مختارات من عمارة العالم العربي 1914-2014 (ص 35)

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مختارات من عمارة العالم العربي 1914-2014 (ص 35)

المحتوى

م قمر
[etigh ‏سكت‎
fa)
had the opportunity to explore the relevancy of the knowledge they
acquired in Britain, in their home land. Two of these British-educated
architects, AbdelMonim Mustafa and Hamid ElKhawad, were able to
distinguish themselves through their authentic design approaches.
AbdelMonim Mustafa, is now considered the father of modern
architecture in Sudan. Examples of significant buildings designed by
Mustafa include the Headquarters for the Arab Bank for Economic
Development in Africa, El-ikhwa Commercial Building, El-Turabi
Primary School and Nifidi and Malik Mixed-Use offices and apart-
ment buildings in Khartoum's Central Business District.
Architecture from 2000 onwards
During this period, architectural practice in Sudan seems to have
regressed. With the discovery of oil, and aspirations for images of
Dubai, glass towers and aluminum cladding came to dominate the
architecture style. By then, as Rowan Moore puts it “form started
to follow budget”.
The Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Khartoum, designed
by Studio TamAssociati, a firm from Venice, represents the best of
what has been built in Sudan after 2000. The project opened in
2010 and has won the 2013 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The
building manifests an outstanding marriage between the use of local
materials and careful use of space. Mixed modes of ventilation and
natural light enable all spaces to be homely and intimate.
Conclusion
As mentioned earlier, this article does not aim to trace all architec-
ture development in Sudan. Rather, it intends to present a selective
summary of the evolution of architecture in Sudan between 1900
and 2014.
While early Sudanese architecture was clearly influenced by
the modern movement, it also developed with an appreciation for
regional factors that make it unique to Sudan. The degree of accept-
ance and influence that this development had on future architectural
production in Sudan remains to be seen. The break that this trajectory
constituted in the natural development of the architectural heritage
of the country also needs to be studied, as well as analyzing the influ-
ence on future built culture. What appears to be undisputed is that
the above factors, established by the colonial architects, and later
exerting a strong influence on Sudanese architects, seem to have
shaped the architectural scene up to the end of the 1970s.
Additionally, due to Eurocentric approaches to education and a
history of colonialism, some architectural academics in Sudan take
little pride in local culture and how it impacts the built environment.
Architectural production in the country is today characterized
by imitation and a rootless character. Attempts at emulation of a
regional approach are usually misguided or politically motivated. The
economic aspirations resulting from oil wealth, have led to a trend
of imitating the current architecture of the United Arab Emirates
or Malaysia.
* This article is a modified version of a langer version by the
authors titled: Sudanese Architecture (1900 ~ 1970): A Firm
Footheld in the Modern Movement
Somalia
Rashid Ali
To popular imagination, Somalia is probably the last place one
would expect to encounter Modernist architecture. However, for
much of the twentieth century, the country — particularly its urban
areas — were Spatially, politically and culturally very different to
the way in which they have been represented in the mass media in
recent years.
The country’s oldest urban centers with a significant built form
of architectural value are to be found along the coast. Some of these
towns were important trading ports that had played a significant role
in both the movement of goods to and from the Arabian Peninsula and
India, and in the spread of Islamic cultural influences along the East
African coast. Influenced by Arabs, Persian and Indian merchants,
and, later, by European settlers, coastal towns —as urban enclaves
with diverse inhabitants ~ have historically remained outside the
nomadic traditional clan structure of the interior, to which most
Somalis belong.
Modernist influences on Somalia’s pre-civil war architecture
owe their morphology and characteristics to its former colonial
power, Italy, the last of the European powers to join the “scramble
for Africa’, Some of the key structures built under colonial rule have
in some ways influenced the form and style of the civic architec-
ture that was subsequently built in the country’s main cities. This is
most evident in the capital, Mogadishu. The city’s modern history
began when the Italians arrived in 1889, taking control of the city
and other coastal settlements, after having purchased the port of
Benadir (Mogadishu region). After Rome took direct control of the
administration in 1908, Mogadishu was officially made the capital
of the new colony of Southern Somalia. The built form predating this
period is of a compact walled city with two separate neighborhoods.
Behind the heavy walls through which caravans brought goods from
the country, was an Arab-style old center generally made up of ter-
raced one-storey houses with battlemented cornices in the noblest
examples, and thatched adobe homes.
The transformation of the. old city began under its first governor
Giovanni De Martino, who immediately started to undertake projects
that radically altered the character of the old city and which consti-
tuted an enduring influence on architectural and urban development
in the country for most of the twentieth century. A plan of Mogadishu,
produced in 1912 at 1:500 scale, can be considered the first town
plan in Somalia, and one of the earliest in the continent, Under the
plan, the walls of the old Arab style city were knocked down and two
new native suburbs were to be constructed to the east and to the
west. In contrast to other colonial planning models, for instance in
Asmara and the Libyan medinas, where the colonial city developed
next to the existing native city, in Mogadishu the buildings of the
occupying power were constructed in its center, surrounded by Arab
neighborhoods inhabited by Indians and Eritreans, outside which a
modest native city gradually grew. In the center a new administrative
area, connecting the two old neighborhoods and defined by a wide
north-south avenue, was created.
Within a short space of a time, the population increased dramati-
cally, and the city became the subject of a new town plan. The footprint
of the 1928 plan was based on the coastal outline connected by a series
of roads that often adapted caravan routes heading further inland. The
modifications which followed the 1912 plan, envisaged wide thorough-
fares and the creation of a new European quarter.
On the whole, the architecture of this period, implemented under
the two plans, imitated colonial stereotypes and would come to
define Mogadishu’s cityscape. However, two exceptions, considered
to be the earliest explicitly modernist examples in the country, were
the Fiat Garage and the Croce del Sud Hotel (Southern Cross Hotel)
built in 1933 by architect Carlo Enrico Rava.
The characteristics of much of the architecture built in Somalia
in the first half of the century broadly tended to be a mixture of colo-
nial, Islamic, Norman gothic, indigenous vernacular and modernist
aesthetic. However, it was the modernist examples that were to have
an enduring influence on post-independence architecture, since this
was largely seen as a way for the country to assert its identity using
architectural forms. Significant public buildings that mirrored the
stripped-down, modernist aesthetic of earlier examples such as the
Croce del Sud Hotel, included the National Theatre and the National
Assembly, both of which were completed between 1969 and 1974.

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مختارات من عمارة العالم العربي 1914-2014

تاريخ

2014

المنشئ

جورج عربيد