Modernity and Tradition: Contemporary Architecture in Pakistan (The Jubilee Series)

This book explores contemporary issues of development and design relevant to cultures in transition. It challenges criteria for "progress" as measured in terms of material quantities, and argues that any assessment of the modernity paradigm as a strategy for development must take into account its collateral damage: the traumatized lives of countless individuals, impoverishment of whole communities, and a threatened global ecosystem. The book explores some of the central issues in the current discourse on transitional cultures, in a world increasingly dominated by technological innovations and rapidly changing values. Critiquing modernity as a Euro-centric ideology which has little relevance or meaning in the context of cultures with different experiences of history, sensitivities, and belief systems, the book presents the traditional perspective, rooted in perennial wisdom, as an alternative framework. Here not only do art and architecture have a positive and constructive role and function, but human endeavour generally can find a purpose and direction