressions of contemporary architectural and artistic production that
establish a new paradigm for the 21st century. I believe that this is a central
task for architects today, and it is an approach that ASA seems to have
embraced.
Architecture is best viewed from multiple
perspectives and with an awareness of the overlays, both local and
international. We need to appreciate it as a mediating space between societal
values and their expression. The concept of mediating realities is an important
one that has seldom received sufficient attention. Modern discourse is
structured around opposing categories of thought. There is, for instance, the
antithesis between the religious and the secular. Concepts that could bridge
this have yet to be satisfactorily formulated. Scant attention has been paid to
the intermediate structures of community life, which occupy a ground somewhere
between political collectivities on the one hand and the individual psyche on
the other.
The scholar Aziz Ismail noted in the
publication Expressions of Islam in Buildings (Geneva: Aga Khan Award for
Architecture, 1991): “An analysis of meaning in life must pay full attention to
symbolic mediations . . . experience is an embodied experience . . . something
we may regard as an Islamic ethos . . . This ethos, as distinct from the
theological creed, is to be found in the institutions, literary traditions, and
architectural shapes of Muslim societies.” The significance of architecture
cannot be addressed in isolation from the humanistic venture as a whole. The
reason for my emphasis on this is to set the context for ASA’s architecture,
because I see that it has a relationship to larger cultural concerns. It
embodies their approach to actions in the built environment.
An idea that is useful to our
discourse are the terms “pre-architecture” and “post-architecture” as
articulated by Philipp Oswalt in the Harvard Design Magazine in 2014.
Pre-architecture refers to proactive or unsolicited architectures: i.e., rather
than playing the role of technical expert brought in after the fact to solve a
problem for a given site, a given program, and a given client and developer, it
urges architects to proactively define problems, propose new possibilities that
are suppressed by the existing political, financial, and legal frameworks, and
develop business models to bring together stakeholders from all sides to put
these potentials into action (state and local governments, big and small
developers, local communities, ordinary citizens, and neighborhood
associations).
Post-architecture, meanwhile,
proceeds from the observation that there is already too much building in the
world and that we can reconceptualize architecture as encompassing a diversity
of spatial practices and scales of intervention that are not limited to the
design of new buildings and flashy projects. It calls for smaller-scale
interventions, in-fills within the existing fabric, infrastructural
improvements, additions and extensions, retrofitting, repurposing, and adaptive
reuse of existing building stock as innovative and sustainable modes of
reshaping cities everywhere.
Referencing pre- and
post-architecture in an article in the International Journal of Islamic
Architecture (2015), my colleague Sibel Bozdogan, wrote:
Even when their [architects’]
“pre-architectural” proposals are ultimately disregarded, the process of
negotiation itself and the creation of a more informed public would still be
small victories. Meanwhile, carefully planned “post-architectural” proposals
(reclaiming abandoned buildings, fixing rather than demolishing dilapidated
stock, reusing left-over urban fragments, occupying empty lots for public uses,
etc.) would surely offer more practical, more economical and humbler ways of
helping the disenfranchised – from war refugees, migrants and minorities to the
general urban poor.
One can see these approaches
present in the work of ASA. Embedded in their design work is what might be
termed as a critical practice where every project has a thesis. It goes beyond
answering a brief to attempting to include a set of ideas that are harmonious
with not only building but also with the wider landscape of culture, economics,
and materiality.
To those like Arshad and Shahid,
who belong to my generation, the cultural and intellectual roots of this recent
professional turn towards actors, process, participation, and agency will
easily be recognizable in and traceable to some seminal ideas and movements of
the 1960s and 1970s when we, the boomers, received our architectural training.
Among the most memorable were books like Housing by People by John Turner,
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, In Search of the Miraculous by P.D.
Ouspensky, and Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, which offered powerful
counter-cultural critiques of the technocratic premises of high modernism.
These ideas, then largely set aside as naively utopian, have made a comeback
today in new and more sophisticated ways, this time challenging the “postcritical”
pragmatism of mainstream practice across the globe. Although our age is one of
political conflict, environmental
crisis, and social inequality, their message is universal and not place or
culture bound.
From the very beginning, the brothers and
their colleagues thought of architecture as a search for truths (and perhaps
answers). As the philosopher-poet Muhammad Iqbal in an article, “Is Religion
Possible?” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, (Oxford: 1933),
postulated: “The truth is that the religious and the scientific processes,
though involving different methods, are identical in their final aim. Both aim
at reaching the most real.” ASA’s projects, especially the social projects,
posit and try to achieve this. These include their approach to architectural
and art education through the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, The
Hunar Foundation, The Citizens Foundation (TCF), and urban interventions. I
list just three of them here to illustrate a chronological progression of their
ideas and actions.
A longtime dream of the Abdulla brothers and
several colleagues helped found the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture
(IVS) in 1990 in Karachi. Arshad designed the school’s new building, while it
was Shahid’s initiative to physically move the 1903 Nusserwanjee stone building
from its premises in Kharadar in 1991 to the new IVS campus, thereby saving it
from demolition and preserving it as part of Pakistan’s cultural heritage.
Today, IVS is one of the pre-eminent institutions in the country, proving that
even a small group can have a significant impact on education.
In 1995, Arshad and Shahid Abdulla and a group
of friends met regularly to talk about what could be done to improve the city
and decided to build schools in slum areas to combat the situation. Five
schools were funded by the founders and built using ASA designs, and the NGO,
The Citizens Foundation (TCF), was launched. These were followed by twenty-six
more schools funded by various individuals. The organization has built numerous
schools in Pakistan; there are over 1,700 units in the country. TCF has expanded
its fundraising activities to Europe, US, and other countries in Asia. It is
now one of the largest NGOs in the world.
In 2008, again with a group of
individuals, the brothers cofounded The Hunar Foundation (THF), a non-profit
organization to combat the problems of livelihood for young lower-income women
and men by providing quality vocational training. THF provides technical
education for students to acquire useful income-earning skills (hunar). ASA
designed several of its facilities; there are now eight campuses training some
1,200 students yearly, with more campuses on the way. Like TCF, THF has
developed into an international organization.
Shahid has been involved in
ongoing urban improvement schemes, recently with a project for improving a
degraded nehr (creek) area around the storm-water channel at the tidal Boat
Basin, eyed as prime real estate, in Clifton, Karachi. PANI, a group initiated
by Shahid Abdulla, comprising fifteen architectural firms voluntarily worked
together to design a park in this area. The plan is to make drains beside the
nehr to inject fresh water into the channel and to run boats on it and build
seating areas and greenery around it. The kilometer-long channel was divided
into 16 sections, with two sections designed by ASA and each of the remaining
sections designed by different architectural firms. It is estimated to cost one
billion rupees. One can see in this monograph, the breadth and vision of ASA’s
work—it is truly inspiring.
What is impressive is the way in which the
brothers, and now Shahid and his friends, have sublimated their egos to work
together with others, claiming little credit for what they do. Their modesty
heralds a new way of operating—unlike that of the individualistic creative hero
architect, Howard Roark of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead, who was not
prepared to compromise, proposing that being moral consists in being rationally
selfish or egoistic; it is a book that most architects in our generation read.
It is, however, an unhelpful way of functioning, and it is encouraging to see a
number of architects in Pakistan beginning to practice more collaboratively.
Perhaps this marks the emergence
of a new paradigm. Like Allama Muhammad Iqbal, I see the search for this new
paradigm as an ongoing mission, taking us on a road that will be marked with
gems of noteworthy cultural achievement. In the 1920s, Iqbal wrote one of my
favorite passages (and one that I have quoted frequently):
The journey of love is a very long journey
But sometimes with a sign you can cross that
vast desert.
Search and search again without losing hope.
You may find sometimes a treasure on your way.
ASA embodies this vision of a search and
through this, the production of physical design in their work to create moments
of experience to be treasured. Finally, architecture is ultimately not about
products or about buildings, it is about people — a message that Arshad,
Shahid, and ASA have absorbed.
HUK/ Providence, RI, August 2020
About the Author
Hasan-Uddin Khan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Historic Preservation
at Roger Williams University in the USA, is an architect and writer who has worked and lived all
over the globe. He helped form the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1977 and coordinated His
Highness the Aga Khan’s worldwide architectural activities between 1984 and 1994. He was also
Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Mimar: Architecture in Development. He lectures widely,
and is editor/author of nine books and over seventy internationally published articles.