ON THEO VAN DOESBURG, ALDO ROSSI, AND THE NEED OF ARCHITECTURE CRITICISM IN THE GULF
Flashback # 1. Weimar, Germany, April 1921.
Theo van Doesburg leaves Holland and moves to Weimar. The artist and theorist of the Dutch "De Stijl," invited by Gropius, begins teaching at the Bauhaus. The collision between his radical neoplastic ideas and the "expressionist" teachers is immediate. Van Doesburg is forced to leave the Bauhaus but begins offering alternative figurative and applied arts classes. Many students drop out of official school courses, and the new "neoplastic" ideas begin to spread even among young teachers. The cultural clash culminates with Van Doesburg's estrangement from the community for reasons of public order. Still, his theoretical legacy greatly influences the work of the modernist masters starting with Mies van der Rohe. His Barcelona pavilion is the manifesto of neoplastic architecture.
Flashback # 2. Pescara, Italy, October 1988.
I enter the large classroom where is scheduled the presentation of the first year of architecture I have just enrolled. Long rows of green plastic chairs stand between the professor's desk and me. There are 250 students in my class. I can still see a large drawing made in felt-tip pen on the plaster of the wall next to the large blackboard from a distance. A circumference circumscribes three towers. They remind me of medieval architecture. At the top of each, there is a triangular flag. At the bottom, there is an inscription: "ALDO ROSSI NO THANKS." I wonder if Aldo Rossi is some character, obviously not very nice, who hang around that building. I soon learn that that name belongs to one of the greatest Italian culture exponents, not only architectural. The "Tendenza," the architectural movement that, in the seventies, sprung from his ideas and saw Pescara as one of its strongholds, was beginning to suffer in-depth criticism. Young professors contrasted Rossi's typological traditionalism and proposed new urban and architectural theories. In the 90s, this small architecture school became a cultural factory due to this academic tension. It was the privileged place of a generational clash between different ideologies in which students attended and participated passionately. At that time, I saw students using a walkman to record the teachers' animated discussions along the university's corridors.
Present time. Dubai. January 2021
The whole world is on the eve of a restart after the catastrophe of the pandemic. After the panic caused by the March 2020 lockdowns, everyone hopes that vaccines will bring the world back to a dimension of normalcy. The effects of the pandemic are felt on a global and, consequently, local scale. Dubai, always very sensitive to sudden changes in the world economy, is suffering from a crisis that had already begun shortly after the heady period caused by the expo's award. The most prominent urban development agents stopped their construction activities to counteract a dizzying depreciation of properties. Their original value exceeded the 30% loss in just two years. As during the crisis of 2009, architectural products of low design value are the first to suffer from the lack of potential end-users. In the shortage of design opportunities, it is the best architecture that wins the few possibilities.
Scarcity always favors quality. Achieving a high quality of the architectural offer and, consequently, of the entire built environment cannot fail to involve the local designers, thinkers, and cultural institutions, especially the schools of architecture.
The rare publications (that survive the decay of print media) and some regional webzines have attempted to build an apparatus to support the built environment's cultural development. I often participated as a juror in numerous awards organized by the local industry. They represent fundamental dissemination and promotional agents of the industry. Still, they do not seem to establish qualitative hierarchies able to influence the architectural "trends." Generally, the debate is limited to celebrating excellence. It also tends to avoid critical positions towards design operations of dubious nature and sometimes-low quality. Numerous events related to the construction industry include experts who discuss the status quo and propose solutions for the future without a real critical reflection. Finally, in the historical era in which it seems to be mandatory to express unsolicited comments on social media, the regional architectural debate seems completely absent. Architects are continually flooding the digital platforms with images of their work. Still, the comments' content is always limited to generic compliments if not showing just a series of childish emoticons.
Therefore, the regional context seems to suffer from the lacking of a genuine architectural criticism that is placed between, on the one hand, customers and designers, and on the other, public opinion. Architectural criticism must be able to build a debate through the analytical process and evaluation of qualities or deficiencies of a particular architecture. In the historical moment of the "restart," after the pandemic's global tragedy, regional cultural figures' contribution must promote quality and criticize what does not reach acceptable parameters.
In this light, I think that the cultural solipsism (in some extreme cases, even snobbery) sometimes showed by some architecture schools is no longer acceptable. Students must be engaged in a highly passionate, contrasting, perhaps revolutionary, cultural debate. They must be endowed with the necessary critical skills to formulate appropriate solutions to global and local issues. The initiatives that put students in contact with professional and governmental entities must become routine and not be occasional events delegated to individuals' endeavors. It is also essential that architecture teachers coming from cultures other than the indigenous one stop to be perched on their own cultural identities of origin. It is an ethical duty to develop an in-depth knowledge of the environmental conditions in which one operates, to avoid, above all, unacceptable cultural colonialism. Architecture cannot be properly taught in an unfamiliar context. The purpose of architectural educators is to understand the regional context within the global dimension and to equip students with the necessary knowledge to design a sustainable cultural environment to the benefit of the community.
The “own light” enjoyed by Dubai's urban culture, is no longer sufficient to illuminate the architectural scenario. The "restart" must include a profound reflection on design culture's role in regional cultural and environmental development.
