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Chris Luth is an architect and architectural curator: he initiates and organises architectural and urban projects and events worldwide. Chris currently works as Curator of International Projects for the Netherlands Architecture Institute and is based in Rotterdam.
Pilgrims aspire to the supernatural. So do architects. Mies found God in architectural details. And Koolhaas, a kind of anti-Mies, finds meaning in subverting architectural sections. As a student at Delft University of Technology during the late 1990s, both left me unsatisfied.
Some ancient and vernacular architecture managed to achieve a deep connection between place and people, well beyond abstract perfection and spatial subversion. Could contemporary architecture still aspire to the same qualities without being nostalgic?
My quest brought me to Gujarat in northern India. From ancient Hindustan step wells to the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad: never had I seen such a complete vision, such wholeness. No neutral abstract perfection here, nor interesting incongruence. It all seemed so pure and modest.
Unwittingly, I had thus been looking for Louis Kahn. Just like his son did in the documentary film My Architect. And, like his son, I continued to the National Assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Asked to design it, Kahn’s solution blended function, landscape, and representation in a masterful way. Perfection was not found in detail, but instead in a harmony that needs no destabilizing. In the film, someone started to cry.
Crime. Not due to ornament, but in concocting allegations of extortion. At least, that is what the political party of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina claims. During my visit in 2007, she was on trial at the Assembly and no visitors were allowed to enter.
This did not satisfy me either. So I tricked the guards and sneaked in, secretly taking photos everywhere I went. Without my architectural guidebook with photos of the complex, I would have been arrested. Or so said the undercover policeman who caught me. Saved by the book – how befitting a pilgrimage.
Then again, a night in jail inside Kahn’s masterpiece… Divine.
Photo: Lykantrop/Wikimedia
Photo: Naquib Houssain/Flickr
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»Intelligence starts with improvisation.«
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