CHAPTER ONE
The beauty was pure and magnificent; mountains covered in green from foot to top: A paradise up high. As I was looking around and enjoying the beauty, I saw a group of rural men getting off a blue pickup truck at the opposite side of the village on a higher ground. I got curious and started to look for a way to get to them, but there seemed to be none. It was a dirt road they were standing on staring at us. It must have been a really peculiar scene for them, to see so many guys and girls at once in their petit village. Climbing my way to where they were, I was going over our probable conversation in my head, nervously taking a friend’s camera to have an excuse for starting a chat. I got there, they gazed at me… -Hello! -Hi, Welcome! ….
CHAPTER TWO
Villages and then cities, as two most primary types of human settlements, have each had their own qualities and characteristics throughout the history. Advantages of rural life come to you in the very first minutes that you step inside a village: pleasant weather, scent of wet soil, homemade bread, and so on. Some others are concealed deeply in the life of the village, they have to be lived in order to be felt. It might seem a bit too poetic, but the
love that a builder of a rural house – who is probably the owner too – shares with the materials he builds with, tenders a sense of life into its architecture that cannot be ignored. Cities too, have their own qualities and advantages. Rapidity, is probably the most exciting of them. In fact, many of these qualities have almost become the city’s inherent functions: for instance, adequate and diverse job opportunities are the core of what makes a city. A quality which may, and only may, explain what that rural man was arguing. Each of these characteristics seem to act as two opposite ends of a magnet attracting human desires; characteristics that can only be found in one of lifestyles: urban or rural. But mankind is too greedy not to seek all the goods. This greed has resulted in several theories in modern architecture and urbanism, theories based on synthesis of villages and towns. Sir Ebenezer Haward’s garden city movement is a prominent example of such theories which, however, was never successful.
CHAPTER THREE
In all these ideas, apparently theorized to enhance the quality of human life, there lies a common notion: imitation. Imitation of a quality or a pattern applied in another time or place, imitation of nature and vernacular architecture applied to prefabricated concrete dwellings in the
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suburbs, or ridiculously exaggerated vegetation on top of a mid-town skyscraper. The fact that these kinds of imitations drive human life to betterment is undeniable, but it can’t be denied too that the feeling of such betterment is untrue and momentary. Fact is, watching a few shrubs in the balcony of a noisy midtown condo can never replace the pleasure of lying on a cottage terrace at the time of fresh breeze and scent of trees. On the other hand, let’s not forget that the tendency for imitation will have an even more destructive impact on villages. Even though they used to live with their own lively spirit for years, villages are now inevitably becoming more and more similar to cities. How cruel and clumsy, is the presence of enormous pylons over rural hills of a mountain village, or outlandish steel-structure houses constructed with a strangely heterogeneous manner towards their surroundings; killing a traditional and self-reliant architecture. These unpleasant and unrelated combinations will gradually destroy the purely traditional appearance of a village, disincline people from rural life and decolorize its bold values. The big question is: are these kinds of imitations the only solution? Isn’t there another way? The cliché phrase: “enhancing the quality of human life” has to have a better answer. Villages aren’t the same any more.