This architectural stratum represents a peculiar historical phenomenon of how a non existing tradition of historical urban architecture could be twice invocated, first in neo-classical architecture in the early 1920s and in modernist architecture of 1960s
Հոդվածի հայերեն տարբերակը կարող եք կարդալ այստեղ
The beginning
Soviet modernist architecture became particularly popular in the world during the last decade. Reasons triggering this interest are many, including the fact that the world perhaps did not expect Soviet architecture to produce anything close to the high level of international modernist-expressionist architecture. Whereas the suddenly discovered Soviet modernist heritage proved the unexpected.
It was Frederic Chaubin’s book entitled “CCCP” to be first to shed light on this hidden domain of Soviet architecture and introduce the fashion of researching it. For this book, Chaubin selected modernist structures from all Soviet countries on the bases of one common characteristic: they are all ‘cosmic’ structures.
The ‘cosmicity’ according to Chaubin is a mythologized narrative of the universe, which was seen by the Soviet citizens as a future escape from their not satisfying current reality. Many Soviet sci-fi films and literature contributed to the aestheticization of this idea, the mythology of which “…was steeped in the irrational but had the advantage of espousing the official dogma of the day: The race to the future”[1]. This endeavour towards space was in fact an aspiration of freedom of Soviet citizens, in particular artists and architects. Their individuality and possibility of self-expression had been suppressed for decades and they were doomed to create an architecture which was “mute and of no address-meaning anonymous”. The dreams of artists and architects about space where the first symptoms of breaking state imposed dogmatic cultural ideologies, and the cosmic architecture they created was a praise of emancipation of their individuality. Yet Chaubin notices that before becoming a symbol of emancipated individuality cosmic architecture started as a reflection of the age, which “began with “contextualism”, a rising tendency of the age, which at the very highest levels asserted the postulate that all buildings should express their environment. All architecture must manifest its local specificity-its address”[2]. Nevertheless, Soviet cosmic and modernist architecture in general remained known as a manifestation of futuristic aesthetics connected with freedom and identity issues of the Soviet citizen, whereas its origins and connection with the larger locality, its engagement with the individuality of the locality, remained unnoticed. Until today Soviet modernism is mostly known through such cosmic or expressionist-structuralist buildings, whilst one of the most interesting aspects of Soviet modernist architecture, its contextual aspect, remains not well explored.
As a typical multinational empire, Soviet Union consisted of many different nations and ethnic groups each of which had its own unique history and traditions. The member countries represented not only different cultural, but also geographic regions, which made the cultural differences between them even more prominent. Consequently Soviet cosmic architecture, which was supposedly conceived everywhere in the same social-political context, obtained unique local characteristics in the case of each of the countries. Chaubin cites several examples how ‘cosmicity’ became contextualized in different countries. Yet the overall cosmic architectural stratum overshadows the true contextual architecture, which in other terms is called regional modernist architecture.
Regional modernism
The global tendency of modernization of the traditional (or globalizing the local) showed particularly interesting results in architecture. This new type of architecture became classified among architectural theorists and historians as regional modernism.
The tendency of regional modernism in architecture is probably the most complex and contradictory terminology and phenomenon in the history of architecture. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, the authors of this term, introduced it for the first time in the 1980s and initially used the term ‘critical regionalism’ to denote “an approach taken by a number of architects who were working towards an alternative to postmodernism”[3]. According to the authors the word ‘critical’ was coined with ‘regionalism’ to distinguish modernist regionalism from the romantic use of the term regionalism in the late 19th century.
Trying to avoid universal formulas such as those suggested by modernism and postmodernism, critical regionalism “indicated an approach to design giving priority to the identity of the particular rather than to universal dogmas”[4]. Nevertheless, the term critical regionalism soon became discredited, obtaining denotation of an architecture which expresses nationalistic-romantic ideas instead of its original purpose of reflecting the architecture based on rather intellectual and academic approaches. In order to return to its original meaning, Tzonis and Lefaivre suggested replacing the term re/gion/alizm with the term realism. They believed that the term realism also reflected the idea of “individuality of particular” to define regional modernism as a “bottom-up approach to design, that recognizes the value of the identity of a physical, social and cultural situation, rather than mindlessly imposing narcissistic formulas from the top down”[5]. The critical regionalism of Tzonis and Lefaivre refers to a design approach or a design concept which is similar to contextualism. It does not imply ready-made set of particular design methods. Critical regionalism is an architecture that is conceived on the bases of social-cultural, as well as practical demands of a current region of current times and as such it obtains certain similarity with the ideas of phenomenology.
William Curtis, another architectural historian studying this architectural tendency, calls critical regionalism authentic regionalism, explaining that “it tries to read the collective memory the same way as contextualism does”[6]. Like Tzonis and Lefaivre, Curtis believes that authentic regionalism is beyond being simply a style or a set of design principles, and that there is something more and deeper, perhaps more ephemeral and not easily defined to these buildings such as “…their deeper lessons of order…to reduce tradition to stillborn recipes is actually to kill it”[7]. Working according to set formulas, one cannot secure the authenticity of architecture, and it is definitely not a method of first-hand design thinking. Curtis believes that intellectual and methodological design can at the very best yield a reminiscent of a postmodernist architecture which is “part of the disease, not its cure, since it reduces the problem of tradition to a trivial manipulation of signs and references”[8]. Elements from traditional architecture cannot be used as mere symbols of what they once were or as a reference to their historical roots. Instead while referring to traditional architecture a “distinction between signs that have no expressive base and genuine reinvigoration of symbols”[9] must be made.
Examples of regional modernist architecture
Tzonis’s and Lefaivre’s concern with the term regional modernism was appropriate, as not only the term but also the architecture which the term denoted was confusing. Among buildings, which have been classified by various authors or historians as representatives of regional modernist architecture, there are some which have used traditional architecture as a formal quotation, as a symbol of itself. Whereas others do not represent any visually recognizable traditional features, but they still possess an aura, an aspect which is reminiscent of the traditional architecture which it aspires to evoke.
One of the best examples of the first approach is the French town Deauville, which, along with the surviving historical buildings, has been constructed with multistory residential complexes in a style that recreates the traditional fachwerk architecture of the region. This architectural structure represents a network of wooden frames, which act as a skeleton of the wall. Whereas in the structure of the new buildings there was no need to use these wooden framings. Yet this wooden frame has been inserted in the structure of the wall in many of newly constructed buildings and in some cases it is applied to the facade as a decorative element. For a non-professional visitor of the town this overall stylistic coherence of the town can be pleasant. One could even believe in historical consistency of the town’s architecture. Yet an architect would always know that these buildings are actually dummies and imposers.
Historical (on the left) and modern (on the right) fachewerk buildings in Deauville
Charles Correa, one of the most famous Indian modernist architects, in some of his buildings recites distinct formal aspects of traditional architecture which makes it stand closer to postmodernist concepts. For example the silhouette of his Kanchanjunga apartment building can be related to the silhouette of traditional Indian temples or stupas. In spite of being based on completely different structural principles, the visual impression from both the historical prototypes and the modernist building are pretty much the same. Whereas the square in Jawahar Kala Kendra (Jaipur) reflects better the main tenets of authentic regionalism. Here again the stepped structure of traditional stupas and temples is evident, yet this time Correa didn’t simply reproduce its’ silhouette. Instead he created a unique improvisation on the theme of this stepped structure, which he turned into a large system of asymmetric and chaotically distributed terraces.
Correa’s Kanchanjunga appartment (1983) inspired from traditional temples and stupas and the Virupaksha temple, 7th centur (bottom left) and Chauikandhi stupa 7th century (top left) in India
To sum up the above discussed theories and design examples, it could be perhaps concluded that many modernist architects referred to traditional architecture in their designs on the bases of retrospect interpretation, intellectual analysis or translation of traditional architectural elements from historical artefacts. Yet, if we are talking about authentic regionalism or regional modernism, then any analytical approach to the traditional architecture is inappropriate, as it usually renders a postmodernist architecture, rather than anything authentic. The authentic design can be achieved not by translating elements from traditional architecture but by looking into the current reality which already contains all the elements that conditioned that traditional architecture.
Regional modernism in Armenia
From the 1960s, architecture in Armenia was developing in the modernist direction.Yet that architectural stratum is not as uniform as it might seem. Alongside with cosmic modernism there was another architectural tendency taking form in Armenia and other Soviet countries. This new form was even more popular among architects than the exclusive architecture of cosmic modernism. This was the tendency which represented the aspiration of Armenian architects to express freely their love and knowledge of traditional architecture, on the bases of which they were educated. This was the start of regional modernism in Armenia.
There are several reasons conditioning the rise of regional modernist architecture in Armenia. First of all 1960s was a period during which the rise of the national consciousness and a return to national roots, history and traditions took place. Secondly, achievements in Urartian studies paired with excavation of the Urartian fortress of Erebuni in the outskirts of Yerevan facilitated these growing tendencies of nationalism and historical self-identification in Armenia. Hence Urartian art and architecture became another large stylistic theme used by Armenian modernist architects to synthesise an architecture which would be both modern and linked to tradition.
What is peculiar in this tendency is the fact that Armenian historical architecture is almost devoid of any survived examples of secular architecture and is based predominantly on church architecture. That is why when architect Alexander Tamanyan in the beginning of the 20th century faced the problem of reviving the traditional Armenian architecture in the designs of new Soviet Armenian cities, he had only church architecture to reference. This was also the case of modernist architects in the 1960s. Both times architects had only the large heritage of medieval church architecture as a reference. So they turned to it to create the modern continuation of Armenian urban architecture.
Yet the problem here was not only in translating the traditional architectural elements into modernist idiom. The main problem was applying elements borrowed from sacred architecture to secular architecture. Church architecture was not fit neither structurally, technologically or functionally to be transferred into secular architecture. So both Tamanyan and modernist architects to distinct decorative and compositional elements mainly used on the facades of churches and applied them in the composition of their own designs. By doing so they secured at least artistic or visual passage from traditional to modern and from sacred to secular architecture.
One of the basic elements of Armenian traditional architecture, the special stone cladding system called ‘midis’, was also adopted in modern architecture. Thanks to it, more fundamental and structural similarity between the architecture of both types and epochs could be achieved. Stone cladding by means of its technical and technological specificity conditioned several unchangeable design aspects of architecture which were evident in medieval church architecture, as well as in modernist urban architecture.
These attempts of re-invocation of the traditional architecture hardly included any basic technological or structural principles, except the stone cladding. And despite that, most of the references to the traditional architecture had an artistic nature, they were conceived largely on the intuition and aesthetics of Armenian architects, who were educated as specialists on the bases of medieval church architecture.
Below is an architectural gallery presenting the transition of architectural motifs from medieval to socialist-realist and further into modernist architecture.
Examples of medieval Armenian church architecture
Socialist-realist architecture of the 'Stalinist' period quoting elements from medieval church architecture
Examples of post-1960 regional-modernist architecture featuring quoted elements of traditional architecture
To summarise, regional modernist architecture in Armenia can be classified by the following design methods:
- Use of traditional stone cladding for outer walls combined with a steel and concrete post and lintel structure in the interior. This technological principal didn’t allow any other design form than simple boxes with limited number of narrow fenestrations. This technical limitation resulted in a unique image of architecture which shortly can be summed up as architecture of stone aesthetics.
- Narrow, often arched or circular openings which were typical elements of medieval church architecture.
- Large surfaces of mute walls with few openings. The stone wall itself becomes an architectural and structural theme with an immediate reference to medieval church architecture.
- Laconic and limited applications of ornaments and decorative elements. Usually they cover the side, mute facades, or are asymmetrically applied, as if quoted, on the surfaces of plain walls.
- Abstract and geometric ornaments usually derived or inspired by traditional carpets. This tendency of abstract, geometrical ornamentation is also connected with the raise of abstract arts in Soviet, which was still not very welcomed, hence artists used tradition as an excuse to create abstract compositions under the pretext of reference to traditional ornaments.
- Reference to Urartian and even to Mesopotamian architecture by quoting the enclosed structures and vertical façade divisions of fortresses and ziggurats.
- Usage of red, brown and white tuff, white travertine or falsite for most of public buildings. Pink tuff with which most of the administrative and residential buildings in the first half of the 20th century were constructed in modernist era becomes rather associated with industrial architecture and is rarely used in urban architecture.
These are the main characteristics of Armenian regional modernist architecture. In some cases these design methods render obviously synthetic architecture, which tended towards eclectics rather than modernism. In other cases the spirit of local architecture was maintained by quoting distinct design elements, which, again, brings it close to ‘unconscious’ post-modernism.
In any case this architectural stratum represents a peculiar historical phenomenon of how a non existing tradition of historical urban architecture could be twice invocated, first in neo-classical architecture in the early 1920s and in modernist architecture of 1960s, to safeguard the continuity of local architectural tradition.
Bibliography
CHAUBIN, F. (2011). CCCP cosmic communist constructions photographed. Cologne (Allemagne), Taschen.
LEFAIVRE, L., & TZONIS, A. (2003). Critical regionalism: architecture and identity in a globalized world. Munich, Prestel.
CURTIS, WILLIAM J. R. "Towards an Authentic Regionalism." In Mimar 19: Architecture in Development, edited by Hasan-Uddin Khan. Singapore: Concept Media Ltd., 1986.
[1] Chobin 2011, p.12
[2] Chobin 2011, p.10
[3] Tzonis, Lefaivre, 2006, p.10
[4] Idem
[5] Idem
[6] Curtis, 2006, p.29
[7] Curtis, 2006, p.25
[8] Curtis, 2006, p.26
[9] Curtis, 2006, p.27