The Tropical Asian House [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONAlthough one-off private houses by architects constitute only a small fraction of new building and although they side-step socioeconomic issues through being built for the well-off they do provide an important opportunity for exploration and demonstration. It is here that the ideas of domesticity can be recast, the importance of cultural memory tested, the value of tradition questioned. The house has always been a test-bed for architectural experiment.- Peter Blundeil Jones'In 1987, I was invited to a seminar in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The subject of the meeting was The Architecture of Housing and focussed on the design of low-income housing. One paper in particular left a lasting impression - its authors Charles Moore and Hasan-Uddin Khan^ chose to approach the problem of the lack of attention given to the architecture of mass-housing by the rather unusual strategy of highlighting the amount of care devoted to the design of individual family houses. The message of their presentation was simple: "the houses of the rich have always been the major indicators of cultural and architectural change". Accepting this premise, the study of houses of the well-to-do becomes more than just the admiration of them as beautiful objects. It involves a serious appraisal in order to identify the essential qualities that can act as models in a'filtering-down' process.What appeared at first to be a digression from the serious business of the seminar, which was to find new solutions to the problem of providing shelter for millions of people in the developing world, promoted an animated discussion on the value of individual houses as models. The Indian architect Charles Correa, another participant in the seminar, agreed:By definition, the individual house deals with open-to-sky space ~ a courtyard or a roofed terrace is an additional room - there is a wonderful relationship of graduated space from covered to open. The individual house is a continuously differentiated programme as you go from room to room, the quality of life and the privacy is changing somehow this sensibility is often missing in mass housing projects.^ For a long time after the Zanzibar seminar, I pondered the significance of the issues and particularly a challenge to the participants from Oleg Grabar. Who is going to develop the critical vocabulary by which these houses, which are works of art sponsored by the rich, can be judged? Who is going to transmit the important meanings f It is a search for spaces that are meaningful - what is important is the way in which they establish quality and authenticity within certain cultures.'^ This book is my second attempt to