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LINGUISTIC CONTAMINATION: AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL TOOL FOR INTERROGATINGVERNACULAR TRADITION AND CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE Author(s): Paola Tosolini Source: Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, INTERROGATINGTRADITION: Epistemologies, Fundamentalisms, Regeneration, and Practices: TwentiethAnniversary Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional

Environments, December 12-15, 2008, United Kingdom: Conference Abstracts (FALL 2008), p. 62Published by: International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41758627Accessed: 08-04-2015 10:33 UTC

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62 T D S R 2 0.1

LINGUISTIC CONTAMINATION: AN EPISTEMOLOGICA!. TOOL FOR INTERROGATING VERNACULAR TRADITION AND CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE Paola Tosolini

In 1919, in an essay entitled "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot stated that a poet "is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living."

The paper will investigate the idea of tradition intended as matière vivante , as an operative tool used in architectural practice. The epistemology of a tradition, can be achieved through the analysis of what I call linguistic contamination. It is through this analogous action, made by one element on another at a morpho- logical or semantic level, that tradition "moves," regenerating its forms and meanings.

This approach allows us to liberate the classical concept of tradition from its historical, time-bound limits and consider it in a new dynamic way. Tradition can be recognized in the survival of "architectural constants" ferried from the past to the present, sometimes remodeled, and sometimes deformed under the flux of progress and change. Some of these constants are, for instance, the Finnish tupa, the Spanish bóveda , and the Swiss chambre du tué.

This epistemic exercise will focus on the identification of the different kinds of contaminations which have occurred between vernacular architecture and modern architecture. The way in which a lexicon of the past has been used in a language whose syntax is yet new will be investigated through case studies from modern and contemporary times.

B.7 SPACES OF CITIZENSHIP

RESTRUCTURING PLACE: POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION PROJECTS IN LEBANON Marwan Ghandour Iowa State University, U.S.A.

SPACES OF INSURGENCY: REFUGEE SQUATTING AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING IN CALCUTTA Romola Sanyal Rice University, U.S. A.

INTERROGATING THE URBAN PROCESS: DIRECTED BY VISION OR CRISIS? Heba Farouk Ahmed Cairo University, Egypt

DEATH AS ARRIVAL: U.S. MILITARISM, FOREIGN-BORN SOLDIERS, AND POSTHUMOUS CITIZENSHIP Elizabeth Lee University of British Columbia, Canada

CONTESTING TRADITIONS IN JAPANESE-AMERICAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS Lynne Horiuchi University of California, Berkeley, US. A.

RESTRUCTURING PLACE: POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION PROJECTS IN LEBANON Marwan Ghandour

Postwar reconstruction projects provide a unique opportunity to examine how spaces produced by diverse actions over a long period of time may be reenvisioned and politically sanitized. In particular, current reconstruction projects in Lebanon reveal how they may produce space that empowers particular political net- works rather than merely recover a devastated environment. Looking at three active reconstruction projects - Solidere, Wa'd, and Nahr el-Bared - I will compare design strategies employed in relation to the spatial and political configurations they produce.

Solidere has transformed downtown Beirut into a haven for neoliberal exchange. By transforming all property into market shares, it freed space from social claims, dissociating the area both spatially and economically from its context. This allowed rapid development of the urban environment, but it also made that development unsustainable, as the space itself symbolically embodied a biased political strategy. As such, the area has become a target for opposition groups, who have recently camped there, causing a regression of once "flourishing" businesses.

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