aerial view of Dar es salaam

     No one person designed our everyday surroundings. Towns, neighbourhoods, streets, even most houses were rarely designed by architects. Indeed most were never designed at all. They just ‘happened’. Some are social and environmental disasters, others so delightful they’re highly sought after. Most are somewhere in between.

    They ‘happened’ – but not through happenstance. Their form and character resulted from pressures: economic, social and ecological pressures; cultural, geographic and climatic ones. This gave places built before the era of conscious design an integrity that today we can only struggle to achieve. It also integrated them perfectly with the economy, community, ecology and the whole way of life of their day. This, however, is also why old buildings and places, even attractive ones, aren’t matched to life today. We can no longer do things in the old way and expect success, for modern form-giving pressures are different. There were no 14-wheel trucks in the middle-ages; roads can no longer be scaled for horse and carts as they were then. But this is only one example; most form-giving pressures are less visible and more subtle. What are these pressures? How do we identify them? Respond to them? Integrate them into an inseparable wholeness? Form-giving pressures are easy enough to identify in retrospect – that’s the job of culture-historians. But, just as with history, the pattern isn’t so easy to see at the time.