Addressing the arab reader-architect-thinker

How can we generate architecture that is not bound by man made rules but by ethical and sociological parameters. How can we amend Building laws in order not to be sentences written to conceptualize our buildings but to adhere to sets of parameters, to unleash generative processes.

 

The dilemma in our society nowadays is that an architecture student graduates only to become a builder governed by the building laws, and not a thinker. However, this degradation in conceptual thinking erupts from the rotten old academic curriculums that are still practiced in most architectural schools. How could it be possible for a student to develop her creative perspectives if she is directed to the easier-to-follow route of the “copy-paste” society.

 It is the student to be blamed in the first place. Consequently, the professor carries the emblem of this failure as such. The lack of pure academic research is suppressing the open-mindedness of new students/graduates, hereby rendering them naïve.

    If we can not understand it, then it is not architecture

    If it has no repetitive floors, then it is not architecture

    If it has no arcade’s’, then it is not architecture

    If there are no rectangular windows, then it is not architecture

    If it is not made of Concrete mass units, then it is not architecture

    …and the list goes on and on.

It goes without saying that, although part of the guilt lies on the old Lebanese building laws, nevertheless, the current laws can survive if proper and developed academic research is conducted in the world of architecture, be it an advanced research into latest materials that unleash imaginative minds, or through the implementation of parametric design in the process of generating “aesthetic” architecture.