Identity & Place-Making: Cullinan Studio Teaching Visit to Tripoli, 21-23 May 2013

“Where should we look for Libya’s identity?”

“How can we make Libya’s towns into better places?”

 

 

These are questions that will - or at least should - come to dominate Libya's built environment debate. They were questions that we asked and were asked by students during our recent visit to Tripoli University’s Department of Architecture and Urbanism and we had discussed the same two months earlier with Libyan academics, practitioners and government ministers during our visit to Tripoli with the Royal Institute of British Architects. This time Roddy Langmuir and myself were in Tripoli at the invitation of Architectural Initiative – an organisation dedicated to connecting international architects with Tripoli University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning.

We believe that the answers to these questions – “identity”and “place” – lie in Libya itself. “Context, climate and an architecture of place-making” was the title for lectures given to a public audience at the King’s Old Palace in Tripoli and again to students at the University – “The importance of place, people and communities in making architecture that belongs.” This was also the message of our student workshops, working with the next generation of about-to-graduate architects to build up a logical process by which to produce appropriate design.

 

Libya – as across the world – has grown to become reliant on the car, air-conditioning and the light bulb. A warm climate and abundant land and energy make it OK to make windowless, stand-alone buildings in a sea of car parking. Libya has forgotten the importance of street and place, thinking instead of buildings as objects and rarely of the quality of the spaces that surround them. Turning this tide will not be easy but it will become harder still if the international architectural community fails to actively support practitioners, students, teachers and policy-makers at the front line of the debate.

 

The enthusiasm of the final year students that we met in Tripoli was as understandable as it was exhausting. Their eagerness comes after years of waiting for visiting architects to take time out of their pressured visits to Libya to engage with the country beyond the needs of their own projects or the pursuit of others. Further, Libya’s contemporary appetite for icon buildings can tempt students down “blind alleys” of picture-making and shape-making, rather than the greater challenges of mass housing and urban design. Disengagement from the real problems facing Libya’s built environment is no longer an option, even in the university environment.

 

Architecture Initiative partner and Head of School at Tripoli University, Osama Abdul Hadi, has set a syllabus of designing real buildings – “Live Projects”– forcing a relevance upon the students by positioning them between the commercial interests of real clients and the demands for design quality from (what Architecture Initiative hopes will become) a steady stream of visiting Architects as critics. As proxies for the identity and place-making debate, the students must confront the issues that will define Libya in years to come. The evident appetite for our visit showed that Libya’s architectural students and the profession alike are ready for the challenge.


Architectural Initiative

 

Architectural Initiative was created by British Architect Ghada Al-Bayati, Libyan Architectural student Shadda Elmagri and Libyan Architect Osama Abdul Hadi and has the support of Libyan scholars who are interested in creating collaborative academic partnerships between international built environment institutes and Libya's educational institutions. Architectural Initiative's mission is to run architectural programs within Libya to educate and inspire the Libyan architectural community by increasing student and public awareness of the challenges facing the built environment. This will be achieved by providing a forum for interaction with international leaders, role models, artists, academics and other prominent members of international architectural society.

The lecture series is Architectural Initiative's first organised project in association with Tripoli University's Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, coordinated by Ghada Albayati. They have hosted Cullinan Studio who have been supportive of the initiative since its inception and are the first British Architects to start the Lecture Series. The main sponsors of the lecture were the Libyan architectural practice Allabina Architecture & Engineering Consultancy as well as the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) who have provided both guidance and financial support. The other sponsors were Libyan Institutes of Architects, the Martyr Square Media, Libya Design, Home and Garden Show and Andalusia.

The programme consisted of a public lecture as well as a lecture to students, followed by a series of workshops and crits with final year students.

 

Libya Calling: RIBA Mission to Tripoli, 24-28 March 2013

“There is a moral imperative… that the institute should contribute what it can to the reconstruction of countries that British planes have bombed,” said Building Design magazine’s Ellis Woodman of the RIBA’s recent partnering mission to Tripoli (‘Libya’s aid is some reparation’ – BD Online 28.03.13). The reality is a country whose bombsites are few, peripheral and largely ex-governmental; surgically removed by NATO with only minor pockmarking to even the nearest bystander apartments. First-timers to Libya do also leap to the “British planes have bombed…” conclusion. In fact it is 42 years of neglect, corruption, underinvestment, political isolation and woeful or hands-off planning that have achieved what no ordnance could have: decrepit infrastructure, poor quality buildings, gridlocked roads, fly-tipped left-over spaces, the oppression of civic expression and a denial of the street as a civic space. Here, in the legacies of dictatorship, lies the RIBA’s mission.

There is a “moral imperative” to this work, even if Woodman is right that “some soft diplomacy is at work in this engagement… brokering relationships that will ultimately be of profit to the RIBA’s members.” “Moral,” because as Architects, we have a duty to work for the betterment of the built environment, wherever the society that it serves. “Imperative,” because with a projected 20% growth in GDP this year alone (IMF), the world’s fifth largest oil reserves (now almost back to pre-war exports) but with only a caretaker government and still no agreed constitution, the built environment is more vulnerable than ever.

 

It is vulnerable because problems that were manifest during my time in Libya between 2009 and 2011 – money, land, cars and housing –have become yet more urgent. It has a money problem – too much of it but not enough experience to spend it wisely. It has a land problem – a population of 6m, mostly stretched across its 2000km long coastline (often without title) where sprawl, the protection of sites of national importance or the making of good streets and civic spaces is managed only by dated planning models, if at all. It has a car problem – streets choked to gridlock by an oil subsidy that still makes it cheaper to fill up with petrol than with water, stoked by a booming import market for hand-me-down EU cars at bargain prices. Chronic housing shortages persist, exacerbated by a young population that prefers to move out of the family home. Elhabib Alamin, the Minister for Culture and Civil Society, is all too aware of the problems and the coming explosion of infrastructure investment: “We have one year to design the software before the hardware starts to arrive.” For the relative newcomers to governance that we met and in the context of an international perception of volatility that discourages travel and collaboration, our RIBA mission was significant.

 

As investors look on, Libya’s Architects are stuck on the side lines. Their title is not recognised as distinct from Engineers and there was, until recently, no voice for the profession. Meanwhile, Architects suffer from the perception shared by Libya’s Urban Planning Authority (UPA), that “Architects do not offer spatial or planning ideas.” Indeed, despite the valiant leadership of Osama Abdul Hadi – head of Tripoli School of Architecture whom we met there on graduation day – a lack of engagement from the international architecture community has visibly distanced his students from the level of contextual, social, cultural, climatic and sustainability debate that guides good architecture elsewhere.

We are supporting a lecture series and teaching initiative from visiting Architects to energise schools with new ideas. Meanwhile, in the industry, it is hoped that new laws to guarantee knowledge exchange through collaboration with Libyan counterparts will undo the trend towards “suitcase architecture” that once dominated the pre-revolution outsourcing of Libya’s major projects. Cullinans’ on-going relationship with Sami Jaouda’s Libyan Engineering Office (himself a delegate to the RIBA mission) on the substantial Madinat Hadaek Shahat project was and is a rare exception of a collaborative project.

 

 

Something haschanged though. The cultural amnesia brought by Gadaffi’s quasi-socialist autocracy has left a longing for Libyan identity in its wake. After decades of Italian Occupation and post-war, Anglo-French military administration, preceded by centuries of colonisation by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Ottomans, Libyan identity remains nebulous. Here again, we found Architects being turned to as part of the solution by The Minister for Culture (an archaeologist by training), the director of Libya’s Ancient Towns Administration and by the inspiring Ikram Bash Imam – Minister for Tourism and Libya’s first female Architect. “How will archaeologists ever know that here was Libya?” we were asked. With a professional and political class that is often Western-trained or until-recently exiled, Libyans will need to look more broadly to find their cultural identity.

It was the embryonic, Benghazi-based, Libyan Institute of Architects (LIA) who first approached the RIBA in 2012, leading to UKTI (UK Trade & Industry) backing for our March 2013 mission that included five RIBA representatives plus two of us with past working experience of the country. The LIA brought with them their Tripolitanian colleagues, the Libyan Board of Architecture (LBA) and, together, our joint Libyan-UK mission helped to extend a network that ranges from conservation (the Historic Towns Authority) to renewable technologies (the Renewable Energy Authority of Libya, REAOL).

 

With a supporting resource in the RIBA, these often young and UK-US-trained Architects plan to become the voice of their marginalised profession. Ministerial offers to sit on decision-making committees and invitations from the Planning and Housing authorities to take part in collaborative workshops make the prospect of an effective lobby group for better procedure, regulation, strategy and design review more than possible.

“Think of Libya as a drug addict,” a director of the Libyan Investment and Development Company (LIDCO) told us. “Like a clinic, Libyan Architects must organise themselves and be ready when the country turns to them for answers.”

Posted by Philip Graham who worked alongside Cullinan Studio’s Roddy Langmuir on heritage, housing and urban projects in Libya from 2009-2011.

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