Vernacular architecture: Laying bare the source of inspiration behind the building industry’s magna opera

Written by: Isaiah (25-I4)

Designed by: Kayden (26-E6)

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The serendipitous encounter

An architect oversees building designs, a cultural custodian makes heritage stand the test of time, and never the twain shall meet - or should they? 

Eminent architects are upfront about superseding roles outside of their profession, making unorthodox detours across disciplines and idiosyncratic social groups to integrate new functional attributes into their work. They have naturally responded to the uptick in clientele demand for climate-friendly features by making inroads into vernacular forms of architecture, synergistically meshing ideas bequeathed by the tapestry of wisdom from common folk, leading lives their ancestors laid the groundwork for millennia, to create a new class of modern architecture. Regrettably, the ways through which locals have made do in raising dwellings with their inability to procure materials and manpower beyond their immediate locality and the absence of any cushy technology have long been misconstrued by Western-centric academics as ‘primitive’; I present you this (trigger warning: racism) for starters. If only one could break free from self-limiting parochialisms and racial high-grounds - for the featural elements of vernacular buildings, particularly those that serve a climate-regulatory or disaster-resistant role and that frequently run for a much lower price point compared to conventional solutions, are now spearheading the respective ascendance and democratisation of sustainable architecture. 

Still reading? Follow me as I take you through the 2 salient case studies I have chosen to chronicle this momentous shift to a bottom-up approach in the world of architecture. 

Sakhnin, Israel 

One thing became patently clear to Jewish-Egyptian sustainable architect Abed Elrahman Yassin during his foray into building design as he dropped by the small town of Sakhnin, basking in the unrelenting Middle Eastern midsummer sun: the buildings had to work with the elements. Tasked with proposing a climate-adapted building layout for a museum nestled in the undulating valleys of the Levant, he took to the table ideas considered unorthodox in the world of architecture at that time. Ideas, ascribed to the sages of ancient pastoral communities that roamed Arabia, that would propel the piloted showcase - later actualised in the construction of the museum - along with Abed to professional stardom. The result? A climatically optimised feat of engineering that pays homage to Arab ingenuity equally strongly through vernacular building design and being a stronghold for the dynamic Middle Eastern modern art scene. Or simply AMOCA, which chiefly aspires to broker long-term mediation and eventual synergy between Jewish and Muslim populations in the Levant.

Silt, hoisted in copious quantities from the area demarcated as the building’s foundation, was dried and compacted into earthen bricks (حائط ترابي), which then serve as the museum’s main construction material. This technique piggybacked on established ones perfected and developed by nomadic societies that call the Arabian peninsula - a barren terrain offering little more than a Spartan mode of life - home. It harnesses the improvised material’s high thermal mass to even out extremes of temperature in the arid desert; absorbing heat from the Sun without a dramatic rise in temperature and expelling it into the interior of homes and buildings at night when the temperature dips below the habitable range, as is par for the course in desert climates. Another commonality in AMOCA and vernacular structures - the dome façade (قُبّة) - encloses the largest possible living space with the least surface area and ergo, minimises exposure to solar insolation. A vent is made at the dome’s apex to channel away warm air that would otherwise have smouldered within the imporous earthen walls, while cooler air is drawn from lower-level latticed apertures to create passive ventilation. Like cogs in a machine, the aforementioned features interweave and interact in an additive fashion to furnish communities with habitable respites from the perpetuity of year-round heat. So much thought to subsist in the desert - meant not in the ‘law of diminishing returns’ kind of way, but in a way that seeks to emulate and promulgate the human-centric approach of vernacular architecture.  

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Zurich, Switzerland

Though looking too insipidly minimalistic for its allusive character in traditional Japanese wooden joinery to be readily apparent, the Tamedia Office Building is as much a child of ancient East Asian architectural tenets as timeless wonders located a world away like the Forbidden City (故宫) and the Hōryūji Temple pagoda (五重塔). The German-medium media juggernaut TX Group is headquartered inside the fully timber-framed structure, recognisably poising over the alpine Sihl river in downtown Zurich. It is built at a fraction of the time and cost of the uniform garden-variety concrete blocks flanking it on all sides and engineered to weather through the occasional seismic activity common in mountainous Switzerland. 

The office building is also a palpable manifestation of its director Shigeru Ban’s pet goal: to tinker with and draw from his culture’s inexhaustible repository of wisdom, passively and subtly letting his design idiosyncrasy get thrust into being through his creations. A Tokyo native, Shigeru is no detractor of the unfettered coalescence of old and new, having been normalised and displayed at large in the teeming metropolis. Spatially, striking images taken from within the monasterial compounds of Sensō-ji panning out into Tokyo’s glittering skyline abound; temporally, Japan’s metamorphosis from a peripheral military dictatorship and neighbouring China’s vassal state to being the sole Asian peer nation alongside the technologically advanced European colonial bloc in the Age of Imperialism, a development so rapid that old Japan’s continuity never truly got fallen by the wayside. Even earthquake prevention installations had to have this flair, repurposed as Shigeru’s own flair. 

Japan is a tectonically active nation. With approximately 5000 earthquakes recorded annually, of which a small fraction are destructive enough to warrant a stop to normal life within the archipelago, the fearmongering children’s catchword ‘the ground’s tearing apart’ is not just inconsequential mysticism, it’s bound to happen every now and then. In its infancy, Japan adopted seismic-proof timber frame construction methodologies from Tang China through contact with Korea. China, a comparatively more mature civilisation, had already perfected the art of seismic proof architecture in East Asia, culminating in the state’s compilation of and adherence to a groundbreaking Song-era manual that first codified a template for habitable structures, the Treatise on Architectural Methods (營造法式). 

Unlike its Western contemporaries that used synthesised concrete and stone to erect structures hearkening back to Greco-Roman sensibilities, China tinkered with wood - its geography endowed an abundance of dense trees and it was the choice material for living quarters as held in Chinese philosophy. Most saliently, its high tensile strength afforded the durability yet the flexibility to ride out tremors that would have churned stone and concrete structures into rubble. But just as clay is helplessly functionless without the skillful, deft motion of the potter’s hands, timber logs can’t idly wait by in the anticipation of being allotted part of a building to fill in sans an extant technical model. Thankfully, the aforementioned 營造法式 is a conduit into the intricate rabbit hole of Eastern building typology. The archetypal East Asian pre-modern building, chosen as the main subject of discourse due to its evocative nature, is composed of 4 elements: the foundation (臺基), load-bearing beams (樑柱), the mortise-and-tenon brackets (斗拱) and an overhanging, gabled roof (屋頂). The foundation, laid in situ by compressing alternating layers of clay and straw, is a stalwart resting ground on which the timber framework is ensconced on, resisting lateral shear forces generated by seismic waves. The pillars, chiseled into cylindrical units from a sturdy tree species, abuts on ornamental stone pedestals raised from the foundation and are freestanding. They are fastened by inserting horizontal beams through precut slots made in the pillars, and the timber frame is secured by distributing the weight of a heavy, overhanging roof atop flower-shaped brackets spaced evenly along the perimeter of the beams. The roof acts like a cantilever to dampen swaying in the timber structure with the force of inertia, which is structurally sound as the brackets distribute stress from the roof through a large surface area into the beams. Everything is welded shut by gravity, removing the need for extraneous binding materials like glue or metal. 

A spinoff of the foregoing legacy building type was set into force as the office building’s load-bearing core at Shigeru’s discretion. It retains impressively manifold traits of its predecessor while taking on a more subdued form mindful of not sticking out jarringly from the uniform cityscape.

The overtly visible load-bearing structures might seem like shoddy work to conservative architectural schools of thought. Shigeru did not err - this is entirely by design and analogous to how the mortise-and-tenon brackets both display and blur the line between function (shock-absorbancy) and form.

A global shot of the entirely timber-framed skeleton of Tamedia Office Building. The ground-floor pillars are freestanding. 

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In tracing these two seemingly disparate projects, a common thread emerges: architecture is at its most resilient, humane and forward-looking when it abandons the conceit of chartered progress and instead listens laterally and retrospectively. The serendipity lies not merely in architects “discovering” vernacular wisdom, but in recognising that solutions forged under constraint, climate and catastrophe were never naïve detours in architectural history. As Elrahman and Shigeru demonstrate, when professional design practice meets custodial knowledge on an equal footing, the result is neither pastiche nor nostalgia, but quietly radical architecture that reconciles modern aspirations with intelligence that stood the test of time. In doing so, it redefines what sustainable progress can (and might) look like. end