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Says poet: Friedrich Holderlin.
By Vahideh Ebrahim Zade: Architect and philosophy researcher
Heidegger, German philosopher, considers human habitation poetic, owning to the fact that human being is traveling. Dimension traverse is what human do in habitation. But traversing the dimension between where and where?
Is traversing between the room and kitchen poetic?
How about traversing the distance between street and parking lot?
A few years ago, I had an opportunity to spend some time in Esfahak with Puya Khazayeli team and Behnaz Motarjem (Soil Architecture Research School). The rout is defined as below:
Took the train from Mashhad and get off in Tabas. I had to get a car from Tabas and when I got to the village, call Mr. Yaqoubi to guide me to my place of residence. The team of the research institute, which had left from Tehran, would arrive tomorrow. The simple and clear definition of the path I had to follow left me no ambiguity. I thought everything was clear. But when I arrived at the site of the research institute at twelve o'clock at night, I realized that everything was dark. The only light just showed the soil next to my shoes was the light of my mobile phone, and far away, the sky line seemed to be woodland out there.
I dialed the number I was given to and gave the address of a place where I did not know where it was in that dark village to Mr. Yaqoubi. Later, the sound of engine roared in the heart of the desert the conical light of a lamp illuminated the road. Mr.Yaqoubi came to take me from darkness to light. The experience of this amount of darkness was so strange for me, who were born in the city and post-Edison era, which I thought something might happen at any time now. A well might have been on my way, an animal might have bitten my leg, and a hand might have suffocated me! Mr. Yaqoubi went ahead and I was reading the way in Braille with my hand touching the thatch walls.
Little by little, bright spots were found on the ground. Like gold flakes. As we went further, I realized that there were lanterns there on the ground or on houses. Is there any electricity line in the village? I asked Mr. Yaqoubi.
Not in the old part of the town, he answered. During the restoration Faramarz Parsi suggested that electricity should not be in the village in modern typical way, many things had been restored as they were before the earthquake, He added.
Mr. Yaqoubi raised the lantern and pointed to a wooden door where I had to spend the night. I thanked the man whose face I did not see and leaned my bag against the wall which its color was not visible to me. Mobile phone in hand and just like a citizen in a dark hunted city, I jumped out of a house where I did not understand its nature. I followed the light of lanterns in the streets of the village and headed to places I did not know. I had the feeling of being trapped in the endless womb of a mysterious woman. I sat in a place on the ground where the sky was full of stars above my head and gave me some light. I could only feel the shadow of distant palm trees. I was waiting for the morning to find out where I had come and what this village looked like. I traveled from sky to the earth through my eyes and came to a thousand different fictional expressions about the face of this mysterious woman (village). I was in sheer cosmos. This experience was something the architect of project, Faramarz Parsi, had given me (the audience) deliberately withholding the light and experience of night and absolute darkness.
Now I understood correctly how poetically, man lives on this earth, and traverses to the moon.
An architect is aware of the full and empty. He knows where to put and where not to, where to give light and where to withhold. And only the architect can be the one who knows the traverses of the dimension between the earth and the sky, from which comes culture, tradition, history, and poetry.