At the outset, I would like to congratulate Muhammad Omer Farooq, Head of Department, and his team on the publication of KNOW + 1. It is no small achievement in this digital age to bring out something tactile and portable. I hope the day never comes when publications such as these or books are condensed into the size of a mobile phone. Research, ideas and images, like architecture, need space to achieve their fullest expression.
This volume, as Omar Farooq has mentioned in his Conclusion, is the second publication by this department. In it, Omar has quoted the title of Marshall Berman’s book All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982). Marshall Berman was an American philosopher and Marxist writer. He died in 2013. He dedicated this book ‘In Memory of Marc Joseph Berman, 1975-1980’. There is a certain poignancy in this. In 1980, Marshall’s first wife threw their five year old son Marc out of their sixth-floor window and then jumped herself. The child died. She didn’t.
Often it is tragedies such as these that inspire thoughts, as the British poet William Wordsworth put it, that lie ‘too deep for tears’.
Marshall began his book on Modernism with this thesis: ‘It is a broader and more inclusive idea of modernism than those generally found in scholarly books. It implies an open and expansive way of understanding culture; very different from the curatorial approach that breaks up human activity into fragments and locks the fragments into separate cases, labeled by time, place, language, genre and academic discipline.
KNOW + 1 is an interesting application of Marshall’s approach to modernity. Its various essays are grouped under Chapter 1: Innovation, Narration and Criticism, Chapter 2: Spatial Dialogues, and Chapter 3: Built and Beyond.
In Urban Dreamscapes: The Cities of Zubeida Agha, Sumayya Hasan has written about one of our earliest modern artists Zubeida Agha.
Inevitably, for a university based in the historic city of Lahore, there are a number of pieces about the city. M.M. Jahanzeb Hanif uses the legend of Anarkali: Reimagined space. He dreams of a vertical monument – a testament to enduring love and also a vibrant cultural hub.
Iqra Laman uses Lahore as ‘An Intellectual Revolt’. Similarly, Fahad Mehmood Mayo’s ‘Unfolding Spatial Memory’ harks back to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘City of Dreadful Night’. Zeeshan Sarwar looks at the functionality of public transport in his ‘Where the Bus Stops’.
Two contributors have gone beyond Lahore: Ghuncha Shaheed in her piece on ‘Defensive Urbanism & The Veiling City’ which discusses the metal blinds in Peshawar, and Hira Rasool on ‘Land Water Temporalities’, using the Sindu Darya or Purali as Sindhis call it.
Omar Farooq has gone further afield - to the UN Headquarters building in Manhattan, New York. I never knew that it is located on the site of an old abbatoir. Interesting. How many of you know that the site of Kinnard College was in fact a farm where prisoners, released from the Central Jail on Jail Road, would be rehabilitated before being released into society.
Two foreigners have also made contributions to KNOW + 1. Yingjia Tan – a Chinese scholar based in Munich who has written on the ‘Delta-Comb sister collective’ – a sort of expansive Chinese beauty parlour owned by celibate women who ran Goupuks or sister houses. The Japanese architect Ryuichi Sasaki has covered the Chopin International Music Centre in Tokyo. Music like architecture recognises no borders.
Inevitably, there are essays on the imaginative - Muhammad Wasay Ijaz [Designerds] – ‘a vertical approach to city design’, and Fawad Hussain’s design for an iconic mosque in Dubai. That mosque, in today’s circumstances, is a dream overtaken by a nightmare.
The final essay brings us back home – to BNU. Omar Hassan writes about the Green Experience in BNU.
Each of the essays I have mentioned stands alone and yet they form a coherent whole. They present thoughts, ideas, designs, and innovations that remind us, as Marshall Berman wrote in the book I have just quoted: ‘We all come from ruins’.
Ours is a 5,000 year old civilisation trapped in the body of a 79 year old. Where will future Pakistanis be 50, 75 or a hundred years from now? Necessity will demand that we think, design and construct vertically. Our Population Density is at present approximately 336 people per km. Official figures tell us that previous rural areas are being encroached upon by high-density urban settlements. In our larger cities, with a significant pressure from population influx, many residents live in high-density or slum areas. Soon, very soon, even that other Pakistan – Islamabad – will degenerate into an overcrowded slum.
Institutions like BNU cannot resolve our population crisis or arrest urban development or improve living standards. What BNU can do, and is doing through research publications like KNOW + 1, is to hold a mirror to the future.
Architects do not outlive their work. They owe it to the future to leave a legacy about which future generations of Pakistanis can say: ‘We are proud of what they made and have left for us’.
F. S AIJAZUDDIN |
