ethics pol itics ideology scholarship attention
books globalisation by stephanie white
Owen, Graham, editor. Architecture, Ethics and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge, 2009
ISBN 13 978-0-415-32373-4 (hdbk) ISBN 13 978-0-415-32374-1 (pbk) ISBN 13 978-0-415-32377-7 (ebk)
One of the things I miss most about no longer teaching architecture in the States (besides the rather terrific salaries) is access to the massive conferences and symposia that good universities hold on a regular basis. Some go on for days, and one comes out totally swept away by the headiness of current scholarship. Graham Owen’s book on architecture, ethics and globalisation comes out of one such extended event, the Fourth Harrison Symposium on Professionalism at Tulane School of Architecture in New Orleans. He started the symposium by citing Rem Koolhaas: Does being part of a specific culture impose a systematic dishonesty upon us, because we are part of a culture and not free? Maybe one of the exhilarating possibilities of a leap to somewhere else, where we no longer have to posture to become members in good standing of our communities is this uncamouflaged freedom. For Owen, this paragraph is the smoking gun that makes clear Koolhaas’s embrace of the global project, especially in China, without qualms about ideology or political restriction. The symposium started here and set off in a far-reaching, extended discussion of the practice of architecture when there is no, or at most a very weak, social contract. For Owen, Koolhaas’s perfidy is his betrayal of the social responsibility of the architect – a dismay as avant garde architects go global, building a lot for socially questionable regimes. One wonders if the sense of betrayal, notwithstanding evidence to the contrary, has come from the elision of the avant garde with liberal left progressive politics, proper socialist thinking about designing for the greater good. This was, however, so rarely the linkage. Take Koolhaas’s 1978 Delirious New York , written after a stint at the IAUS under Eisenman. He actually felt a sneaking tenderness towards New York’s corporatism, its hopelessly idealistic ambitions to extend, extend further, to be a total state, echoed unsurprisingly in contemporary China. The avant garde has always broadcast its ‘apolitical’ admiration for action, for the ability to build. Why did so many of us, of a certain generation, assume that progressive art meant progressive politics? And that to find a niche as an architect in rampant new capitalist systems is somehow to betray our role as social improvers, a role we never really had despite twentieth century modernist rhetoric of social equality and access. That was perhaps an error.
Architecture, Ethics and Globalization has two parts, each consisting of a paper, a response to that paper, three or four subsequent papers and then three long, detailed, searching, intelligent and serious panel discussions about the material just presented. The papers are not allowed to sit as a list of monologues, the responses are not allowed to be glib, the participants do not grandstand, and if they did, it has been subdued in the editing. Owen had wanted to have this discussion for a long time, for years. He got it, and a powerful book he has made from it. Philosophers, sociologists, architectural theorists, academics and practitioners, with a collective backlist of publications on ethics and contemporary globalised culture, focussed their wide interests on the subject of architecture: how it should be taught in the current transcultural, transnational world and how it should be addressed, critiqued, understood. The old rules do not apply; postmodern relativism as explained by Geoffrey Galt Harpham has made critical inspection invalid. The free market brings with it a freed conscience. Not so, says Michael Benedikt who is quite capable of saying ‘this is good; that is bad’. And so it goes. The code of ethics for professional architects comes under scrutiny. Is one bound by the legal and ethical strictures of one’s own country when working outside that country where there are few if any codes of conduct? Business is done quite differently in the developing world, in other cultures, than in Europe or the USA. Koolhaas implies that abroad, one is free of all those fetters, that tedious demand for transparency. Is this another version of Rumsfeld declaring that ‘freedom’ includes the freedom to do bad things? It is essentialising to say that there is an ultimate good or bad: postmodernism taught us that, but is that helpful? This is a necessary book, not least because it illustrates what serious architectural discussion actually is. /
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