4 C O N T E X T 1 2 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 2 From The Story of Architecture by Patrick Nuttgens, Phaidon, 1983 The story of architecture begins with the story of civilisation, at the stage when primitive man found himself able to improve upon hunting and gathering by establishing a settlement. Not just a single building – if that was all he needed he could have stayed in a cave. Instead, with others, he established the beginning of a town or city. So intimate is the connection between man’s building of the first cities and his development of a civilised way of life that the very word civilisation comes from the Latin word civis, which means citizen, or dweller in a city. Sir Kenneth Clark points out that a sense of permanence is the prerequisite of civilisation, and what could more explicitly indicate that man meant to give up his wandering ways and settle down permanently than his building of a city? Men, said Aristotle, come together in cities in order to live; they remain there to live the good life. The earliest indications we have of this settling-down process, between 8000 and 6000 BC, have been found in agricultural villages on the hill fringes of Anatolia and the Zagros Mountains, and to the west in the Levant. Jericho, today a palm-tufted oasis town, dotted with lemon trees in the Judean desert, is the oldest recorded city in the world, and it is in such remains and those of cities further east that we shall find the earliest known architecture. Until the birth of archaeology, however, there was little to draw historians’ attention to the land, now generally accepted as the cradle of civilisation. The Greeks called it Mesopotamia; in the Bible it is the land of Shinar. This land occupied an area between modern Iran and Iraq along the 700-mile course of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates from their sources in the mountains of Anatolia southwards down to the Persian Gulf, and is said by tradition to have been the site of the Garden of Eden, the place where Genesis says human life began. Today it looks unprepossessing. But archaeologists have established that, during the 5,000-year gestation period of civilisation, this desolate area was a rich alluvial delta, teeming with fish and wildfowl. It was, as Leonard Cottrel described it in Lost Cities (1957), ‘the most fertile land on earth, mile after mile of flat green fields, palm-groves and vineyards, criss-crossed by a network of irrigation canals… which at dawn and sunset still show as dark lines across the alluvial plain.’ The area has become known as the ‘fertile crescent’, but as each generation discovers more remains of early man, its shape resembles less a crescent than an ink blot bounded by a scattered circle of seas – the Black and Caspian Seas, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. fundamental flaw in the current debate was an authoritarian approach. In his closing remarks, Karl Sharro, an architect, urged us to replace discourses of anxiety with ones of opportunity. The focus should be on recovering a vision for the future, harnessing humanity’s creative energies, and realising aspirations. Tindalls Cottage in its original location Listed buildings prosecutions Please note a change of email contact details for notifying the IHBC with information about listed building prosecutions. Send these to Bob Kindred at either government@ihbc.org.uk or bob. kindred@bobkindred.demon.co.uk Reconstruction TheWeald and Downland Open Air Museum, at Singleton near Chichester, West Sussex, is reconstructing Tindalls Cottage. The 18th century home will become the latest addition to the museum’s collection of rescued historic rural buildings. Tindalls Cottage was dismantled in 1974 as a result of the construction of the Bewl Water Reservoir, near Ticehurst in East Sussex, and has been in store at the museum since then. The cottage, timber framed with a large stone and brick chimney, contains two rooms on each floor, and an attic. Dating from the late 17th or early 18th century, it would have probably been originally the home of a labourer.
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