The Subversion of Universalizing Trends in Arch Itecturel
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232 83RDACSA ANNUAL MEETING HlSTORYfrHEORYICRlTlClSM 1995 Critical Vernacularism: The Subversion of Universalizing Trends in Arch itecturel NlHAL PERERA Binghamton University State University of New York INTRODUCTION THE COLONIAL STRUCTURE OF ARCHITEC- TURAL PRODUCTION In 1978, three decades after independence, Sri Lankan leaders moved the seat of government from the former Architecture --understood as a professionalized discipline of colonial capital, Colombo, to a former indigenous seat of building design, practiced by specially-trained architects power nearby. Abandoning the neo-classical architecture of employed and paid by clients-- was largely institutionalized the colonial Parliament House, the new parliamentary com- in the nation states of western Europe and the USA in the plex was constructed in a "vernacular" form of architecture nineteenth century. Such institutionalized architecture pro- that appears to be continuing from an indigenous past and vided for the requirements of both industrial and colonial belonging to Sri Lanka. The prelude to this, however, was societies, and particularly, as it had done for centuries, for the the emergence of what we might call critical vernacularism constitution of a realm of high culture. Architecture in this as the most prominent design trend in the 1970s, a trend sense was constructed and reified in the imperial metropoles, which radically transformed the constitution of the Sri in this case, Britain, often marginalizing a vast array of other Lankan field of architecture. It was, therefore, not an building and design methods that operated both inside as accident that Geoffrey Bawa, a leading architect of this well as outside this Western cultural domain. tendency, was commissioned by the government to design In colonial Ceyl~n,~official government construction the most prestigious project of "national architecture," the activity was monopolized by a particular group of govern- ment departments, lead by the Public Works Department, national parliamentary complex. which I shall refer to as the PWD. The PWD also institution- The development of place and community specific archi- alized the distinct ways in which official built culture was to tectural designs is not limited to Sri Lanka, nor to this period. be produced. This colonial project was not only responsible However, a consciousness of "the world becoming a single for a whole range of "new" spaces that were completely alien place," exacerbating a concern with identity among different to the colonized --such as a road network, new institutional states and ethnic groups, and resulting in decisions to address buildings like barracks, courts, prisons, and hospitals, as well these problems, has intensified over the last two decade^.^ as tennis courts and cricket grounds-- but also aimed at The discourse on critical regionalism represents one intellec- producing new subjects within these, such as prison guards tual attempt to come to terms with such developments in the and prisoners, tennis and cricket players. For the Ceylonese, European and US fields of architecture.' therefore, space was at once both defamiliarized and What I focus on is, however, an architectural discourse dehistoricized; yet at the same time, it was also historicized that critiques the general and universal approach to culture and familiarized for the colonizers, and subsequently, also and architecture adopted in colonial and modernist prac- for the Ceylonese elite and technocrats who were also tices by evoking spaces and symbols indigenous to a produced within this structure. particular society, especially after colonialism. In this In many respects, the construction of a new built environ- paper, I shall take Sri Lankan critical vernacularism as an ment and culture operated at the "international" level of the example of this much more widespread phenomenon, ex- British Empire, linking the imperial metropole and the plore the way it was constituted, and the architectural colonies, since the PWD and other departments of the design it replaced. Since it is beyond the scope of this paper colonial state in Ceylon involved in the design and construc- to discuss each of the practices that constitute the broad tion of buildings and structures were simultaneously con- field of critical vernacular architecture, I shall focus my stituent elements in the larger administration of the Empire. discussion on Bawa's work. The colonial system therefore replaced former Lankan sys- 83RD ACSA ANNUAL MEETING HISTORY~HEORYICRITICISM 1995 233 terns of producing its built environment, which had largely methods, for example, those producing peasant dwelling been confined to its individual kingdoms, by a larger one that forms and religious architecture. Although old royal prohi- was empire-wide.5 Moreover, architecture produced by the bitions, such as those forbidding the use of burnt clay tiles as PWD was primarily representative of the Empire and the a roofing material, were ignored by the colonial rulers, the colonial power of Britain rather than the indigenous culture economically marginal existence of villagers within the of the co10ny.~Neo -classical buildings such as the Parlia- newly instituted market-economy prevented them from imi- ment of Ceylon, and the Town Hall of Colombo, built in the tating the trends of the city in modernizing their dwelling early twentieth century, can also be seen in other British houses. Moreover, under new building regulations, their colonies and dominions such as India and Canada. We must building practices were often marginalized as "sub-stan- not, however, fix this in what linguists call a binary opposi- dard," and as "traditional" under the new ideology of "mod- tion of metropole-colony as these new spaces were part of a ernization." The line of mimicry of indigenes following the "colonial third culture," which Anthony King defines as "the built forms produced in the metropole (>> metropole >>> European colonial culture which resulted from the transfor- colonial capital >> cities > villages) was thus never com- mation of metropolitan cultural institutions as they came into plete. contact with the culture of the indigenous ~ociety."~ As in other colonies, Lankan religions --Buddhism, Hin- Furthermore, the imperial metropole monopolized the duism, and Islam-- lost the moral authority as well as the production and circulation of knowledge in the realm of political and ideological persuasiveness they had held within architecture. Until the 1940s,military officers, planners, and the pre-colonial society. Yet different forms of Christianity architects who undertook design and construction functions introduced by the colonial powers were unable to replace were largely Europeans who came and brought "appropri- Lankan religions, and today, Christians constitute only about ate" knowledge from BritaineRThis system was gradually five per cent of the Sri Lankan population. Traditional supplemented by recruiting compliant Ceylonese, training Lankan religious institutions and their architectural prac- them in the metropole, and selecting the most competent tices, including the design of temples, survived the hostile through exacting examinations. The design activity was thus conditions of c~lonialism.'~The continuation of these decentralized to the colonies, but the production of architec- traditions, therefore, sustained forms for future aspirations tural knowledge was monopolized by academic and profes- and development, as well as nodes for hture subversions of sional institutions in the metropole. These Ceylonese archi- the colonial and modernist universalization. tects, educated and trained through a curriculum directed at producing professional members for the Royal Institute of THE POSTCOLONIAL LANGUAGE OF SUBVER- British Architects, were more suited to work and design in SION Britain than Cey10n.~ Despite independence in 1948, neither the PWD type state- This system reproduced the colonial structure of domi- run department structure through which design and construc- nance and dependence in the plane of knowledge, in whlch tion activity was carried out, nor its dependence on Western the metropolitan center depicted the "developed society" as knowledge, changed very much.lh The critical discourse, a model which the society in the "undeveloped colonial however, emerged from outside this structure. Geoffrey periphery would inevitably foll~w.'~Sociologist Susantha Bawa, his partner, Ulrik Plesner, and many others who were Goonatilake has argued that so-called significant knowledge engaged in developing architectural designs more appropri- assertions in the dependent periphery result from the diffu- ate to Sri Lanka largely practiced independently outside the sion of ideas fiomthe center; the basic core knowledge grows post-colonial, proto-PWD structure. By the 1980s, however, largely in the West and is transferred to the developing government departments had also been influenced by this countries." In this context, the production of "meaningful vernacularism, and many of them had developed their own architecture" in the periphery was confined to the process of variations. Critical vernacularism, therefore, eventually mimicking Western buildings and architectural styles. The subverted the colonial and modernist universalization of the centralized production of architectural knowledge, just as built environment, countering the exclusion and the production of architecture itself, tended not only to marginalization of indigenous building practices