“A House Is a Machine for Living In”

This uninspired practice inevitably reduces architecture to an empty gesture, an act of accumulating building blocks, whether logically ordered or haphazardly made, an activity that can be performed without the need for architects and rather solely by developers and even AI!

Thus, it’s fair to say that neither the traditionalist nor the modernist continues to exist in the classical sense of these terms. Rather, both have metamorphosed into reduced versions of themselves, leaving civic aspiration to roam in search of a new definition of “progress.” Although today’s arguments tend to claim that we have passed into a post-style era in which modernity is no longer defined in opposition to tradition, having now become a radicalized, “high,” or “liquid”² modernity, the binary comparison between the traditional and the modern is still very much at the core of our collective architectural debates, even if only through the shadows of their original meanings.

The reason for that lies within the paradigm of modernity in which methodical Cartesian doubt has substituted subjective relativism for the certainty of divine truth. In this modern world, so-called traditional building styles, which once were genuine embodiments of worldviews that championed higher values, have become mere rote replicas of products of the past––in other words, kitsch.

Moreover, modernity, which sets out from a need to break from any affiliation with the past, has defined its own relevance in terms of being disruptive and discontinuous. Consequently, we find ourselves in all areas of culture in a stalemate between the wall of kitsch and the spiral of emptiness.

One of the immediate results of the modern paradigm shift is that beauty is no longer understood as an absolute value like goodness but is rather considered to be entirely subjective. Perhaps it was possible for philosophers like Kant to rescue beauty from the abolitionist depths of rationalism, yet for architects, and consequently for the rest of the public who do not always have the time or the tools to disentangle the subject, beauty and aesthetics, with all the human values they had the power to preserve, have been sacrificed at the altar of misleading notions such as progress and success.

The City as a Factory

The reason these notions are misleading is not because of what they are in and of themselves but rather because of how they are defined by modernity. Progress, considered of value simply by virtue of being new and different, is part of the rat race in modern society, where alienation and the pathologies of loneliness and boredom have become the norm. The infamous analogy made by Le Corbusier, “A house is a machine for living in,” sums up modernity’s view of what used to be the most intimate aspect of the human sphere. It is a declaration that no longer is anything pertaining to our being free from the dogma of the Factory. In the same way, the success of the city is constantly evaluated according to how well the city’s gears rotate smoothly: trains arriving on time, traffic flowing without backups, infrastructure functioning as expected, and so on. If, however, this is indeed success, then how do we reconcile it with all the crises that riddle modern societies, from high living costs and lack of affordable housing to suicide, drug use, and mental illness?

To see all these phenomena connected is not an overstretch; in my book Building for Hope, I discuss what I term the “Factory system,” which is the product of the industrialization that dominated all aspects of life in the aftermath of the two world wars. In analyzing that system, I look at the city through the lens of five main human fears: death, need, treachery, loneliness, and boredom. Science (and consequently industrialization) isn’t a knowledge-seeking tool anymore; it has turned into a tool of domination of a new worldview, a new system that wishes to leave nothing out of the domain of man-made certainty, a certainty with no God. Critical theorists talk about the sense of disenchantment that evidence-based modernity has brought. And we use the same approach when we talk about buildings today. Ironically, the evidence indeed shows that human beings are subjects of abuse by modern buildings. We struggle to maintain our levels of productivity and security in an increasingly out-of-control world. We are surrounded by fear in place of love, and this directly has to do with how we choose to define the success of the places we build and live in. Even with our best intentions, spaces are still treated as living labs in our scientific pursuit of best outcomes, where people can ideally socialize, live, and inevitably spend money!

The Price of Place

There is no shortage of rigorous research on city planning and placemaking. However, the conflict between the two types of style still persists across the research field, leading to no satisfying resolution. Traditionalists claim that because they rely on “successful” idioms, they have more relevance to people’s collective aspirations, and in consequence, aesthetic choices, and so ultimately deserve their funds. Modernists, on the other hand, believe that their sweeping effect in postwar rebuilding qualifies them to hold the baton to direct what comes next. They shrug off the grievances of the public, who find themselves estranged from a world built solely for profit. Today, as we try to build in times riddled with cost-of-living and housing crises, arguments concerning beauty and moral relevance can quickly be detoured into a checklist of performance criteria, with any other values dismissed as subjective. Restricting an argument to subjectivity and technicality is an evasive approach that seeks to fill the void left by the dismantling of a unifying worldview. For instance, the New Classical idiom advanced by architects such as Léon Krier provides an elegant form, albeit devoid of meaning precisely because it is not backed up by a reinforcing worldview that expresses a collective sentiment. Instead, these forms find their relevance in the sphere of politics, where market interests make the final call. The historic centers of European cities are a perfect example of how beautiful buildings can become shells for abandoned meanings deployed to the taste of the global elite and the demands of tourism.

Again and again, we find ourselves at an impasse where we have to choose between impoverishment of our souls and impoverishment of our pocketbooks.

The key to this problem lies beyond the Western world. In the Islamic financial system, interest-bearing loans are prohibited and corporations do not have a monopoly on people’s lives. Small businesses, which are the basis for mixed-used buildings and developments, exist naturally in the absence of the mass dominance of the loan-enabled corporate system. Against the odds, Muslim societies—for example in my own country, Syria—on the whole still abide by the rule of Islam, despite the availability of interest-bearing loans from governmental institutions. Private developers as well as members of the public undertake the endeavor of building without taking on loans and instead put up palpable funds up front. This results in two things. The first is that the projects they undertake are significantly smaller than those possible through interest-bearing loans, resulting in lower building heights at better human scales and creating more diverse economies with a greater number of players. The second is that real estate transactions happen on the plot as much as on-site; for instance, contractors may sell eight floors of a ten-story building at the beginning of the building process. The funds they get as an advance from those eight floors then gradually fund the building as it goes up, with the profit going into the building of the two remaining stories.

Let’s not focus for a minute on the lack of style in which such buildings take shape and instead see how the method possible within Islam’s interest-free system is a socially enabling power. Self-built housing, to which evidence-based research is finally awakening, is possible because the Factory hasn’t taken root in alliance with banks. The result is organic, diverse societies whose freedom is not taken away in the name of progress. This image is tarnished by the colonial legacy that systematically sought to deconstruct all the financial and social networks and structures that used to sustain an organically free and mutually collaborative model of work. It is also the reason why style is a contested matter lost along with the definition of self in post-colonial regions. Modernization was the pretense under which Islamic institutions like the waqf (charitable endowments) were deactivated to the degree that it remains only as a nominal facade of what used to be a network of charitable funding and innovative building.

The perils of modernity are not confined to its building style; they are integral parts of its structures as a system and its values as a worldview. This individualistic and utilitarian worldview, which created an architectural norm that champions disconnection and disruption in the name of creativity, has led to three main changes in the way we define good and successful architecture. First, it engendered a culture of replacement in which nothing is so valuable that it cannot be replaced. Whether a building, a tree, or now with AI, even a human being, everything and everyone is considered a means to an end. This end is always utilitarian, which means it does not go beyond itself: there is no higher purpose and no diffusion of goodness. Perpetually self-serving, our buildings, by extension, set an example for our life goals. Second, it promoted record-breaking scale as a measure of advancement; in other words, the bigger, the better. In the race for recognition, architects and city planners (backed by their clients’ funding) aspire to ostentatious quantity rather than genuine advances in quality. Beyond the damage they do to our value system, these aspirations damage our planet, deplete its resources, and leave us blind to the cost each one of us imposes on every other. In that sense, their damage is cumulative beyond their immediate footprint as they gain followers of the same wrong type of behavior. Third, modernity elevated tourism as a measure of a city’s success: the city as an objet d’art to be enjoyed by passing strangers. Here, traditionalist buildings compete in the same race as modernist creations. Both introduce the city as a place, to use Thomas C. Oden’s term, of “narcissistic hedonism” where the above-mentioned culture of replacement and architecture of records are at play.

Comparison with Islam

Although modernism is a Western project, there are two main contradictions when it is discussed in relation to the Muslim world. The first is that, although modernity is a secular project that contradicts all of Islam’s values and convictions, the Muslim world fervently embraces it. This is partly because embracing modernity is seen as a prerequisite for success, something that the Muslim world has dearly missed since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It is inescapable that the Muslim world has failed to reassemble itself in the postcolonial era that followed that defeat, instead becoming fragmented and controlled by corrupt elites who never completely escaped the colonial project.

The second contradiction appears when we consider the twelve-century history of Islamic civilization. If modernity means innovation, progress, and advancement, then Islam is perpetually modern. Any examination of Islamic architectural styles during that long and rich history will show that Islam never settled for repetition, nor were its creations disconnected from their place, time, and history. It always built on what was already there, but was never satisfied with merely copying it. Therefore, traditional style in the Western sense is not part of the history of Islamic architecture.

Furthermore, in comparison with Western modernity, Islam’s project was never individualistic; rather, it focused on creating a healthy society of individuals, tightly knit instead of isolated. This was evident in the way Muslim cities were built, allowing for clusters to form around family structures and neighborly values. To have developer-led corporations tearing down these societies and boxing them into isolated building blocks is not only a crime against beauty and the environment but also a betrayal of history and civic stability. The sad irony is that this mistaken subscription to a false idea of progress is dismantling the city and its societies in the Muslim world at a faster rate than in the West. Whether because the postcolonial political orders in the Muslim world are autocratic and malfunctioning or because the Muslim public is outcast and besieged, planners still throw modernity upon those cities and towns as a rescue rope, although it’s proving with each passing day that it is no rescue rope, but a noose. The other alternative, a return to the old and traditional, also seems to offer no satisfaction, because it not only fails to represent society’s collective aspirations and self-image but also is, like the New Classical movement, an empty shell of meaning reduced merely to the technical value of a fading worldview and dismantled structures.

Architecture has always been a field that championed humanity’s higher values as well as men’s greatest victories. In its heydays, it was able to celebrate beauty, nature, and the best in the human being, but it was also able to idealize power and enforce hegemony. History shows us that it is in the latter where the end of civilization lies, so we owe it to ourselves and to the world to fight back against the tide of materialism and ugliness, against utility and ideology, and against counterfeit and kitsch. To build is to immortalize, and it’s up to us to choose the nature of how we build.