The decline vs the rise of architectural and urban forms in the vernacular villages of southwest Saudi Arabia

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This paper analyzes the vernacular architectural and urban form in settlements of southwest Saudi Arabia. It attempts to explore the forces behind their decline, transformation and rise. It provides a pluralistic historical background of the genuine vernacular architectural and urban forms of an insular context. The decline and rise of new architectural and urban form are hot issues in the current architectural discourse where the paper attempts to explore. The paper suggests possible courses of action regarding the planning and design practices in a context that faces an apparent conflict between the vernacular and modern in such a region. The justification of the decline of vernacular architectural and urban forms are in many ways attributed to an overwhelming attitude toward modernization and inadequately changing culture. Overall, the vernacular architectural and urban forms represent a cultural heritage of archetypical forms containing answers to many questions that have been bypassed in the country’s rush to modernize during the last four decades. A more appropriate approach to planning and design practices in the southwest of Saudi Arabia today might be based, for example, on a renewed awareness of how cultural and social aspects were implied in vernacular architectural and urban forms. In this context, the architecture and urbanism is viewed more than an agglomeration of buildings and streets whereby each function as a commodity to be produced according to overly rationalized systems of production and exchange and imported notions of users and individual comfort. Such an attitude would incorporate a new focus on psychological, anthropological and architectural perspectives to obtain a synthetic account of how local ecological, economic, social, and cultural factors affect the rise of appropriate new architectural and urban form.