would like to start this short talk with a small incident that happened
earlier in my professional life. The only time I recall being
discriminated for being a woman was when I was still a student in the
seventies. Good students used to get by priority some offers of training
abroad. For my luck, that year, two offers for training, one coming from
Spain and one from U.K were available only for men. I still managed by
myself to get a training in Vienna. That was, fortunately, the only time I
was ever discriminated as a woman until today: As I am standing here just
because I am a woman, called for that again by Spanish women. This is
probably what could be called positive discrimination. Apart from both these
incidents, I never really felt in my practice the difference of being a
woman architect: Being a man architect or a woman architect, the same
realities whether interesting or cumbersome are to be faced. The subject of my intervention
being the link between tradition and modernity in architecture, I will
again start from another incident of my professional life. While pursuing
a higher level of education in the States, I realized that I was very
intrigued by the movement that started in the seventies of re-using old
structure such as warehouses or disused industrial or even religious
buildings with new various functions such as residential or cultural uses.
That was contradicting the basic concept of modern architectural education
that “Forms follows functions”. These buildings and their
transformations appealed much more to me than any skyscraper on Fifth
Avenue whoever was the architect that built them. These structures were
furthermore anonymous and had no famous architectural name attached to
them. The seventies also raised the
interest into vernacular architecture: the book “Architecture without
architects” became a best seller as the architectural treaties of Le
Corbusier were best sellers in the fifties and sixties. Loaded with all these new
ideas, I happened to visit Spain on my way back to Lebanon. That is where
I felt for the first time (and probably last time) an architectural choc:
the visit of Alhambra in Granada. That is a building that is so simple
externally and so complex internally: A lesson in humility. A lesson in environmental
integration. A lesson in perennial
architecture. Also a discovery for me of two
major sources of inspiration: the combination of Mediterranean
architecture and Islamic architecture. I tried as much as I could in
the practice of my professional activity to keep these furtive moments of
architectural pleasure as vivid as possible. I kept trying to mix
traditional, historical, and vernacular elements with modern attitudes,
updated building technologies and renewed social realities. Most of all I
also tried to keep a kind of architecture that is respectful of the
surrounding urban or rural environment, meaning a kind of architecture
that volumetrically, culturally and aesthetically is in phase with its
direct environment. Simone Kosremelli, Lebanesse architect. |