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Global Context?
Globalization, Culture, Nations, Ethnicity, Contemporary International Issues, What?
Many of these new terms and ideas might be incredibly vague and vast, abstract and wide-spanning; perhaps they can best be described as murky. However, they all present a relevance to not only contemporary politics and business, but also architecture. I continue to maintain that architecture is inherently political.
The question, or rather a good question to ask, is “How do these phenomena affect architecture and architectural practice.” Not being an expert, I can say that in term of globalization, for the most part, the architectural industry is becoming increasingly amorphous as the cultural interactions and exchanges are creating an incoherent network of collaborators. We are seeing values shift, disintegrate, unify, and even reappear. The practice of outsourcing is becoming is increasingly popular, as with many other industries. However there are other issues I think may be far more interesting the exchange of human beings from one country to another.
I recently picked up some books that I think would make for a series of interesting summer reads. I began readinf much of (AM)OMA’s Content, which is an incredible book, that I hope everyone can get there hands on along side with Koolhas’s MUTATIONS (another awesome title in which Bruce Mau make incredible contributions). Aside from books generated by architects, I largely reccommend the following texts: Failed States by Noam Chomsky, Ethinicity (an Oxford Reader, it’s an edited compilation of a number of texts on ethnicity including the writings of Manning Nash and Max Weber), The Clash of Civilizations by Hutchingson, American Nation edited by Krakau, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide: World COnflicts.
I think there are huge implications around and how groups form. I became fascinated in the various ideas circulating ethnicity and it’s theorized subjective formations as well as the increasing number of recent conflicts that has spurred world wide on the basis of ethnic conflict. I think it is beneficial to understand today’s world, its market, identities, and tensions, and to understand the global players who are all in one way or another defining the relationships that exist between themselves and each other.
Interestingly enough, I think there is a clear divided between what architecture is, as well as where it is. On one hand you have a cosmopolitan, or universal, avant-garde and on the other hand you have, I believe, culturally sensitive regionalists. One bolsters shared universal ideas and the other attempts to accentuate cultural distinctions. I can’t understand at this point which of the two stands as the most valid approach to design, however, I can say that I have personally founded my design thinking based on cultural-consciousness. However, I feel more and more the urge to abandon such ideas and motivations as see, more and more, culture fallacies with mythic proportions. With such intellectual realization, I believe, more and more, that architecture should not be used as index features, signifiers, or devices of cultural or ethnic identities and distinctions differentiating people or place (the one thing architecture does best), but rather, I believe, architecture should be a unifier, in the cosmopolitan sense, and become a mediator of the bridging of the perceived or real separate identities, people, groups, classes, cultures, and ethnicity that exist within societies. Architecture can be, and should be, a measure of social inclusion and interactivity, not the other was around.
I think that’s where I current stand on the issue of architecture. If anything, I think that is my current architectural conviction.
