Two tales of differing contexts will tell the tale that local craftsmanship provides to architecture and vice versa. Both are concerned with matters of national identity through strengthening ideas from local knowledge. One enriching the cultural past and the other reviving traditional methods for current circumstances.
Learning ornamentation from Azerbaijan’s Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale.
Ornamentation changes space to create patterns of beauty. With a contemporary take done by six artists from Azerbaijan, geometric shapes and patterns create a rich tapestry that ranges from the different religious contexts and daily life as its source of inspiration. Farid Rasulov exemplifies themes of religion with his work Carpet Interior, which reproduces typical settings from a living room that is characteristic of a particular region, Karabakh. As documented by a blogger visiting the Biennale,
“Farid Rasulov pays tribute to the ancient silk route between Europe and the Orient by confronting the Venetian palazzo with traditional Islamic patterns. Carpets with Azerbaijani ornaments cover a whole scene creating a shift in space.”
The curator of the pavilion also points out Azerbaijan’s influence on Dutch and Italian painters during the 14th and 15th centuries as a sign of lavishness where colours and geometric patterns were linked to a kind of exoticism for its playfulness. There is a kind of colonial perception of Azerbaijan’s wonders in carpet patterns, especially with the pavilion of the Biennale being held in Venice. However, the artists creating these exhibitions raise this essence of ornament as a matter of national cultural heritage. And as with the exhibition of Farid Rasulov, there is a distinct sense of cultural identity not just in terms of ornamentation but how it is printed onto a typical living room within Azerbaijan that celebrates that lavishness. Only in the reclamation of Azerbaijan’s rich history with the arts.
Construction as an Artisanal Practice for Empowerment
Dhajji Construction has a unique place in the field of architecture that gets built in earthquake zones. It makes use of what is around the local area, given the scarcity of materials in the event of a disaster and focuses on the owner’s drive to reconstruct a house, given extensive training from people who do know the technique. And those who knew of the technique had no technical documents or standardised building practice. Yet, in its origin as a vernacular construction technique, meant in the Old Farsi language as patchwork quilts, architecture practices revive its use to aid in humanitarian issues by patching up existing material to create an earthquake-resistant house.
It is what architect Yasmeen Lari aims to achieve with her “Barefoot social architecture’’. Her response from an article by writer Rowan Moore in the Guardian is said to come from a place where “she had to “shed the ego” that drove her former career as a designer of shiny corporate architecture—realizing that the international community’s approach of “giving them handouts, telling them to use concrete and all kinds of materials that are going to be even more destructive to the planet” is the kind of response to natural disasters that will never work in the long run.
Instead, she turns to her home country’s local culture and crafts by using the earth as a building material and making use of the knowledge of Dhajji construction. And where earth is used, there is an expression of love and knowledge for Pakistani crafts through fabric and patterns, which in turn empowers women to be creative and design.
A great example of this lies with her training 35 ‘Barefoot Village Entrepreneurs’ to build their own low-cost and smokeless cooking stove, called Chulah, as a means of increasing clean, safe cooking for households in Pakistan. The World Habitat Awards site details how these women were able to build the Chulahs, but there are key lessons in how it has impacted them.
They uplift themselves, architecture-wise, with the way these stoves are raised on a podium, as artisans who are creative with the personalisation of these stoves that they have built for themselves and as teachers uplifting other women who learn from them on how to build these stoves.
There are cases where women have faced opposition from their male partners, allowing them to work independently. But their venture has brought about decent income in certain cases, even earning up to $40,000, and men have joined their wives to build these stoves as well.
This brings about perspectives of how different fields of design bleed into one another. Yasmeen Lari’s approach to using earthen materials to build low-cost architecture has led her to make use of an old construction technique from Pakistan, which in turn informed on how these low-cost buildings would be built in the event of disasters. And her venture to help build these houses allowed her to interact with the domestic spaces of Pakistani women and uplift them to become artisans of Chulahs that, in turn, uplifted others.
Strength To Both Tales
While the Azerbaijan Pavilion may prove to be an architectural piece for a Biennale catered to a mainly Western frame of thought, it imposes itself as a bold display of its cultural textiles onto an architectural lens. Yasmeen Lari’s work as an architect is an uplifting story of women’s empowerment through architecture by means of a local construction method that makes use of materials to not only rebuild after an earthquake but create life from it.
References
Artintheheartofsummer (2013) CARPET INTERIOR. FARID RASULOV AT THE AZERBAIJAN PAVILION, 55TH VENICE BIENNALE. 25th of August
[Online] [Accessed on 8th of July 2023].
Schacher, T (Arch.). Ali, Q (Dr.). (2009) DHAJJI CONSTRUCTION For one and two storey earthquake resistant houses. Islamabad, UN Habitat Pakistan. [Online[] [Accessed on 8th of July 2023] https://www.world-housing.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Dhajji_English.pdf
Moore, Rowan. (2023) Architect Yasmeen Lari: ‘The international colonial charity model will never work’. 7th May. The Guardian [Online] [Accessed on 8th of July 2023].
World Habitat. Pakistan Chulahs: The smokeless stoves empowering women and changing lives. [Online] [Accessed on 8th of July 2023].
https://world-habitat.org/world-habitat-awards/winners-and-finalists/pakistan-chulahs/#resident-stories
Image References:
Rasulov, Farid. (2013) ‘Carpet Interior’. Architecture installation. In: artintheheartofsummer. (2013) CARPET INTERIOR. FARID RASULOV AT THE AZERBAIJAN PAVILION, 55TH VENICE BIENNALE. [Online] [Accessed on 8th July 2013].
World Habitat. (2019) Pakistan main image. [Online image] [Accessed on 8th July 2013] https://world-habitat.org/world-habitat-awards/winners-and-finalists/pakistan-chulahs/#resident-stories
