The influence of culture on architecture
Designing the environment is a work that originates from within the designer and external factors also influence the mind of the designer..
The culture of any society affects all its elements. When a designer uses forms and components that are of interest to the majority of the people of that society, in fact, he has used the culture of those people in his design. The optimal design should be considered because many of the structures of the society originate from its history, as well as another factor of the type of use of an environment, which due to the diversity of users, the designer should consider in his design. .
Culture :
The culture of any society originates from the intellectual infrastructures of the people of that society, and these intellectual infrastructures affect the construction of everything that is needed in that society, and play the main role in designing a cultural environment. . A newcomer's careful look at his surroundings helps him to understand the main culture of those people, the appearance of buildings, the shape of the landscape and ….. It shows what the people of that society think .
As much as there is similarity between two environments in two separate societies, it indicates the closeness of the cultures of those two nations and finally shows the continuity and the manner of their attitudes and thoughts.. The reverse of this article is also true in different societies due to differences in cultures, the use of components and their arrangement in building a campus is different. .
2- history :
The existing and present form of an environment is largely taken from the history, myths and symbols of its past. .
All the factors and physical structures of the environment should not be thought of as something dry and soulless, but they have their roots in the states and thoughts of the ancestors of that society. . In fact, history is the intellectual evolution of a society and this evolution affects their structures .
3- The way and type of using the environment :
The design and arrangement of the components should be such that the people who use that environment can easily access all the facilities. . In a close look at a landscape, if principles have been followed in its architecture, one can understand the occupation, age, physical condition, etc. of its users from the placement of its components. The participants in that plan have been considered .
What is certain is that along with the passage of time and changes in the society's thoughts, the factors affecting the culture and structures of that society also have an effect. . Certainly, a design from a few centuries ago is different from today's design in terms of the method of execution and the way the components are arranged, and this is the result of the culture ruling at that time and the history of the society, so it is appropriate for designers to create a lasting and innovative design from different aspects. identify the society and its people, in other words, it is a successful plan that has been paid attention to from the cultural and sociological aspects. .
Head of culture fountain :
Every culture is a reflection of the value system of a social system, in the comprehensive sense of the word, it can be said that knowledge and art are representations of these manifestations, while knowledge is moving in a highly rational direction and deals only with human consciousness, art is something perceptive. which deals with feeling .
With the help of science, man tries to improve his position in the battle with natural forces, he uses fire to protect himself from the cold and improve food. ….
But today ( Almost a hundred years ago ) This is no longer the case, because scientific works have become so complicated that it is no longer understandable to anyone. On the other side of the coin, the non-rational or emotional side of culture is as old as the scientific side, but since we are dealing with a sensory process, which is neither measurable nor easily definable, so we cannot reconstruct its evolution step by step, the progress and evolution of science and art had a common progress for a long time. Also, in the world of perception and feeling, they had similar and equivalent phenomena and became a part of art . In the 19th century, the ways of knowledge and art were separated and the relationship between the methods of reasoning and the methods of feeling was broken .
Today's tension between architect and accountant should also be considered as the result of this disconnection, Gideon has a lot of emphasis on feeling, which according to him is being paid attention to as it should be. . Only a truly comprehensive culture can create the ground for the maturity of a unity in feeling .
We can examine the stages of the development of science relatively carefully, everyone can experience an invention like the wheel or Gutenberg's printing method once again, but where is the source of art, which is the second bed of culture?
The main characteristic of even the first organized human societies was their religious customs . Probably, gradually, some of these customs and rituals were abandoned and replaced by objects that had symbolic value. . Another type of experience had replaced these customs and these objects were the beginning of art .
These objects have found symbolic meanings and in other words, they are considered a language . Adore No Me Good : Art wants to give reality to non-human expressions with human means . Louis Kahn even believes : The art of tahana is the real language of man, because tahana is a tool that tries to establish a relationship between humans, and thus its humanity is visible. They are not considered works of art in any way ( Today, we call many of these works as works of art, while they are only works of art ) .In the same way, the first buildings that are no longer built simply for the protection of man from nature, but are symbolic works, and their form and structure have only religious content. .
Hans Moline believes that even today, architecture is a matter of mirroring, building is a human need, and this need does not show itself only in raising a roof over the head, but rather in creating a mirrored building, that is, a center for human activities, which is the main point of every city. We see it, making is a mirror work .
Substituting a new experience for the work that Ernst Kries calls the aesthetic dream, according to Freud, as it was said, is at the beginning of culture. .
Undoubtedly, art had a stronger social aspect before the independence of the individual from the society. The declaration of the independence of art from the society is a function of the bourgeois way of thinking about freedom, which of course is also related to the structure of the society. . As long as art has been in the service of religion, the creators of these works have remained unknown, until when the creation of an artwork found an independent value and became an independent profession, the name of the artist was removed.. The separation of the work of art from its purely constitutional content has been done little by little but step by step and with strength. This separation has occurred twice in the advanced western cultures, the first time in the Greek culture before Christianity and then in the Renaissance period. We know the builders of some Egyptian buildings, but the names of the builders of medieval masterpieces are unknown to us .
Architecture as a bed for culture:
Every society with every system that is governed and every type of ideology that governs it has its own goals and ideals, the main task of culture is to express these mental ideas and through objective forms in the process, this transformation plays a fundamental role in architecture. He is responsible for Hermann Motsius, one of the first theories of the German Word Bund in the year 1911 He writes like this :
Architecture has been and is the real means of a nation's culture, when a nation can build beautiful sofas and chandeliers, but builds the worst buildings every day, it indicates the chaotic and dark situation of that society, a situation that, in total, The orderliness and lack of organizational power of that nation is proven . Every building, as a part of the architectural culture, has the duty to objectify this mental thought through its external form, and thus it will be a manifestation to measure this culture. Is .
Ma'ari is a spiritual discipline that is embodied in the building, they often try to avoid this responsibility under the pretext that this building was built only for a certain function, here they forget that every building is built for a purpose. which is only because of architecture does not exist at all, in this way, every building is a cultural witness, whether in a good sense or in a bad sense. .
This is how Sigmund Freud defines culture :
Culture is a collection of all the abilities and tools that separate our lives from the lives of our animal ancestors and serves two purposes: protecting humans from nature and regulating human relationships. . In explaining the actions that are related to the first part, Freud mentions building a dwelling in addition to using tools and controlling fire, but culture is not only about the function of something, such as trying to achieve what is beautiful. It is also a part of the culture, with the establishment, a military culture was found that sought to create a balance between individual and social demands.(In sociology, social life is studied in two different ways, and who means whether ((Individual life in society )) and includes all human social activities (Economic, political …) is, another in a special sense that mostly includes mutual relations between people and class relations of people ) According to Freud, this system is based on ignoring the instinct and its inevitable result is the limitation of individual freedom. . Refinement of these repressed instincts has been one of the most important factors in the formation of culture, and repressed and refined instincts have been the primary motivation for any kind of religious, ideological, scientific or artistic activity. .
These three factors existed in a balanced way for a long time, and this balance has caused a kind of harmony. Gradually, religion and ideology became the main structure, the overall system, ruling over everything, science and technology were related to reason, and art was related. emotional
This system, which defines human mutual relations and traces the basis of culture, is based on a value system. This system is not fixed over time, what we call architectural style is actually a regular system of this system. It is a value and as a result a manifestation of the overall ruling system .
It is in this way that with the change of ideology, knowledge and art, the style also changes . Otto Wagner in this case in the year 1875 May Noised : Each new style is gradually born from the heart of the previous styles, the reason for this development is nothing but the fact that the change of building techniques, building materials, human tasks and finally people's worldview forces them to create new forms. .
The 19th century was the century of the industrial revolution, and as a result of the belief in new techniques in this period, rational thinking developed in such a way that it left no room for the world of emotions. . It is natural that this article had a strong impact on architecture, ignoring some exceptions that were related to technology, we see that the 19th century was a century of innovation, Siegfried Gideon says about this. : The arts were banished to a closed and special world that was no longer related to people's lives, the result was that the integration of art and life was lost and life lost its balance, while science and industry were advancing day by day. The confident ones were moving forward. In a closed world, we witnessed ups and downs from one end to another every day. .
The art of architecture, unlike the art of pure painting, is not a pure art, architecture is a mixture of knowledge and art, and for the same reason, architecture always goes back and forth between the two poles of reason and feeling, architecture is influenced by the ideology ruling the society from time to time. to the other side. goes and as a result the architectural style also shows the same changes, under the influence of the technical excellence and extraordinary aesthetic qualities of the automobile and shipbuilding industries of the decades. 1920 Le Corbusier shouted that architecture is suffocating in its old fashion !!! Or is it just a profession so dull that the progress in it is not without effect and in it the life of yesterday is still going on . Architecture and automobiles are similar in general, but the intense competition between all these automobile factories obliges each of them to strive for success in this great competition. . It is like that they have to look for a goal higher than evolution, they must create something that not only meets the practical needs, but something beyond that and the result of this search is that now not only evolution and harmony They achieved that they also found beauty . This is how style is created, that is, an achievement approved by everyone in which everyone sees perfection. . And finally, in rejecting the styles that were common at that time, he says; The art of architecture is a pious style, the styles of Louis XIV and XVI and even the Gothic style are to architecture what a hairpin is to a lady, sometimes it can be used and it is beautiful, but only that and nothing more.!!!
Turning your back on absolute technique and absolute lack of confidence in knowledge and that too on a wide level in the decade 1960 We witnessed that the unrest at the end of this decade was not only a social political unrest, but also a wave against rational thinking and against ignoring feelings, the logical result of this turning away from the existing ideological valuation system was a general change of direction in architecture as it happened; The post-modern style replaced the modern style, another sign of this change in the general direction and towards the world of feeling is that art museums were built everywhere at the same time..
On the one hand, culture has influenced architecture, which is a diagram of the ruling value system, and gives it form, and on the other hand, culture is indirectly one of the main foundations of human psychological life, human perception of the environment that surrounds and around him. His creation is subject to his culture, but often not enough attention is paid to this matter. An interesting example in this case is the relationship between man and urban spaces in England on the one hand and in the eastern kingdoms on the other hand, an Englishman from the middle class and in a He lives in a single-family house overlooking a small garden. For this person, living in a dense neighborhood in Cairo or Damascus with that population density is unimaginable. The average amount of space needed to live in these two cases is not comparable. This need has cultural roots
And it depends on the person's ideas about the fit between his body and his ego. The ego of an Englishman goes beyond his body. .
But the ego of an Arab is inside his body, contacting him does not mean violating his private environment, living in a group in a small space, as is customary in many Arab countries, does not mean limiting his ego in any way. .
With a careful study, the differences in these cases increase, the use of sensory receptors in different cultural environments are different and each of them has its own characteristics, the use of the sense of smell in the western world under the influence of different types of sprays and others Interferences in its nature have been neutralized, but compare this situation, for example, with an eastern market, where the perception of smells is one of the main parts of the perception of the environment. Linguists have come to the conclusion that even language can be effective in the process of perception of the environment. be .
Edward Hall also believes like Woof (( Apart from the process, the perception of the environment by humans, if we want to use a modern term, is programmed by the language that speaks, just like a computer is programmed. ))
Here too, the human brain, like a computer, records and examines the received facts if they match the pre-given program, for example, in the language of philosophy of the Hui Indians who live in Arizona, there is a word that means time. No, in relation to the place, this means that for them the place has no time dimension, they see the place only in relation to the present time. – They know and the mental concept of place has no meaning for them .
Article by Mr. Taslimi (Bachelor of Architecture)
