INTBAU Tradition Today conference and book

INTBAU was launched on Thursday 24 January 2002 with a one day conference entitled Tradition Today, held at The Prince's Foundation in London. The day began with an introduction and welcome from Foundation director David Lunts, who read out a message from HRH The Prince of Wales, who has agreed to become Patron of INTBAU.

The twelve speaker have now written chapters for INTBAU's forthcoming book, Tradition Today: Continuity in Architecture and Society, which will be published by WIT Press in Autumn 2006. Please use the form below if you'd like to know when it is published.

The nature of tradition

Cesare Poppi, anthropologist from the University of East Anglia, speaking on "Transcending time: rethinking the invention of Tradition", began the introductory session with a densely argued piece leavened by amusing examples from his field work. The presentation, drawing on an analysis of tradition as analytical tool and theoretical construct, drawn into sharp focus by the advent of globalisation, provided a solid foundation for rest of the day.

Clive Erricker, Reader in the Study of Religions at University College Chichester, addressed "Religious traditions, globalisation and cultural change", dealing movingly with the issue of tradition in the context of immigration and both cultural formation and assimilation. Interesting examples from British Muslim and Buddhist communities gave immediacy to his arguments.

Andrew Clegg, of Errol Brick Company Ltd, speaking on "Links in a chain: Antiquity and the present in building technology", described brick making as "the oldest profession" (at 15,000 years BCE). He linked the early brickmakers of ancient Mesopotamia (with a poetic analysis of the wondrous Tower of Babel) to the rediscovery of brick making traditions in Great Britain, noting that his brickworks used the same clay deposits as had the Romans before him.

Law, legibility & language

Opening the second session, Richard Kindersley, of Kindersley Studio, London, spoke on "Ancient letter carving and computer type design" and used illustrations to show how some of the most beautiful, traditional scripts from Roman Imperial inscriptions to Eric Gill's exquisite Gill Sans font had followed on each other. Kindersley's work as a type designer provided a basis for the examination of the role of tradition in modern fonts such as Hermann Zapf's Palatino of 1950 (right), which closely follows Roman precedents.

Linguist Professor Viktor M. Zhivov, from the Russian Academy of Science, spoke on "Language as tradition", arguing cogently that tradition is the basis of language. His examples of English pronunciation drawn from across America and Europe, and of written Russian language, gave emphasis to his point that written and spoken language have different traditions.

Michael Lobban, Reader in Law at Queen Mary, University of London drew on a range of eminent jurists from the middle ages to the present in his piece on "Tradition and the Law", demonstrating the capacity for evolution through tradition demonstrated by British common law over many centuries. His piece opened with mention of Blackstone's memorable late eighteenth century image of the English law as a Georgianised gothic castle of redundant though picturesque battlements and bright warm daily living quarters.

Tradition and diversity

Gastronomer Lynne Chatterton, in "Tradition and culture in food and gastronomy" which opened the third session after lunch, described some of the frightening agricultural, manufacturing and retailing practices and trends undermining traditional high quality foods based on season and region. Her piece underlined how Modernist "improvements" to traditional foods had often left them as almost unrecogniseable industrial products retaining little food value.

Dr Khaled Azzam, Director of VITA at the Prince's Foundation, spoke on "Tradition and the Architecture of Islam", providing some fascinating background to the sacred in Islamic architecture and its expression in the very material world of building and construction of urban space. The speech was a compelling look at a living culture in which the sacred was held to be present in all human activities.

Alexander Stoddart, sculptor (above right), provided a stimulating and provocative argument on the "Hidden Diversity in Traditional Art", arguing passionately for a better informed critique of the place of public sculpture in today's city against the incursions of Modernism. His explanation that the opposite of conceptual art was perceptual rather than representational art, and his distinction between statuary and sculpturewere both useful and memorable, as was his detailed explanation of the iconography of posture in traditional sculpture.

Buildings & places

In the fourth session, Robert Adam, speaking on "Traditional Architecture, Modern Building" gave a very visual presentation which reviewed survey findings on attitudes to housing to illustrate the preferences for traditional over Modernist housing types among the broad range of consumers. The talk drew on research material by the Popular Housing Group published as Kerb Appeal, which demonstrated the British public's continued affection for traditional design.

Léon Krier (right, on the podium), the influential architect and urban theorist, spoke on "Traditional urbanism" in his keynote address, using drawings and photographs of various commissions to illustrate the beauty and utility of a number of newly planned traditional urban spaces. Krier's argued that tradition was modernity, whereas traditionalism was not, rueing the Modernist's "generalised counter-intuitive approach to construction", and emphasising the room for development in new traditional architecture.

Philosopher Professor Hans Kolstad of the University of Norway closed the session with an address on "Tradition, architecture and nature". Kolstad argued that much had been lost from human capacities for expression and feeling with the arrival of blocky, rigid Modernist domestic urban architecture in Scandinavia and elsewhere.

Plenary session

The speakers regrouped for a final plenary session in which they fielded questions from participants.

Krier noted that he never saw stylistic or syntax errors in buildings erected before 1940, while buildings from after that date were often visually inconsistant and stylistically incoherent even within their own stylistic grammar. Lobban, Zhivov and Poppi agreed that mistakes were a mechanism by which tradition mutated, and Zhivov explained that provincial and marginal expressions and misquotations of tradition were frequently adopted by the centre as revitalisations.

The day ended with a reception at which INTBAU was formally launched to short speeches from Bill Westfall of the University of Notre Dame, Christine Franck of the Institute for Classical Architecture, and Victor Allen of Archicentre in Sydney.

Publication

Tradition Today: Continuity in Architecture and Society will be published by WIT Press in 2007. Please register as a free General Member of INTBAU to be kept up-to-date with information about the forthcoming publication.

Subscription

You can help us to publish this ground-breaking work by becoming a subscriber at one of the following rates:

� 70 - which will include a free copy of the book
� 150 - which will include three free copies
� 500 - which will include ten free copies.

All subscribers' names will be acknowledged, according to the level of contribution.

The value of this resource on traditional architecture and tradition is endorsed in the forword by His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, patron of INTBAU. The book will add value to th library of resources on traditional architecture and tradition in general, linking the names of the subscribers with the book and the values it promotes.