Portable Architecture and Gateway Cities
4.3 Portable Images of European Architecture in Asia
architecture, rather than being mired in often unspoken assumptions of sessility and stasis in the built environment. As Aleppo had been governed by the Ayyubids, the Zangids, Saljuqs, the Hamdanids (Shia), the Umayyads, the Greeks, the Romans and the Byzantines, architectural exchanges are part of this varied architectural legacy. This mutability is the result of many exchanges over time. Portability relates more obviously to architectural mobility, and is the direct exchange of building parts (such as spolia) or the adoption of distant architectural elements in buildings through the transmission of architectural knowledge whether by well known and established routes or by more obscure and convoluted pathways (or both). Mutability is the ability of a building to undergo changes in appearance and identity. Thus buildings are seen as having the chameleon ability of metamorphosis, to be able to undergo constant changes in relation to changes in the power relationships of the city, as well as religious vicissitudes (for examples see Part II).
4.3.1 Illustrations
The ambassadorial exchanges between European courts and the Ottoman Empire, included illustrations of French palaces and gardens. The engraving of the view of Versailles palace from the orange orchard (1721) was one such illustration.46 This engraving would have influenced the building of Sa’dâbâd and its gardens, after the return of the Ottoman ambassador from France (see Chapter 5).
In addition to illustrations, wall paintings showing buildings, gardens, rivers and landscapes on the exterior and interior surfaces of houses, palaces and mosques provided information about these environments to the inhabitants and visitors to these buildings.
Wall paintings were potent material sources in transmitting the ever-changing face of local and distant urban environments (see Chapter 5 and Chapter 6).47 The application of European techniques to the production of wall paintings on buildings also effected the more realistic depiction of aspects of the architectural environment in Istanbul and its surrounds (see Chapter 5). Most wall paintings were executed on the interior walls, and
46 Göçek, East Encounters West, France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, 77.
47 They could also be the source of transmitting past images of these town or city environments.
thus were visible to the inhabitants of the buildings and their guests. These images formed part of the corpus of the travelling images of the architecture of Empire.
4.3.2 Intangible Images
Images of a building were often imprinted in the traveller’s mind, and these images are referred to as travelling ‘memories’.48 A patron could still retain these images, without there being a written record of his observations.49 These travelling ‘memories’ also relate to the images and writings in the group of Arab works belonging to the fada’il genre (such as writings by al-Khiyari, al-Nabulusi and al-Dimyat), where the viewers (pilgrims and Islamic scholars) described in words what they had seen on their journeys to distant architectural displays in cities such as Jerusalem (see Chapter 6), Medina and Mecca.
Islamic patrons (mostly ambassadors and courtiers) also saw and retained ‘memories’ of European built environments. This aspect (in the European milieu of Venice) has been highlighted in a study tracing the ‘impact’ that the Islamic world had on Venetian architecture from 1100-1500.50 Alternatively, to express this concept of ‘impacts’
(Howard’s perspective) in terms of architectural exchange, exchanges with Cairo and Damascus in the buildings and open spaces of Venice are an expression of this phenomenon. In India, the experience of seeing a sector of an Asian city with buildings from a distant European metropolis, could also travel in the visual memory of the Islamic observer to inspire a recreation of aspects of what he or she saw in this city to their own
48 Grabar refers to the carrying of ‘memories’ by patrons and the translation of these memories into local techniques. Oleg Grabar, “Islamic Architecture and the West: Influences and Parallels”, in Islamic Visual Culture, 1100-1800, Constructing the Study of Islamic Art, Volume II, Oleg Grabar (Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 381.
49 It is harder to reconstruct ‘remembered’ images of buildings and gardens than those from illustrations.
Most illustrations in the eighteenth century were more accurate than earlier depictions. The accuracy of illustrations also depended on the skill of the artist and the use of the camera obscura.
50 Deborah Howard states that ‘memories’ of Islamic architecture played a part in the impact of Islamic architecture on Venetian architecture, when Venetian merchants returned from Egypt and Syria with memories of the mosques and palaces they had seen there. Therefore these ‘memories’ were critical to the
‘influence’ of Islamic architecture on Venetian, in the period from 1100-1500. Howard generally presents a complex, diffuse and intellectual image of the Venetian exchange (Venice saw itself as a biblical
Jerusalem); but she does mention some concrete examples of architectural portability. Howard, Venice and the East, The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100-1500, 99, 6, 217, 218, Fig 109.
locality; such was the case with Saadat Ali Khan when he observed the English buildings, streets and gardens in Calcutta (see Chapter 7).51
4.3.3 Ephemeral and Portable Models
There is another category of portability in the architectural environment of Islamic (and non-Islamic) Asia that enables the portability of buildings and their images, rather than their terrestrial confinement: the construction of models of buildings from temporary materials that were carried from place to place, and then destroyed after the ceremony or after the completion of a monument.52 These portable and ephemeral models of buildings and gardens further destabilises the assumption that information about a building’s decoration, form and structure is confined to its physical location. Again, this shows how information about a building’s appearance is transferred from its original apparently
‘immobile’ state, and singular location, to many other contexts and physical locations through the portability of the model. It also highlights the importance of buildings within a specific cultural context, as they set the scene for other activities occurring on the human stage. Some examples of portable and ephemeral models of buildings in the Asian context are the construction and use of taziya in Lucknow (Chapter 7), the building of tabernacles in Aleppo (Chapter 6), Hindu portable temples (Chapter 7), and the parade of sugar models of gardens in Istanbul (Chapter 5). The three case studies in Part II, discuss these examples in more depth.53 Further, the copying of architectural images on three dimensional objects such as illustrations on ceramics, and paintings on the lids of boxes (see Chapter 5), circulating at a more restricted level, but having the possibility of being caught up in the wider world of the ‘travelling’ architectural image, are further examples of architectural portability in this category of ephemeral and portable models.
51 Isfahan also had a broad ceremonial thoroughfare in the eighteenth century.
52 They could also be preserved, particularly if they were made of costly materials.
53 See Chapter 5, Section 5.9.3 Models of the Gardens, Chapter 6 Section 6.5.2, the Judayda Quarter of Aleppo and Chapter 7 Section 7.7.3, Karbala in Lucknow-the Bara Imambara and taziya.