Re Edging The City: Exploring the Culture of Islamabad

Abstract

In some way, architecture plays a part in preserving memory and history of a place and representing the culture. Whether or not it was its intended purpose, a building, landscape or even a piece or rock is the essence that witness the happening of that space which is stuck in time. Architecture is an everyday part of this process, its intricate detail in putting history and culture down on its site goes down to every minor detail of the memory of its making. This unique character of architecture can be used to identify various factors that are still ambiguous for that particular area and help clarify various underlying forces forming that area. Using this concept, the thesis deals with studying Islamabad as a case study. Understanding the city, analyzing it, and concluding that it has unique culture in the respect that the city didn't take on the cultural influences from the context itself, but it created its own culture. Still under the process of making, this culture is amalgamation of various already existing cultures (national and international) growing within a city whose purpose was authoritative in nature, primary focus was global exposure, rather than local ties. Primary objective is understanding the purpose of city, its unique nature, build culture and its display of nature, the underlining patterns, lines of forces, attraction points and growth axis. Exploring the grid structure of Islamabad, physical and social grid and the underlying connectors, the web of activities and nodal points, to understand the working of city and the emerging culture of Islamabad, which is then translated architecturally. So the building as an end product would be a homage to emerging culture of new city, whose primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about the situations and working of the city (situated learning) and to preserve the memory of events (museum), primarily consisting of displays and exhibition spaces categorized according to the stages of development of city, supported by their respective institutions.