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The History of Beehive-Shaped Homes |
This wide distribution of a single building style in the same Chalcolithic era suggests a passing fashion. And it was-save in Syria.
Are we to ascribe the beehive house's tenacious longevity to mere inertia, to a sterility of the Syrians' inventive powers, or to the known conservatism of rural communities? Any of these explanations might be plausible, were it not that they also apply to the other beehive - house cultures where, however, this type of man-made housing vanished completely centuries ago. A more convincing explanation for this seeming enigma may be sought in the architectural response of "primitive" man to his environment. In the Aleppo region this environment is especially harsh and uncompromising. Summers approach desert extremes in heat, and the only shade is the shadow cast by one's own body; winters are dry and cold, usually accompanied by bone-numbing winds off the bare plains. And his building materials? No structural steel, concrete, glass brick, plastic panel, ceramic tile, aluminum sheathing, or quarried stone-and even wood to construct a roof is rare and beyond the reach of the common man. Restricted choice of building methods and materials left the north Syrians few alternatives, mostly painful. Their houses had to resist the mechanical stresses of wind pressure and the minor shocks of the frequent earthquakes which afflict the region. Door and window openings had to be few and small to minimize the sun's glare and the entry of hot air during the day as well as cold air at night. And they had to have a high-heat-capacity roof to absorb the sun's rays during the day, and slowly reradiate it toward the interior during the cool night; the roof, furthermore, should have a continuous surface to provide a maximum of shade with a minimum of area exposed to the sun, and it should slope steeply to shed the occasional but torrential rains. All this-and it had to be built of the only abundant material locally available: adobe brick.
The Syrian beehive houses provoke more questions than they answer: Were they independent inventions or only copies? Do they predate their stone Anatolian analogues? How did their unlettered builders apparently achieve instant fulfillment of Frank Lloyd Wright's dictum that "form follows function"? Above all, how did the villagers of northern Syria-in a changing world that glorifies novelty for its own sake-have the wisdom of knowing when to stop? |
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