Water in Islamic Architecture

In Islam, water is seen as life-giving, sustaining, and purifying. The Qur’an states, “from water every living creature was created.”

Water is used in Islamic architecture for several basic reasons. First, it is used practically to provide cooling in hot, dry climates (e.g. the courtyard fountains and pools typically found in the vernacular architecture of the Middle East and North Africa, the origin of Islam). Second, it is used aesthetically to emphasize visual axes, reflect the surrounding environment, and visually multiply the adjacent architecture and its decorative detailing (e.g. the reflecting pools and watercourses at the Alhambra and Generalife in Granada, Spain). Third, it is used symbolically to represent the life-giving, sustaining, and purifying aspects of water mentioned in the Qur’an (e.g. the ablution fountains found traditionally in the central courts of mosques).

Water is an important component of traditional Islamic gardens and courtyards. In the Qur’an, the “garden” is used to represent the paradise promised to believers. One very particular type of Islamic garden related specifically to this concept is the so-called “Paradise Garden.” The word “paradise” comes from the Persian words pairi, meaning “around,” and daeza, meaning, “wall.” Together, these words create a reference to the fact that early Middle Eastern gardens were enclosed, masonry-walled precincts set aside from the wilderness of nature and used for cultivation in the desert.

The traditional layout of the Paradise Garden is rectilinear with a central pool or fountain and four extending watercourses. This quadripartite garden is also known as a chahar bagh or charbagh, a term which means “four gardens” in Persian. The central fountain symbolizes the origin and sustainer of life and the watercourses represent the four rivers of the Garden of Eden. In addition to their symbolic function, the fountain and watercourses also served the very practical purpose of irrigating the garden. As a general rule, the Paradise Garden is very formal and manicured. Perhaps the most famous Islamic Paradise Garden known to westerners is the garden at the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. At the Taj Mahal, each of the four quadrant gardens is divided geometrically into sixteen planting beds.

Although the Paradise Garden form is prevalent in Islam, it should not be taken as the only type of Islamic garden. Regardless of the ultimate form, there are several general themes that are common throughout the design of gardens in Islam: water is generally a unifying feature, shade is achieved through planting and architecture, and there is a balanced play between formal and informal planting arrangements.

With respect to water in particular, there are several important aspects of its design worth noting and which are helpful in evaluating its specific use in Islamic gardens:

type – fountain (dynamic) v. pool (static),
character – moving (dynamic) v. still (static),
depth – deep (dark, used to reflect its surroundings) v. shallow (light, used to illuminate its intricately-patterned, tiled basin),
form – linear (marking an axis) v. compact (marking a point).

Cultural Context

At work we are entering a design competition for a hotel in the Middle East. Even though it is sometimes a bit of post-rationalization for our design concepts, we often research information about the cultural context for a specific site. (I am actually quite interested in the influence of cultural context on Modern architecture. I only wish it was not always a post-rationalization!) Frequently this research means looking at the vernacular architecture of the region and any particularly noteworthy works of architecture based in the local culture.

This week I was asked by the team working on the project to do a little research on Islamic architecture, focusing specifically on the use of water in traditional Islamic design. I have really enjoyed traditional Islamic architecture ever since I did a research paper on Islamic gardens when I was in school at Georgia Tech, so this assignment was right up my alley. I find Islamic architecture incredibly beautiful aesthetically, especially the use of geometry, order, patterning, and color at all levels of the design. It is intricate yet simple, which is a pretty amazing thing to balance. (Unlike, say, Baroque architecture, which is intricate yet over the top!) Someday I would love to have the opportunity to visit first-hand some of the incredible traditional works of architecture in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

I really enjoyed refreshing my memory this week about Islamic architecture and gardens and looking at photographs of some pretty incredible works of architecture. After putting together a “cheat sheet” outline of concepts for the team, I decided it might be nice to write about some of what I researched on this blog. I think what I learned is a bit long for one blog post, so the next few articles will be about a specific aspect of traditional Islamic design that I find to be particularly interesting.

Parking

"The parking garage is a peculiar twentieth-century phenomenon. The one in New Haven comes from the design of throughways....I wanted to make a building which said it dealt with cars and movement. I wanted there to be no doubt that this is a parking garage." (Paul Rudolph)

I have a strange architectural affinity for parking garages.  I suppose I love their simplicity and utility and the fact that they are, unlike most multi-story structures, basically a continuous surface from bottom to top--a combination of folds and ramps and decks and spirals.

While studying at Yale, I took a class called "Photography for Architects" in which we learned some basic SLR photography techniques, developed black-and-white film, and printed black-and-white photographs in the darkroom.  For our final project that semester, we were asked to pick a theme on which to build a collection of images, and I chose to photograph several parking garages around New Haven:  the Coliseum (demolished 2007), the Air Rights Garage, the Crown Street Garage, and the Temple Street Garage.  My photographs at the time attempted to focus not only on the parking garage as form in light and shadow, but also also on their upper decks as a sort of urban landscape, populated with stair towers, light fixtures, cars, and, perhaps most interestingly, the tops of the surrounding buildings, ungrounded and without context.

One of my favorites is the Temple Street Parking Garage, designed by Paul Rudolph and completed in 1963.  I love it because it is monumental, exuberant, retro, "cartoony," and "designy."  Sometimes I think it looks as if it was not built by humans but by some colony of giant insects--or perhaps it emerged out of some strange geologic event which left it standing after all the soil around it was eroded by water over the course of a million years.  The garage's slightly anamorphic stair and elevator towers peek out of the upper deck like sentinels guarding the city beyond, lit by their strange concrete light-pole companions and distinguished by their bright red and orange tile work--the choice of colors a product of 1960s design trends no doubt!  (The strange residential sun room-like backpacks and tangle of exposed electrical conduit running along the tiles are, I am certain, not original to the structure.)

I recently decided to stop back by the Temple Street Garage to try my eye at some photography with our new DSLR.  Last time I shot the garage, I was shooting black-and-white film.  But now, using digital photography and the magic of Photoshop, I was able to process these new photos to emphasize the vibrant color of the tile work on the stair towers, which I have done by using the channel mixer to remove the color from the remainder of the photograph.

More Kahn

I thought I would post a few more images from my photo shoot last week with Ken.  Like those that I posted earlier, these photos are from the Yale Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art and they were contenders for the architectural photography contest I entered last week.

Enjoy!

Yale Art Gallery

Yale Center for British Art

This is the view of the Yale Art Gallery's Swartwout Building

from the 4th floor of the British Art Center--I love this view!

Six Down, One to Go

Yesterday I took my sixth ARE:  Construction Documents and Services.  The multiple choice portion of the test was quite difficult, so I am not sure how confident to feel with my performance.  I studied quite a lot for the exam, but I think there were some nuances of contractual issues that I should have brushed up on a little more.  I hope they will not leave me hanging too long waiting for my score!

I also scheduled my last exam (Programming, Planning, and Practice) for later on in March.  I am pretty tired of taking tests so I decided just to power through studying for it and get 'em done!

Kahn-test

On Saturday, my photographer friend Ken (who blogs here) and I went downtown to do a little photography.  Ken and I went to photograph together a few weeks ago for fun, but this time I wanted to take some photos for an architectural photography competition sponsored by AIA St. Louis.  I asked Ken if he would like to join me and he jumped at the opportunity to come and try out some of his new equipment.

It was a beautiful day for a photo-outing and we spent most of our morning in the Yale Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, two wonderful Modern buildings designed by architect Louis Kahn.  I have always loved the Yale Art Gallery and British Art Center being across the street from each other in New Haven, as they were Kahn's first and last musuems respectively--the latter completed posthumously.

Although we walked around town to some other sites, I ended up deciding to only submit photos from the two galleries.  Each competition entry could include up to five separate images, which I have included below for your viewing pleasure.  The competition postmark deadline was today, and I mailed my CD of images this morning.

So, what do you think?  Are any of these winners!?

"Kahn's Window"

"Kahn's Doorway"

(Ken's version of this photo is here.  Take notice of the "missing" fire extinguisher and alarm in my submission.  Ahh, the miracle of Photoshop!)

"Kahn at Eleven"

"Kahn's Vertigo"

"Kahn Descending"

Another One Down

Today I received another ARE score in the mail:  I passed "Building Design & Construction Systems."  This was the quickest turn-around I have experienced so far with the scoring report (about five weeks).

I hope this bodes well for prompt scoring on my last two tests, one of which is scheduled two weeks from yesterday.  My mantra these days is "just get 'em done!"  I want my license by summer.

Beijing Burning: Questioning the Starchitect

Today is Friday the 13th and architecture has been a bit unlucky this past week.  On Monday, the 50-story Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Beijing, still under construction and due to open in May, burned to a crisp when an unauthorized fireworks display celebrating the Lunar New Year went horribly wrong.  One firefighter died in the blaze and six people were injured.  The hotel, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA, was part of Central China Television's (CCTV) new headquarters complex.  Unsurprisingly, CCTV has been careful to release only minimal information about the disaster through their own agency, reportedly covering the Australian wildfires much more than the fire in their own back yard.

When I first heard about the fire, I thought, "Wow, even Koolhaas' buildings can burn!"  The event felt like a bit of an equalizing moment and I had a very distinct "we all have to sit down to you know what, don't we" reaction.  I asked myself, "is this the end of the Starchitect?"

Thought I do not know when the terms "Starchitect" and "Starchitecture" were first used, I seem to recall them coming into frequent use more than a decade ago when Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain.  Back in 1997, completion of the new building literally put an unheard-of town in northern Spain on the map for tourists and art aficionados around the world.  In 1998 when I entered Georgia Tech to study architecture, Bilbao was still fresh on everyone's mind, and the concept of the "Starchitect" was ingrained in us young, idealistic, star-crossed young designers.

For more than a decade now, architects like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Santiago Calatrava, Renzo Piano, and Rem Koolhaas (to name a few) have been riding a wave of landmark, high-profile projects destined to transform cities in the way Bilbao was transformed by the Guggenheim.  In Beijing, the new CCTV complex, for example, along with the trendy Olympic architecture we all ogled over last summer, was intended to usher China into the new millennium in the eyes of the world.  Now with the burning of a landmark work of architecture by one of the world's most prestigious architects, are we supposed to think now that China is all talk?  After all, we know from the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics that China can put on quite a show when they want to, all the while controlling their very carefully-crafted "official" image.  What is the official story on this one?  This is a difficult event to sweep under the rug unnoticed.

I suppose it is a bit of an inauspicious moment for architecture, which is already starting to feel the pains of the global economic slowdown we can not seem to hear enough about in the media.  Just a few weeks ago, in fact, at a gathering with a few of my Yale classmates, I was saddened to learn that several of them had recently lost their jobs, even at prestigious, well-established architecture firms.  True, even I tend to get a little giddy when I see the next "new" thing from the big-name architects, but I also continue to struggle with the ego of it all, while all the while Beijing was burning.  What is it all for?  Is this the end of the era of the Starchitect and the Bilbao effect?  Has the playing field been leveled?  (Alas, can I hope?)

And to further prove that even well-entrenched, 101 year old Modernist Starchitects must take a blow to their own ego from time-to-time, it was recently reported that Oscar Niemeyer's project for the "Plaza of Sovereignty" to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of Brasilia was halted before it ever started over what seem to be concerns about budget as well as preservation of the urban fabric of central Brasilia's Monumental Axis.  Oh well.  At least even Modernism is up for preservation these days!

It's okay, Oscar, don't be discouraged.  Rem's got nothing on you!  You were designing icons while he was still in diapers!

[In an curious side note to the this story, I found it interesting to find online that conspiracy theorists have been quick to point out how the fact that the structure of the Mandarin Hotel is still standing after its vigorous fire has proven that 7 World Trade Center, which collapsed during a fire hours after the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, was "imploded."  Some people just have to make trouble don't they!]

Five Down, Two to Go

Today I took my "Building Systems" exam. This particular test covers mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems with a couple of calculations and code requirements thrown in for good measure. I left the testing center feeling relatively comfortable with my performance, although there were a few calculations I did not have time to complete in time and so my answers were basically my first guess.

As with my other exams, I expect it will be about two months or so before I hear whether I passed or not, at which point I hope I will have completed my last two exams remaining!

Pass, Pass

This past weekend I got some very good news in the mail:  I passed two more AREs!  This means that, as of today, I have passed 3 of my exams (Site Planning & Design, Structural Systems, and Schematic Design), I am awaiting one score for a test I took in January, and I have 3 more tests to go.  I have been diligent about following my "one test every 4 weeks" schedule and so I will be taking Building Systems next week.  This keeps me on track to finish testing in April, which was my goal when I started taking the AREs in October.