Sunday April 27, 2008
The Wright way
ARCHITECTURE INSIDE OUT
By PROF DR MOHAMAD TAJUDDIN MOHAMAD RASDI
One of America’s greatest architects, known for his churches, offers many lessons designers of mosques should heed.
Take his renowned Unitarian Church (in Wisconsin, the United States), for instance (pic right).
It offers a great lesson in this era when huge mosques that can house hundreds of thousands are preferred. Wright’s church is lower than the trees that surround it, making a clear statement that God’s creations are more important than man’s. Mosque designers should try to break up the scale of their works and ensure the dominance of trees over the main building (except over the minaret) to encourage contemplation of God’s creation.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s house of God does not overwhelm God’s creations – note how his First Unitarian Meeting House stays low to the ground and allows trees to dominate it. – JEFF DEAN / Wikipedia Commons When it came to materials, Wright preferred to use natural materials, such as stone and timber, and he would not plaster over the stone or paint the timber, as he wished their texture to be discerned by all.
This aspect of organic architecture is one of the most important lessons builders of mosques could learn. Natural materials have the power to remind man of his primeval origins. Stone and timber were here long before man set foot in this world. This connection to the primitive past helps to bring man down from the high pedestal upon which he has placed himself with the help of technology. With modern gadgetry humbling Nature, man has forgotten that he is a mere “keeper of the world” for Allah until a particular time.
The most prominent characteristic of Wright’s architectural works is his preference for strong horizontal expression, something he associated with the horizon of an open prairie. This concept is, again, another primeval reminder of a connection with Nature, and it also acts as “weight” to “tie” the building down to the ground, thus creating a secure sense of shelter.
Many mosques are designed standing vertically upright without a tawadhu sense of humility. The church in question – and, in fact, most of Wright’s buildings – has a quality of humility that we do not find in many so-called “Islamic” works in this country. And that is an irony, indeed, considering that the meaning of “Islam” is “submission to the will of Allah”!
Wright was never an advocate of revivalism, nor was he ever known to condone eclecticism in any form whatsoever. From his Prairie School period to his Cubist era, and finally to his structuralist preference, Wright always believed in the idea of the “spirit of the times”.
This idea simply postulates that each building truthfully produced in an era reflects the technological prowess and the economic conditions of that particular period. Revivalism, which seeks to lie about true conditions and makes simplistic nostalgic references, can never be taken seriously as an important rationale to produce works of socio-political importance.
Thus, Wright rejected the use of typological church models in his designs of both the Unity Temple and the Unitarian Church. He believed that religion is a progressive and not a dogmatic practice. With his rejection of the established typological reference of religious architecture, Wright underlined the idea of religious practice as a true independent relationship between the individual worshipper and God without any intermediary whatsoever. This is an important lesson for the design of mosques nowadays, which seems to relish the notion of a sacred vocabulary and syntax in references to Middle Eastern, African, and Mediterranean domes, arches, minarets, courtyards, and ornamentation.
Siting a church in a way that does not overpower the landscape leads one to the idea, again, of humility in the face of God’s works. There is absolutely no mistaking the presence of a mosque in the contemporary context, as clients prefer them up on a hill, sitting like a monarch surveying his peasantry.
Besides the Unitarian Church, lessons can also be drawn from two other works by Wright.
The Darwin D. Martin House Complex in New York offers important lessons how landscaping elements can be integrated in organising spaces. Instead of lumping all the spaces into a single mass, Wright created three volumes connected with passageways.
What this ingeniously does is provide for leisurely but ceremonious journeys to all the different spaces in the house past plants and trees in the small courtyards created. A mosque could benefit from such a strategy, as this would not only encourage the contemplation of God’s natural creations but also sooth the spirit – and cool the building, as natural material would absorb solar radiation!
Wright’s concern for sustainable architecture can be seen in his preference for natural materials and his energy conservation strategies. In the design of the Friedman house, for instance, Wright buried much of the building in the soil, which acts as natural insulation against heat and cold. He also oriented the building to capture the rays of the winter sun to heat the house.
In tropical Malaysia, an emphasis on openness and the use of pools of water for cooling and encouragement of convective air currents is desirable.
However, many mosques disregard this principle, and some have even opted to use mechanical means of cooling just so that they can use the fortress-like images of Middle Eastern mosque typologies.
Islam encourages actions of conserving resources and abhors wasteful acts of any kind. The Prophet was known to have admonished his followers not to be wasteful in performing their ablutions even if the water was from an abundantly flowing river.
The American architect advocated many principles that are directly relevant to the design of mosques not as monumental and glorified symbols but as product that dissolve into the landscape while emphasising the lessons of Nature. Such mosques would perform their duty of reminding the Muslim of humility.
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia lecturer Prof Dr Mohamad Tajuddin passionately believes that architectural design that respects cultural values, religious sensitivities and the ideals of democracy is vital to nation-building and harmony.
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