blue in architecture: water civilisations and climate change.

blue in architecture: water civilisations and climate change.

topic
Blue in
architecture:
water
civilisations
and climate
change.
author | affiliation
Albrecht Benno
Università IUAV di Venezia, Venice, Italy
The end of the glaciations of Würm, the great
Flood of which all the ancestral traditions bear
the scar, enters a life of stability and water is
directly connected to the continuation of the
human occupation of the natural environment
and, as a result, architecture 1.
The hypothesis of paleoclimatologist William
Ruddiman 2 shows that climatic cycles 3 that
describe the effects of the periodical variations
4
of the earth’s movement on glaciations and
the earth’s climate, have been affected by
the presence of humans, particularly by the
development of farming. It was the discovery
of farming that gave rise to a sequence
of micro climatic changes, triggering the
mechanism leading to the consequences
that we see today. The birth of the concept of
design began with farming.
Humans created a new artificial environment
- to their need and benefit - where they could
grow plants and breed animals. The view that
had to this point characterised the history of
humankind was suddenly shaken up: the
inseparability of the human world with the
natural and animal world. Humans could
now be considered to be in a different
and dominant position compared to other
creatures: they chose the species suitable for
cultivation and breeding, they prepared the
land by deforestation and procuring water,
they transformed the inanimate world of
the landscape, the shape of places, with
method and constancy. The adventurous
duty of “forcing nature” began, which in
religion is sometimes considered a title of
superiority or a transgression to atone.
Humans began to live close to the water or
else, they had to transport water or dig down
into the earth to bring the water closer to
them. For this reason, in the pre-industrial
age, they needed to exploit the forces of
nature, gravity and pressure, in order to
transport the water closer to their places
of residence and towards the farms. It was
the range of the aqueducts, the capacity of
the qanāt 5, the richness and depth of the
artisan aquifers, which would determine
the location of human settlements and
the quantity of food that it was possible to
cultivate and harvest in any given territory.
The sacredness of water, springs and rivers
found in all cultures is the result of how
important they are for life. “Water, according
to Thales of Miletus, would be the start of all
things and the community of humankind”
points out Leon Battista Alberti in Book X of
De re aedificatoria 6 where he analyses the
virtues, the potential and the dangers linked
to water, and that without water everything
we know in the world would disappear.
Alberti adds that dignified Spartan kings
were given the right to have a section of
water on the doorstep of their house: “this
demonstrates just how much consideration
was given to water by our ancestors” 7.
It is clear that water and architecture go
hand in hand and that this relationship has
to be managed with care and attention.
1
blue in architecture 09_
PROCEEDINGS_IUAV Digital Library
notes
unstoppable progress of technology.
In the age of necessary sustainability,
architecture is the collective discipline of
assuming responsibility for the physical Care,
for the defence of architecture, interpreting
the results and causes of transformation
phenomena.
Care means being interested in something,
participating in it in an emotional way and
without requiring something in return, caring
about the needs of others, being collectively
concerned about something. Care is a
term that carries the meaning of planning,
calculating, predicting and planning towards
the future to improve the present. To care is
an action that constantly evolves. We care or
worry about the future so that we do not miss
out on any opportunity that was given to us in
the past 8. Care is a technique of immanence.
In Islamic culture, humans have to care for
the world as if it were a garden. The flow of
divine Grace, the barakah, has at its base
nature represented as a global garden where
the hand of the Creator is always visible, it is
His mirror, and humans are the temporary
guardians. It is a culture of parsimony, of
the conscious use of resources, hardened by
the arid climate and the lack of water and
unfolds within social solidarity and a group
conscience.
Care for water, for its hydrological cycle, can
be a way to measure sustainable activity. We
are aware of the fragility of humans in relation
to the rhythm of nature; humans and nature
have two separate rhythms that we perceive
now as increasingly compromised due to the
Angkor, the enormous city of water, capital
of the Khmer kingdom, is an individual
episode which should be used as reference
in the race, and the defeat, of humans to
compete with the cyclical phenomena of
the climate and the natural landscape. In
Cambodia, the concept of the mandala
materialises on an urban and topographic
scale, beyond the extreme threshold
of visual perception. Vāstu Śāstra is the
ancient Indian system of rules for design
and construction and it aspires to establish
a balanced relationship between Shape and
Energy, in order to create harmonic and
organic living conditions, where the forces
of nature and the lives of human beings are
balanced and in peace with one another.
In the Veda, Purana and Agama cultures, the
microcosm and macrocosm are reflections
of each other, they influence each other and
they follow the same path with the same
destination. This thought echoes within a
millennia-old tradition where the forces of
the earth, the movement of the sun and its
rays, the multiple rotations and oscillations
on the earth’s axis, the water cycles and
the direction of winds, the influx of the
earth’s magnetism and nature in general
become an integral and determining part
of the rules of design. Just as the Prana, vital
energy, flows inside our bodies in Yoga, the
Vāstu Śāstra is the way to act to direct the
Prana into the building.
Mandala, meaning shape, vital cycle,
represents a psycho-cosmogram and Vatsu-
Purusha, Place, Being, is the spirit of the
place, the Being of the Vastu, which unites
the Environment, Energy and the Horoscope
giving a total balance; it is a permanent
shape set in a reality that is presumed to
be unstable and unwilling. The concept
thus defined covers any type of object,
from the hermit’s shelter to the temple, the
city, the territory which is recognised as a
subject of the celestial law. In reference to
this dependency, the many examples of
concrete shapes is never thinned out or
standardised.
On the architectural scale, the potential
universality of the mandala is nearly
translated into practice by an immense
multitude of variations. The architectural
tradition of India takes on the characteristics
of a widely pronounced classicism which
can be found in Ceylon, Burma, Indo-China,
Indonesia: the variegated block that the
Europeans called “the Indies” in the 15th
century. The earlier concepts were perhaps
the settlements of the Gange-Delta,
the monasteries of Paharpur or Shalban
from the 8th century, today Bangladesh,
from where the expeditions towards
the East would begin by land or by sea.
The dagoba of Ceylon, at Anurādhapura
and Polonnaruwa, the 10,000 temples of
the Pagan plain, in Burma, Sukhothai in
Thailand, My Son in Viet Nam, interpret
and vary the Indian conceptual model in
the most surprising way, just like the Candi
Borobudur in Indonesia.
Borobudur (8th century) today rises up
1. For a general overview, please see Benno Albrecht, Leonardo Benevolo, “Le origini dell’architettura”, Laterza edition, Bari, 2002.
2. William F. Ruddiman, L’aratro, la peste, il petrolio: l’impatto umano sul clima, Milan: Bocconi University 2007, which takes its title from the fortunate book of
Jared Diamond. I have to warn you that Ruddiman’s thesis is criticised by many parties.
3. The theory of the Serbian engineer and geophysician Milutin Milankovitch (1879-1958) is described in the famous Milutin Milankovitch, Kanon der
Erdbestrahlung und seine Anwendung auf das Eiszeitenproblem, 1941, Koniglich Serbische Akademie.
4. The hidden effects of these cycles on mythology and human culture are described by Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechend, Il mulino di Amleto: saggio
sul mito e sulla strutture del tempo - Milan: Adelphi, 1984.
5. William B. Hemsley, The qanat: an ancient water supply, University of California at Berkeley, Environmental Water Resources, 1994
6. Leon Battista Alberti, L’Architettura (De re aedificatoria) (1966), X, 2-13 pp. 880-978, even if it is entitled, “Il restauro degli edifici” (restoration of buildings), an
argument that also comes up, it is mostly centred on the topic of water use
plenary session
2
Albrecht Benno
notes
from the densely populated countryside of
the Javanese Garden, an entirely designed
area, symbol of a cultivated environmental
and water culture near Yojakarta, in Central
Java 9.
The Candi Borobudur monument is an
artificial mountain which is approximately
34 metres tall in the Kedu plain where there
are other temples aligned with it, and is today
surrounded by a landscape of rice fields and a
community of villages each specialising in a
different material and intellectual production,
ranging from the production of tofu
(Tanjungsari) to ceramics (Tuksongo), but also
one specialising in language (Ngargogondo),
perhaps the legacy of the ancient widespread
and sectorial colonisation of the plain.
Borobudur was on an island or more probably
on a peninsula overlooking a lake 10 . The
square-shaped temple mountain, with a side
of 113 metres, was reflected in the water. The
geometric and dimensional limitations of
the mandala is required to compare it with
the dwellings. The different duration alone
provides an absolute distinction between the
sacred and the profane and sacrifices the idea
of the city to a sense of unbridgeable disparity
between heaven and earth, but at the same
time it designs a landscape of life, between
water and the earth, which is something
entirely new and unusual.
Borobudur, in Indonesia, precedes the
experience of Angkor, in Cambodia, and the
relationships and similarities are obvious.
The economy of the Khmer kingdom between
the 9th and 13th centuries was based on the
intensive cultivation of rice on the plain of
the Mekong River. Angkor, from the Sanskrit
nagari, pronounced nakor, literally “city”, is
located not far from Tonlé Sap, the great lake
which floods with the return of the Mekong
River. During the monsoon season of the
south-east, the river cannot flow into the
sea and creates a wave that flows upstream
once again. The upstream wave follows
the current along thousands of kilometres
and seasonally multiplies the surface of the
lake by nearly 7 times. The Bon Om Tuk, the
festival of water, is still celebrated today
to recognise the floodwaters changing
direction towards the sea, the “reversal of
the waters”.
To dominate this particular water and
climatic phenomena, the Khmer designers’
idea was to build great artificial basins
surrounded by high embankments, baray,
which contain and manage the flow of the
water and can provide water throughout
the entire year.
Their conformation, on a uniform slope
from north to south with one very long
side resting on a contour line and the
other side raised approximately 12 metres
from ground level, is necessary to store
the water reservoir required to irrigate the
downstream cultivations.
The complex water system, a vast network
of canals, embankments, moats, distribution
drains and reserve basins, provided water to
the city and its vast suburbs; an extended
and widespread urbanisation of low
intensity with an estimated population of
750,000 people.
The monumental complexes denote the
many service centres of a population spread
out over a large territory which would have
been inside the mind of the geographical
mandala 11.
The architectural invention was to
incorporate the baray into the city’s
landscape. The capital, Angkor, has two
colossal baray, 2.2 by 8 kilometres to the west,
Western Baray, and the Yashodharatatāka,
o Eastern Baray, 1.8 by 7.5 kilometres, to the
east, with the East Mebon temple island in
the centre which is the only construction for
which we know the name of the architect:
Kavindrarimathana. The third is Jayatatāka,
3 kilometres by 900 metres, which supplied
the Preah Khan complex, with the temple
island of Neak Pean in the centre, where
the stretches of water are located on
many platform levels of the water temple.
The fourth great baray of Indratatāka, 3.8
kilometres by 900 metres, irrigated the plain
of the city of Hariharālya, with the group of
Roluos temples, 12 kilometres to the south
of Angkor.
The baray would collect the rivers and
the monsoon rains upstream and would
feed a canal network downstream, which
in turn were very large, with the widths
ranging from 50 to 100 metres, to divide
the various zones of the city and identify
the relevant areas of the temple mountain
islands. The overwhelming obstruction of
the baray meant that a constant direction
had to be maintained and the city
7. Leon Battista Alberti, L’Architettura (De re aedificatoria) (1966), X, 2, pp. 880 - 882, cfr. Aristotle, Met, I,3,983,b,20. and Xenophon, Hist. Graeca, IV, 2, II.
8. For the concept of Care, see Luisella Battaglia, Alle origini dell’etica ambientale: uomo, natura, animali in Voltaire, Michelet, Thoreau, Gandhi , Dedalo editions,
2002, pp. 196-200.
9. The Buddhist monument has its counter altar in the Hindu temple complex of Prambanan (9th century).
10. Murwanto, H.; Gunnell, Y; Suharsono, S.; Sutikno, S. and Lavigne, F (2004). “Borobudur monument (Java, Indonesia) stood by a natural lake: chronostratigraphic
evidence and historical implications”. The Holocene 14 (3): 459–463.
Luis O. Gómez and Hiram W. Woodward, Jr. (1981). Barabudur: History and Significance of a Buddhist Monument. Berkeley: Univ. of California.
Diane L. Evans, Tom G. Farr, The Use of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar ( InSAR) in Archeological Investigations and Cultural Heritage Preservation, in
James Wiseman, Farouk El-Baz , Remote sensing in archaeology, Springer, 2007, pag. 89 – 102.
11. Damian Evans, Christophe Pottier, Roland Fletcher, Scott Hensley, Ian Tapley, Anthony Milne, and Michael Barbetti, A comprehensive archaeological map of
3
plenary session
Albrecht Benno
notes
became an immense combination of fences,
approximately 25 by 10 kilometres that used
the “temple mountains” as geometric centres
and points of perspectives. The temples then
lost their feature as singular constructions;
they connected to one another and organised
themselves into a magnitude of sequences.
The water, a resource collected for agricultural
irrigation, was also symbolic; it became a
defence system populated by crocodiles and
an architectural feature that multiplied the
length of the views, like the European parks
of the 17th and 18th centuries. Some temples
were reflected in the water along the baray,
and the baray themselves were treated as
architectural pieces that characterised the
city of water.
We can imagine the geometry of the urban
area extended as far as the eye can see from
the grid of surrounding rice fields, within the
complex network of canals and embankments,
channelled in the same direction to provide
water. This extraordinary scene was not to
last. The complexity of the water settlement
system made it rigid and fragile against any
change.
The droughts caused by the Niño effect, the
warm climate phase, and the Niña effect, the
cold phase, of the first half of the 14th century
and the 15th century, a problem already
noted by Maurice Glaize in 1944 12, are today
documented and puts the regulatory efforts
of the Khmer engineers into crisis 13.
It was impossible to stop the reservoirs from
silting up and the productive impoverishment
left the kingdom open to invasions by
surrounding enemies. The Khmer cities
were abandoned in the 15th century,
excavated and reassembled later by the
French archaeologists of Henri Marchal.
André Malraux, a prominent figure, stole
some bas-reliefs from the temple and
following this, the cities were abandoned
once again during World War I and II,
weakened once again by the troops of
the Khmer Rouge of the Brother Number
1. Perhaps the tumultuous return of mass
tourism will definitively change this daring,
but unsuccessful, human attempt.
For six centuries, the city of water was
functional but it was defeated by a
meteorological and climatic event. The
architecture and engineering of a centralised
hierarchical society were the victim and
they succumbed.
The case of Angkor is not unique and
its climatic collapse gives it something
in common with the fate of other urban
agglomerates; the studies 14 conducted by
archaeologists and climate physicians show
the close relationship between the crisis of
ancient civilisations and climate change,
phenomena that together form a collection
of human and natural causes 15.
The climatic collapse is documented in the
fertile crescent of Akkadian Mesopotamia
16
, in the arid canyons in the south west of
USA, inhabited by the Anazazi peoples 17 ,
in the equatorial forests of Central America,
the land of the Maya culture 18, in the desert
coast of north Peru where the Huacas of the
Moche were located and in the Andes, on
the banks of Lake Titicaca in Tiwanaku.
The most recent knowledge learnt about
the climate catastrophes of the water
civilisations bring to light the classic studies
of Karl August Wittfogel 19. Wittfogel had
noted the birth of centralised and organised
power, and its physical translation into the
construction of cities or in realising grand
widespread urban sprawls had developed in
the water societies, in Egypt, Mesopotamia,
India, China and in the pre-Columbian
cultures of Mexico and Peru, where survival
revolved around the conscious use of
water and required very large coordinated
efforts.
Strangely, the great water cultures, efficient
in transforming a given environment, were
in reality very fragile and did not give
working responses to dynamic climate
change, despite their technical skills. The
organised and centralised power, regardless
of how sophisticated it was, was not able to
adapt and was not resilient to the changing
conditions of the physical environment.
The past gives us two disturbing examples
and sincere doubts on the real ability of
humans to respond to such structural
changes, whether they be caused by
cyclical phenomena of nature or caused
and multiplied by the irrational behaviour
of complex human societies.
Angkor, in Asia, has its twin city in Europe:
Venice. They are the two largest cities of the
Middle Ages of their respective continents
and they are two water cities, a reference
for vast territories. The difference, to our
the world’s largest preindustrial settlement complex at Angkor, Cambodia, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 104, Number 36.
12. The classic guide written by the Angkor superintendent Maurice Glaize, published in Saigon in 1944, Les Monuments du groupe d’Angkor, republished in
Paris, 2005, J.Maisonneuve, page 4.
13. Buckley, B.M.; Anchukaitis, K.J; Penny, D.; Fletcher, R; Cook, E.R.; Sano, M.; Nam, L.C; Wichienkeeo, A.; Minh, T.T.; Hong, T.M. Climate as a contributing factor in
the demise of Angkor, Cambodia, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 107, Number 15.
14. Nuzhet Dalfes, George Kukla, Harvey Weiss Third Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World Collapse, NATO ASI Series, Vol I 49, Springer-Verlag Berlin
Heidelberg 1997. Harvey Weiss, (2001-01-26). What Drives Societal Collapse?. Science 291, pp.609–610.
Peter B. De Menocal (2001) Cultural responses to climate change during the late Holocene.
Science 292:667–673.
15. Joseph A.Tainter, The collapse of complex societies, Cambridge University Press, 1988. Jered Diamond, Collasso, come le società scelgono di morire o vivere,
Torino, 2005, Einaudi Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill The Collapse of ancient states and civilizations, Tucson, The University of Arizona, c1988
plenary session
4
Albrecht Benno
notes
good fortune, is that one has collapsed and
the other has not.
Venice was founded by an intervention of
humans who deliberately and paradoxically
wanted to render a place out of the ordinary
as habitable, somewhere usually not suitable
to be populated, a city “founded on the
impossible”, a salty lagoon of surfacing sand
behind the sea. The fragile physical scenario
made of water and earth, of buildings and
boats, is completely humanised and is
“supported” thanks to daily works, an eternal
care, an uninterrupted human enterprise,
without which it would irreparably run into
ruin. The city is actually only the centre of a
very wide territory designed for its survival.
It is an environment that must conserve an
amphibian nature, an undefined aspect that
is somewhere halfway between water and
land, on which the life of the city depends.
To maintain and model such a particular
environment, Italian engineers divert rivers,
they dig canals, they reinforce the strips of
land that separates the Lagoon from the sea,
they identify a series of legislative measures
to maintain the artificial integrity of the
amphibian system 20.
The term “maintenance” is reductive and
does not fully describe the historical urban
planning enterprise of the Venetians. This care
for the vast Venetian amphibian environment
requires persistent invention, adaptation and
continual planning that must deal with the
evolution of history and the physical, climatic,
social and cultural transformations.
The physical balance was linked to the
domestic political interests of the city-state,
the connection point between the Stato da
Tera (Land State) and the Stato da Màr (Sea
State), and its impregnable nature, which
would see their demise after the Treaty of
Campo Formio. Care, the collective interest
politically invested in the Republic, was
then subject to international interests that
led the territory and the city of water to
breaking point.
The distance between the domestic and
international interests in the geography
of the amphibian lagoon territory, the
bio-region with Venice at the centre,
clearly shows that the system of Care is
complex, involving inhabitants, cultures
and traditional customs, obliging us and
pushing us towards collective responsibility
in the use of territorial transformation
techniques.
A continual territorial planning enterprise,
based on the coordinated work of a
regional community, is put to the test
when international interests become
more important, corroding the domestic
coordinated efforts. The particular nature
of Venice as a city of water cannot survive
integration with the international world.
This risk, already run in the past and only
partially curbed by “conservation policies”,
is faced today with a new and very big
problem, added to the wrong thinking of
the recent past: that of the unrelenting and
proven change in the planet’s environmental
climate.
The amphibian water territory, even if it
were “maintained”, would find itself in crisis
due to the conditions changing all around it,
for which it was not designed or planned.
This territory must face up to long-term
forecasts and dynamic needs, which do not
offer any certainties to grasp hold of, and
which must be responded to with flexible
sustainable adaptation strategies which
aim to solve this condition conceptually
and practically.
Care should be deferred and projected
towards an uncertain future that opens
up different scenarios and the direct
consequence falls on the decision-making
systems and the design techniques.
The challenges of tomorrow involve
updating the environment, conserving the
history of the Western world and designing
new tropical cities, where the majority
of the planet’s urban population will be
concentrated and which may grow out
of proportion in the near future. Over the
next two decades, the cities of developing
countries will absorb 95% of the planet’s
urban expansion, places where water
supply is decisive 21.
The problem of the relationship between
architecture, resources, the water system
and climate change, becomes essential.
The examples of Venice, Angkor and the
water civilisations show that care must
be flexible and must adapt, they must be
16. H.M.Cullen , P.B.de Menocal, S.Hemming , G.Hemming , F.H.Brown, T.Guilderson, F.Sirocko Climate change and the collapse of the Akkadian empire:
Evidence from the deep sea. Geology, 2000, n. 28, pagg.379–382. See the studies of Arie Issar, such as Climate changes during the Holocene and their impact
on hydrological systems, Cambridge: Cambridge University, c2003. Arie Issar, Mattanyah Zohar Climate change: environment and civilization in the Middle East,
Springer, 2004. Rifiorirà il deserto: uno scienziato, una profezia, Rome: Di Renzo, [2004]
17. Andrew Ellicott Douglass had already published in 1929, The secret of the Southwest solved by talkative tree rings. National Geographic Magazine 56(6):
736-770.
Edward R. Cook,Richard Seager,Richard R. Heim Jr,Russell S. Vose,Celine Herweijer3 And Connie Woodhouse, Megadroughts in North America: placing IPCC,
projections of hydroclimatic change in a long-term palaeoclimate context, Journal of Quaternary Science (2010) 25(1) 48–61.
18. Gerald H. Haug, Detlef Günther,Larry C. Peterson,Daniel M. Sigman,Konrad A. Hughen, Beat Aeschlimann, (2003) Climate and the collapse of Maya civilization.
Science 299:1731–1735. David L Webster,The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse, Thames and Hudson, 2002. Arthur Demarest,
Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pag. 240-276.
5
plenary session
Albrecht Benno
notes
enlarged to scale and mentally embrace
a planet which must, and continue to be,
inhabitable.
A new way of feeling and new technical
skills are essential. Education on prudence is
required, the near phrónesis, the virtue of the
right action, the practical wisdom of Aristotle
that overcomes the technical knowledge
and “looks to improve the assets made by
humans by calculation” 22. Architecture takes
on (perhaps even once again) a new founding
ethical value and is responsible for the different
trust-based relationship between human
actions and nature and can be summarised
in the saying “you must, therefore you do,
therefore you can”. 23 This responsibility,
a public ethic based on prudence and
conservation, unfolds across a long period of
time. The care to be taken today for “future
generations” has value, which is one of the
theories underlying sustainability policies.
It means perhaps sacrificing something of
the present in view of the possibilities of the
future and has to move from “the ecstasy of
ever increasing needs and satisfying them
without limit” to return to “a level that is
compatible with the environment” 24 .
Perhaps the Annunciation of catastrophe tells
us not only that order was disturbed 25 , but
also that order wants, and will always want, to
be re-established.
19. Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental despotism: a comparative study of total power, New Haven, Yale University Press, c1957, translated into Italian in Il dispotismo
orientale, Florence, Vallecchi,1968
20. Piero Bevilacqua Venezia e le acque: una metafora planetaria, Donzelli Editore, 1995.
21. UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/7 - SOWC/06/07/B/Urb1
22. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 8, 1141 b 13.
23. Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung, of 1979, translated into Italian in Il principio responsabilità , un’etica per la civiltà tecnologica, 1990, Turin, Giulio
Einaudi ed. page 160.
24. Hans Jonas, Sull’orlo dell’abisso, Conversazioni sul rapporto tra uomo e natura, edited by Paolo Becchi, Turin, 2000, Einaudi, pag. 4
25. Ernst Jünger, Al muro del tempo, 2000, Milan, Adelphi ed. pp 153 – 165
plenary session
6
Albrecht Benno
notes