Tradition Today: Continuity in Architecture and Society
WIT Press, 2008, 160 pp., $59 hardcover
This is the first book from the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), an organization founded six years ago to promote the old ways of building, in a world that often seems impelled to “think outside the box.” No out-of-scale Rem Koolhaas provocations for the INTBAU crowd. The purpose of the organization is to show how methods that were passed down through the centuries can serve and elevate life today.
It’s a worthy aim, for as Prince Charles observes in the introduction, tradition “is a term that has been much maligned and misunderstood in recent years.” Maligned among a considerable number of architecture schools and design critics, anyway. Charles, who is identified on this book’s cover as “patron” of INTBAU, says the goal should not be to “preserve traditions as empty gestures” but rather to “create the basis for traditions to live again, to be practised in the real world and once more help people to re-connect with their past.”
Leon Krier, in the book’s penultimate essay, recalls that for more than six years after plans for the Krier-designed traditional town of Poundbury were announced, “Prince Charles had to brave mountains of abuse and lies. I lost most of my architect ‘friends.’ ” Says Krier: “The traditional agenda needed a powerful and independent protector exactly because it has been so radically cornered and aggressively excluded from architectural education and institution patronage.”
In his unfailingly witty way, Krier tells of his disappointment with the vast majority of modern buildings and developments. “Most of our buildings, independent of style, are today in fact little more than full-size models,” he says. An important problem is size, he contends. “Oversized buildings, whether skyscrapers, landscrapers or underground-scrapers, necessarily overburden and congest urban networks. Corbusier was right. If you want oversized buildings in the short or long run, you will not have traditional cities.”
Other essayists, such as Cesare Poppi of Italy, Hans Kolstad of Norway, and Khaled Azzam at The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, ponder the nature and role of tradition in buildings in disparate locales. The English architect Robert Adam makes a fascinating case for the need to have architecture respect history, custom, and tradition. Did the founding Modernists of the early twentieth century claim that buildings should be machine-like — liberated from custom and tradition? Adam points out that up-to-date machines in fact often incorporate practices from long ago. Computers, for example, still rely on the QWERTY keyboard layout that was designed in 1873 to slow typists down to avoid the collision of key bars. Those who insist on escaping every element of the past embark on a fool’s errand.
The book goes beyond architecture and urbanism to explore tradition in religion, law, language, and gastronomy and in arts as divergent as sculpture and computer type design. Some of the essays are awkwardly written. There seems, alas, to have been no copy editor; punctuation and grammar are in some cases abysmal. Nonetheless, the thinking displayed by this slim book’s dozen essayists is frequently fascinating. Tradition Today takes readers, at a quick pace, over a lot of interesting terrain, most of it off the Modern beaten path. It’s a refreshing excursion.
