Description

First and foremost, ‘indigenous reinterpretation’ is self-consciously concerned with the architectural tradition and past practice, or constructed context of a place. It has waxed and waned from early concerns with historical conservation and preservation, at least as far back as the eighteenth century in Europe, up through periods of modernity and more recent concerns with existing building contexts.
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For many, it is a means of conforming housing to local conditions in a manner that is somehow familiar, comfortable, and well-fitted with what is already in place. In lower-income housing circumstances, for instance, it has been pursued as a means of avoiding any stigma that may arise from too obvious a material difference. In housing immigrant populations in urban areas, it can also serve to reference the building practices from where they are from, as was clear in the case of Tiburtino, discussed in “Housing and Landscapes”. In the realm of historic conservation, it is a means of maintaining and even renewing housing in a manner that is consistent with aims of perpetuating an overall environmental integrity. In this regard, it is different from preservation, per se, which implies literal maintenance of structures in place and, in some instances, reconstruction and replication. Nevertheless, always at work is a backward turn, which in the case of housing may also be bound up with expressions of social status, something clearly on display in the neo-colonial McMansion estates in suburban United States. Alternatively, pursuit of older indigenous building techniques can arise in conjunction with local material use and the interests of using local skills and lowering costs. At root here, however, is not something that is exactly the same as an original in all respects, but where certain elements or qualities are adhered to fully or very closely. This, in turn, raises the question of what it is that is being reinterpreted: If we conceive of housing as a bundle of parts, properties, and qualities, when we speak of indigenous reinterpretation, along which of them might it be usefully pursued? Moreover, the choices made, although often lasting, are also subject to change as indigenous conditions are reconsidered and the necessity of conforming, or not, to what is there in place became either relaxed or reinforced.

Precedents: Codes, Associations, and Reproductions

Almost invariably, different cultural contexts involve different manners of housing, often in line with their indigenous architectural traditions. Arab environments of the Middle East are not exceptions, even when experiencing the levelling effects of Western-oriented modernization. Indeed, in some places within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, people still live in traditional housing. This is particularly true in coastal areas like parts of Jeddah and on the Red Sea, and smaller towns in the Arabian Gulf of Saudi Arabia and in some of the preserved areas of Dubai and Abu Dhabi where the prominent wind towers are a conspicuous local architectural expression. Typically, traditional Arab houses are courtyard houses with interior courts open to the sky surrounded by the rooms and domestic quarters of the house. Gender separation is de rigueur with the haram set aside for women and the family in general and the majlis set aside for reception, entertainment, and meeting on the part of male members of the household. Usually this involves two entries, with access to the haram more private than that to the majlis.

Location of houses along the narrow lanes of larger residential blocks, or hara, especially in former times, secured the same privacy and protection for women, whereas bustling commercial streets on the outside, framed by commercial and other mixed uses, provided the public spaces and places of market transactions for the men. Visual seclusion of one house from others was achieved through a variety of screening devices, including the elaborate and ornate wooden mashrabiya that hang on the sides of houses, creating semi-enclosed and discretely screened terraces. Passage for community residents through their environments was also secured by usufructural requirements in addition to more normal public, semi-public, and private rights of way. Material composition of housing, ranging from one to three or more storeys in height, was usually of masonry or mud brick covered in stucco, forming walls with good solar insolation qualities. Roofs tended to be flat, often with tall parapets forming roof terraces, occupiable during evenings and nights, in contrast to the folly of high-rise European-style residential towers and so-called ‘crash housing’ in Saudi Arabia.
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Several successful attempts have been made to entrain this kind of cultural rule structure of traditional patterns of housing in formal layouts that are also expressive of, if materially dissimilar from, traditional enclaves. The 650-hectare Diplomatic Quarter next to the Wadi Hanifa in south-east Riyadh, for instance, with urban design by Ali Shuaibi and others, is a prominent example, as is the housing scheme by the same architect closer into the center of Riyadh, the Saudi capital.
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One case in which several cultural contexts framed the reference for recent housing is Villa Victoria in the South End of Boston, dating from the late 1960s into the early 1980s and designed by John Sharratt. There, engagement with a population primarily from somewhere else and reinterpretation both in terms of where they were from and where they appeared to be going can be readily discerned. In 1965, under the South End Urban Renewal Area designated by the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, wholesale demolition was to be visited on the area, clearing it of many substandard and vacant properties. At much the same time, substantial numbers of low-income Puerto Rican immigrants had moved into the area in search of cheap rents, welfare benefits, low-skilled jobs, and proximity to others like themselves. Their plight was then taken up by the Episcopalian Church, among others, and by Sharratt as an advocacy planner alongside the Emergency Tenants’ Association and Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción. A plan for an area of the South End was approved in 1970 and with aid from available tax incentives for low-cost housing and sizeable government grants, the project for Villa Victoria got underway being managed for its community by the Boston Housing Authority.
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The overall plan acknowledged the grain and formal block structure of Boston’s Back Bay, but incorporated loop roads instead of a straightforward gridiron of streets in order to secure a stronger spatial sense of community. Houses along Tremont Street, a major road on the periphery of Villa Victoria, were maintained and rehabilitated into what became known as Casa Borinquen, although the remainder of the 736 dwelling units was newly constructed. One line of reinterpretation of indigenous circumstances appeared around Plaza Betances, which became framed by six-storey arcaded mid-rise residences and row house units atop a commercial arcade to form something akin to a zócalo, or plaza, in a Latin American tradition.
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Also nearby was the 18-storey Torre Unidad, primarily housing an elderly population and in a manner that broke with the architectural tradition of the South End. The other conspicuous reinterpretation came about with an unmistakable aspirational orientation towards American suburbia and individuated dwellings, although at Villa Victoria in the form of denser row houses. Some of these were duplexes with from three- to six-bedroom units over one- to two-bedroom flats on the lower levels. All incorporated private garden spaces at the back, in common with row houses in the area, and also a common space for children’s play and other local activities, insisted on by residents through the participatory process that was employed throughout the project. Despite use of the more urban row house type, the figural expression of the units, with the overlaying of upper floors, window sizes and alignments, prominent pitched roofs, material coloration, and so on, suggested a distinctly different and ‘suburban’ appearance.

A third form of indigenous reinterpretation took place in Zacatecas, Mexico, at Veta Grande and at Rincón Colonial on the periphery of the inland and arid city, dating from 1990 to 1992. This took the form of an experiment with traditional forms of housing and reinvention of traditional modes of construction using mud bricks. An economic aim was also to reduce the cost of construction with mud brick prototypes, using local materials in place of concrete and steel, which typically accounted for around 80 percent of the construction cost. In fact, this proved to be possible at a twenty percent reduction in cost. Designed by Carlos García Vélez, a partner at the time in GEO, one of the largest producers of low-cost housing in Latin America, the initial prototype at Veta Grande comprised seven small houses of 65 square meters each in a two-storey arrangement with small patios and a common wall and shared service arrangement.
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Prior precedents involving mud brick construction were investigated, including the work of Hassan Fathy in Egypt and of Pueblo Indians in Taos, New Mexico. Consultation also occurred with the UNESCO research organization in Grenoble, France, who were also investigating and experimenting with mud brick structures. Among the two most generally available approaches for mud brick production, a method involving stationary grinding and sedimentation of blocks was selected over higher-tech pressure systems. This choice proved to be relatively portable and adaptable to local materials, using machines created by Henry Elkins in the United States out of Fresno, California, that were also affordable for the project. A system of brick vaults built in compression spacing between common walls formed the backbone of the construction, with all surfaces covered in stucco. The larger project at Rincón Colonial aimed to build 800 units in clusters of from 50 to 60 units, again enclosing common outdoor spaces. The client for the project was the municipal government of Zacatecas and of the original 800 units, 600 were realized, costing less per square meter to build than comparable low-cost housing and selling at the same price, although 30 percent larger in area. During the process, the mud brick common walls were replaced by concrete block as the scaling up necessary for the larger project proved to be problematic and an episode of highly unusual rainfall hampered the mud brick production. Basic housing units under vaulted roof modules incorporated two-storey layouts of rows and a broad double-height space that could be later filled in with further floor space. The mass wall and mud brick roof construction performed well acoustically and thermally in Zacatecas’ arid climate and some 65 percent in savings in steel and concrete also added to the cost savings. In 1993, upon completion of the project, the municipality signed a technical assistance package with Cuba, where some 30,000 units were to be constructed.
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In yet other venues, contemporary-looking indigenous reinterpretations are commonly carried out. One such venue is Singapore and the venerable shophouse building typology, with its five-foot ways, vertical orientation to fenestration along street façades, up to four-storey height including use of attic space, and a pancake-like stacking of rooms towards the back and well-proportioned and sometimes double-height rooms at the front. The shophouse at 31 Boon Tat Street of 2003 by Forum Architects, alongside of a renovated original structure is a useful example of this practice.
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Although using contemporary materials of exposed concrete, broad glass panels, and metal screens, along with unusual angular geometries, this shophouse conforms in almost every other respect to the traditional shophouse form dating well back into the nineteenth century. A top-lit stairway towards the front of the complex departs from the original type, although updating it at the same time through the use of modern materials and methods of construction.

Contemporary Cases: References to the Past in Beijing and Shanghai

In the two cases presented and discussed here, the contexts of indigenous reinterpretation are to be found in ubiquitous past dwelling environments and housing types, first in Beijing with the hutong and siheyuan, and then in Shanghai with its large blocks and the lilong.
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Certainly, since the Ming and Qing dynasties, if not before in Beijing, the hutong are the lanes or small streets that usually run east-west within the overall gridiron of streets and roads inside the walls of the old city. Indeed, the term hutong appears to be derived from the Mongol hottog, which means ‘well’ and ties the hutong back to the gridded well-field system of agriculture and cropping division of the Shang dynasty in antiquity. The east-west orientation of the lanes also provides for a north-south alignment of the dwellings and their facing south in accordance to good Confucian and fengshui practice. In addition, the hutong, which vary in width and local regularity, became defined materially by the adjacent four-sided courtyard houses, or siheyuan, that lined them. These dwellings, in turn, usually had a relatively ornate entry gateway at the south-east corner, through which visitors would be ceremoniously received, but the remainder of the façade along the lane would be blank, consisting of the so-called ‘reverse’ rooms of the siheyuan, set aside for service functions. In basic layout, the courtyard houses had open courtyards, surrounded by pavilions and arcades for circulation. Alignment of pavilions was according to a north-south oriented bi-lateral symmetry with occupation according to position in the family.

Movement through the siheyuan, depending upon one’s familiarity with the owners and how far one went, probably involved up to five turns with deliberate pauses and all orchestrated according to the doctrine of li, and proprietous and courteous behavior. In other words, the siheyuan and hutong location facilitated a desirable and preferred form of social interaction. According to the Qianlong Map of 1735, for instance, substantial areas of Beijing, outside of the Forbidden City precinct, were occupied in this manner.
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Indeed, the first project under discussion, the Ju’er Hutong by Wu Liangyong of 1989 to 1992, was originally a small part of this broader context in the north-eastern Dongcheng District of old Beijing.

From the outset, Wu recognized that it would have been impossible to preserve all the courtyard houses without introducing any interventions, and yet, it would have been unwise to maintain them in an ossified state. In his view, features that have fallen out of pace with demands of contemporary life would have to be adapted, and the rehabilitation of these traditional residential districts in the Old City of Beijing, primarily within the confines of the Second Ring Road, ought to occur as a process of “organic renewal”, hinging on “metabolic change rather than total clearance and rebuilding”.
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The Ju’er Hutong project was thus a pilot project in Wu’s application of a practical methodology that would “enable the preservation of the historical and cultural value of the Old City as well as promote sustainable development and provide a solution to the housing shortage” the city was then facing in the 1980s and early 1990s.
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Since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, extensive industrial development and the concentration of government offices and commercial enterprises within the Old City resulted in severe congestion and deterioration of the urban-environmental quality. Moreover, the construction of nearly seven million square meters of new housing between 1974 and 1986 alone, or 70 percent of the city’s total new housing development since the Communists took power, was associated with uncontrolled infill, often in the form of high-rises that compromised the horizontal character of the Old City and greatly reduced the open spaces and leafy environments.
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The Ju’er Hutong is located in what was formerly known as the Zhaohui-Jinggong Fang, a neighborhood block dating back to the Yuan dynasty and built around 1267 and 1290 A.D., and retained the original block layout with nine east-west parallel hutong crossed by one north-south street.
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Since time immemorial, this physical layout of the Old City in the form of neighborhoods composed of courtyards has been integral to the evolution of community life, with a number of Chinese literary works celebrating the socio-cultural life in these communities based on mutual respect and aid. In fact, the courtyard typology lends itself to the fostering of such amiable ties and sense of communal identity with its intimate scale, close relation between the indoor and outdoor spaces, and distinction between the public space of the lane and the semi-public/private space of the courtyard. Further, the attractiveness of the courtyard housing also lies in its union of natural beauty within a man-made environment, incorporating gardens, trees, and plants that offer respite from the hustle and bustle in the lands, and its inherent adaptability to accommodate live-work spaces. The 8.2-hectare block occupied by Ju’er Hutong had deteriorated considerably with poor housing conditions by the time it was selected as an experimental site for renewal by the Dongcheng District in 1989. Despite the overcrowding, poor environmental conditions and utilities, frequent flooding, and its degeneration into a dazayuan or “big cluttered courtyard”, Ju’er Hutong was home to a close-knit community of some 3,180 residents where neighbors would help each other out.
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The design team from Tsinghua University led by Wu Liangyong thus resolved to: (i) improve the living conditions of the community through the creation of a new courtyard housing prototype that would attain an ideal balance between insolation and ventilation while increasing the intensity of land use; (ii) “respect, support, and enhance the residents’ attachments to each other and their place”; and (iii) to allow them to regain the sense of privacy and spatial control originally afforded by the traditional courtyard environment.
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Research and surveys of the area had already been undertaken in 1987, and the rehabilitation was organized to be carried out in four phases, of which only Phases I and II were materialized. From the exterior, the redeveloped neighborhood blends seamlessly into its surrounding fabric of low-rise, grey brick courtyard housing, distinguished by just its white, stuccoed walls rising two- to three-storeys above grade, striated by bands of sliding windows. Crowning these new apartment clusters are roofs that are partially pitched and composed of traditional grey-tiled patterns, inspired clearly by the architectural language of the classic siheyuan. Despite the height difference with adjacent one- to two-storey courtyards, these modern additions are not at all imposing. Instead, their presence is softened by setting them back from the hutong and incorporating lower garden walls of traditional grey brick and wrought iron on their periphery. From the hutong, the courtyard clusters are entered in via an articulated gateway that continues as a system of lanes or public alleyways that later branch off into communal courts before one gains access to the units arranged around the courts, reminiscent of the orchestrated movement in the siheyuan of the past which similarly reflected the transitions between zones of differing public-private characters. Old trees were preserved, and serve as departure points for where the communal courts would be located, complete with planter boxes, lamp posts, new trees, and garden furniture like stone benches, tables, and stools.

By way of housing, the apartments were arrayed in two- to three-storey courtyard types that were built within the height restriction of nine meters, allowing for a higher floor area ratio and density comparable to mid-rise residential blocks. In doing so, Wu and his team were able to introduce roof garden terraces, thereby creating more private outdoor space for communal purposes, including planting – an important traditional pastime – as well as opening up views to the Old City and its historic landmarks. Within the clusters, lofts were also made possible under the pitched roofs, providing for more useable space in the attics, and enhancing the rooflines of the project in concert with the rooftop terraces. Besides extending the elevation upwards, additional floor space was created through the introduction of basements in Phase II of the development, once the drainage problems were resolved. With large windows, light-wells, and sunken outdoor patios, these basement apartments were pleasing and well received. Vernacular Chinese architectural elements embellished the courtyard clusters, ranging from ornamented doorways and entrance screens to elaborate door knockers that imbued a sense of belonging and tradition in what otherwise were modern, figural interpretations of the old siheyuan typology. In Phase I, 64 bays of old housing made way for 46 new apartment units with a total floor area of 2,760 square meters, the equivalent of 2.5 times the space prior to the renewal.
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A variety of unit types were included to cater to a range of households, from young or elderly couples, to families and intergenerational living, and the average floor area per person was improved from 7.86 square meters to 20.75 square meters. In Phase II, a collection of individual courts were designed in response to the site conditions around the transistor factory, and included a community center of some 300 square meters in area to complement the modest elderly residents activity centre that doubled up as an after-school youth activity centre. During this second phase 164 new apartment units were built, with a total floor area of 17,897 square meters, and increases in average floor area per person from 11.49 square meters to 26.25 square meters.

It must be said, however, that the project was not a wholesale demolition and redevelopment of a dilapidated neighborhood. In fact, in keeping with Wu’s argument for organic renewal, some of the original courtyard houses that were still structurally sound and of notable architectural quality were preserved, including a cluster adjacent to Phase I of the development. In addition, existing buildings such as a small transistor factory dating from the Communist era emphasizing industrial production, as well as a research institute next to Phase II of the project, were retained. To manage the renewal and resettlement of the original residents, a housing cooperative was established during the first phase. As China was undergoing housing reforms, moving away from state-provided free housing to market-oriented conditions, a system of cost sharing was put in place such that the cost of rehabilitation was shared between the local Dongcheng District Government, the residents, and the work units that employed the residents. Under this system, original resident households would pay 350 yuan per square meter, while their employers paid 250 yuan per square meter, and the rest was covered by government subsidies. Residents with the ability to pay thus obtained the use rights to the new units, which could be transacted through the market five years after the purchase; those who were unable to afford the costs or who were unwilling to move back to the new units were provided with good-quality accommodation elsewhere, with the remaining units sold by the cooperative at market rate to cover the remaining costs while generating a surplus for further work to be conducted.
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Overall, 13 of the original households in Phase I returned after the renewal, and another 48 of the original households in Phase II, equivalent to 31.7 percent and 23.5 percent of the original total. This system of cost sharing was not just a means of shifting towards a housing market in the early days of housing reform, but also enabled part of the original community to be retained – a highly laudable social goal in and of itself. Given the close ties of the original residents, this gesture allowed the social fabric or at least some parts of it to be preserved, rather than the conventional disintegration of such a community in urban renewal projects. In sum, Ju’er Hutong is not about master plans per se but an instance of how the extraordinary hutong structure can be redeveloped in Beijing, merging both traditional and modern architecture whilst still maintaining the underlying spatial logic and principles of the traditional courtyard house within contemporary lifestyle and urban demands. In essence, this has given rise to a viable prototype that provided for relatively high-density housing within low-rise, mixed-use circumstances, revitalizing this historic capital’s inner-city life even in the modern day.

In the case of Shanghai, the second case study, the contextual reference is younger, dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century and the 1920s and 1930s, with the lilong or lane housing that became the dominant form of local housing, regardless of background or social standing of the inhabitants. In fact, by 1937, or thereabouts, some 280,000 to 300,000 dwelling units of this type had been constructed, housing well over one million of the city’s population. The term lilong simply refers to ‘neighborhood lanes’.
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The housing type was a hybrid between a southern sanheyuan or three-sided courtyard house and a western terrace or row house. The basic lilong, as a housing type, was comprised of a two-storey and sometimes higher dwelling, across a four- to five-meter frontage, built of brick and stucco finish, with a simple arrangement of rooms facing on to a small courtyard at the front and then a lane, and a lane at the back. Aggregations of dwelling units along the lanes varied according to the actual lane structure of the housing development, often referred to as a ‘fishbone’ configuration or a ‘spinal’ configuration, and so on. Entry into the lanes from the road outside, which also defined the large urban block in which the lane or lilong environments were placed, was through a gateway in the surrounding shophouse alignment along the road.
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These gateways were often highly ornamented and gave rise to references to shikumen houses. In essence, a relatively continuous and multi-storeyed alignment of shophouses encircled a block with an interior lane structure, replete with lilong. Unlike the hutong of Beijing which were relatively blank with regard to the dwellings, the lilong of Shanghai, under the lane space itself, became the site of daily as well as celebratory life. Variations in floor space, height, and width of the basic type were adjusted to meet the needs of different socio-economic groups. Specific developments also varied from a relatively small number of units up to several hundred in some cases. Moreover, the entrepreneurs involved were both Chinese and Western. It is with reference to this context that some of the housing in the Nuova Città di Pujiang by Vittorio Gregotti was designed, although in a context beside the Huangpu River in metropolitan Shanghai which was entirely rural in the early part of the twentieth century.

Developed as part of Shanghai’s One City–Nine Towns Plan of 2000, also known as the Comprehensive Plan of Shanghai Metro-Region (1999–2020), these satellite towns were to adopt various international themes in their formal outcomes. While towns like Songjiang, Anting, and Gaoqiao were built in the English, German, and Dutch styles, Pujiang was slated to be constructed in the Italian style. Located some 15 kilometers south of Lujiazui along the Huangpu River, the rectangular site was formerly an assortment of farmlands and villages, criss-crossed by a network of canals. This Italian new town was to house a population of 100,000 inhabitants, and the design brief issued by the city stipulated that the planned settlement would have to be structured around the system of waterways and to introduce hydrological control given its adjacency to the river. The master plan was won by Gregotti Associati International in 2001 in a closed international competition, and was composed of three different grids overlaid on top of each other like a tartan patch: the first was a road network that broke down the site into blocks measuring 300 meters by 300 meters; the second was a system of bicycle and pedestrian pathways, creating a hierarchy of circulatory access as distinct from the vehicular routes; and the third was a grid of canals, some of which are navigable, that provide the landscape connection back to the river, and amplify the hydrological element in the existing site conditions. To accommodate a variation of densities, the plan is further broken down into three districts, increasing in density from low to high along the north-south roadway spine. The plan is bisected laterally by a central axis where the primary public and private urban functions are to be concentrated, including plazas, a university campus, as well as sports and recreational facilities.
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The housing project of interest is located in the first sector, covering one square mile or 259 hectares of primarily low-rise residences that broke ground in 2004. Planned also by Vittorio Gregotti and his firm, this first phase was undertaken by a major domestic real estate developer, the Overseas Chinese Town Group, also known as OCT, and completed in 2007. A composition of ‘road villas’ and ‘townhouses’, the residences were grouped around loop roads that generated more intimate zones branching off from the arterial streets. Rising two- to four-storeys in height, these contemporary assemblages of cube-like structures in no way resemble the Italian towns they were intended to emulate. Instead of creating the Italian equivalent of Thames Town in Songjiang, Gregotti presented a tasteful, formal reinterpretation of Shanghai’s traditional lilong fabric. Like some of the old lilong neighborhoods, the blocks have through roads that then subdivide into smaller lane structures accessing the individual housing units. Some of the ‘road villas’ are arranged in a front-back manner, harkening back to the layouts of the hybrid row houses of the past.

In contrast to the Ju’er Hutong, which drew on the architectural language of the siheyuan, here, Gregotti makes no material or, indeed, figural references to the lilong housing. Rather, the formal qualities are further reified at the scale of each villa, with small entry courts or front yards doubling up as parking spaces just beyond the main entrance, leading to the relatively porous interiors complete with private gardens. The main rooms, such as the living and dining rooms, and bedrooms, typically on the upper floors, unfold along the largest garden, with glazed façades opening up to views of the garden; this visual connection with nature is likewise emphasized for villas or townhouses along the canals. Constructed of concrete, steel, and glass, the minimalist architecture here is clearly modern, although the overall massing and the aggregation of these units side-by-side share volumetric parallels with the lilong terraced housing of the past. Each unit is commodious, with 250 to 400 square meters of floor area above grade, and another 120 to 200 square meters in the basement, complemented by a diverse range of outdoor spaces including gardens, skywells, balconies, and terraces. With the exception of the handful of 11-storey high-rise blocks dispersed across this first phase, the overall residential density is low. In Block 6, for instance, there are 39 villas and 30 row houses, yielding around 2,300 people per square kilometer. Ultimately, this well-designed showpiece illustrates how indigenous reinterpretations can occur beyond literal emulations of the figure or figura, manifesting themselves through a reference to the form or forma, while remaining true to the times of the present or even future in its figure.

Contextual Engagements and Differences Between Form and Figure

From the foregoing, the main issue in indigenous reinterpretation as depicted here is two-fold. The first concerns an overall approach in terms of the urban-architectural aims of a project and the interests involved. This may include claims by particular groups, such as heritage officials, or be related straightforwardly to scale requirements in more contextual than historical circumstances. An approach may also derive from a set of interests on the part of a particular architect or builder, regardless of the preserve of a broader institutional context. This, in turn, may be experimental, as with the mud block architecture in Zacatecas, Mexico, or rather more prosaic as in Villa Victoria and the pursuit of a suburban image in an urban context. Built outcomes may be otherwise contemporary, as with the Singaporean shophouses, or backwardly expressive as in the projects in the Saudi Arabian context.

The second aspect of indigenous reinterpretation, closely related to the overall strategy as well as the interests concerned, is the choice of a formal or figural approach to the architecture, including mixtures of both with varying emphases. This pair of qualities derives from forma and figura, where forma refers to the inherent pattern of order of a thing, in Heideggerian terms, while figura is its perceptible external boundary. Heidegger in his excursus on ‘thingness’ in The Origins of a Work of Art describes a ceramic jug’s ‘thingness’ as being not its physical properties, per se, but the void inside it.
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The jug shapes the void which, in turn, shapes the jug and the form of the jug is its void and its figure is the shape of the void. Much earlier, Aristotle defined form as being not the thing itself but its organizing pattern, while figure, instead, referred to its visual shape. Thomas Aquinas in this Aesthetics also took up a similar view. In short, for architecture, form or forma, in this kind of discussion, is the layout, spatial organization, its underlying topology or similar, while its figure or figura is its actual outward surface manifestations, style, and ornamentation.
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As for the two principal case studies here, in the Ju’er Hutong, Wu Liangyong was working within the ambit of ‘contextual traditionalism’, one of the streams of thought associated with China’s intellectual period of ‘Culture Fever’ during the 1980s prior to the Tiananmen Incident. In particular, he was adhering to Li Zehou’s formulation of ‘modern content with Chinese form’, resulting in a figural emphasis.
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Alongside of this, the use of courtyard housing, albeit at a higher density than the traditional siheyuan of Beijing, also further secured an argument in favor of past practices for the project. By contrast, Vittorio Gregotti, with the town villas at Nuova Città di Pujiang, sharply favored a more formal reinterpretation of past practice, in this case with regard to the lilong of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. Although somewhat wider to accommodate cars, like the ‘new lilong’ and ‘model villages’ of Shanghai in the 1930s, the arrangement of entries, small front courtyards, front-to-back layouts of dwelling, and so on, clearly drew on their earlier precedents. By contrast, there is little if any figural reference, with the exception of the overall massing of building elements and where ‘ornamentation’ applied by residents is to be found.

An underlying question in all this discussion is, of course, why do it? Why engage in conscious indigenous reinterpretation in the first place? By way of an answer, it seems to make most sense when something about the past way of making housing and the architecture of housing is worthwhile continuing or readopting when moving forward. As such, this impetus is certainly consistent with traditio in the Latin and Roman sense of ‘bringing across’. In other words, it is about deploying dimensions, qualities, or practices from the past that are judged to be useful in the present-future. The manner and mode of the judgment, in turn, reflects back to the interests involved, the strategy being undertaken, and presumably, who or what is being saved. These days, critical accounts of the judgment involved can also be entertained, further relativizing the merit of one approach versus others, as well as making some more apparent than others. All that being said, however, under the colloquial truism that there is very little that is truly novel in this world, reinterpretation of what is there in a place can be a useful point of reference for otherwise highly contemporary architectural production. This is clear, for instance, in several recent Singaporean shophouse-like projects. Also in the spirit of traditio and bringing across, the locus of what is being brought across, urban-architecturally speaking, may not be and probably is not complete, fixed, and finished. Further development of typal arguments, as well as work on the language in architecture, is, after all, an ongoing project in itself.

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.