Architecture and Globalisation | five years on Graham Owen
debate over whether globalisation, though it weakens the boundaries of other nation- states, is in fact synonymous with US imperialism has been given a new twist in the context of Bush-era pre-emptive war. Observations that (partly as a consequence) we have the paradoxical convergence of China and the United States in terms of the market economy, totalitarianism and corruption are also gaining attention. *the bursting of the ‘new economy’ bubble The appearance of cracks in the idea of the free market as an all-encompassing social paradigm has given rise to mistrust, but without adequate replacement models. Widespread alleged or proven corporate criminality (WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Enron, Adelphia, Nortel, CP, Parmalat, Hollinger, etc., etc.), has led to a crisis of faith roughly analogous to that in the Catholic church. Until very recent years, architects who have sought to make their creativity broadly and quickly visible have had little choice but to work for capital. And in the last decade, global entrepreneurial capital itself came to be widely understood as inherently virtuous, creative — even radical, capable of solving hitherto intractable social problems through the power of the market in the hands of the ingenious. But the breathless mythologies of Wired and Fast Company magazines ran up against the realities of inflated profits and worthless pension plans. Their way of thinking outside the box has taken on a new meaning for us. And architecture did not go untouched by this: at the 2001 Guggenheim exhibition in New York, Frank Gehry , Architect , a sponsor’s tribute ran as follows:
The uniqueness of Frank Gehry’s work is the blending of the functional with the artistic to create an innovative product. This is a quality [we] relate to every day as we question traditional business assumptions and embrace innovative solutions. We are pleased to help showcase Frank Gehry’s genius. The writer was Jeffrey Skilling, former Enron President and CEO, and the sentiment, ultimately, rather unflattering to one of North America’s leading practitioners. *active opposition to globalisation— the rediscovery of the local What have sometimes appeared as revivals of the spirit of 1960s volunteerism (recalling the Peace Corps, for example) have been conducted both internationally and closer to home in recent years. The former serve, perhaps tacitly, as rebuttals to superpower unilateralism in the international arena; the latter often take as their touchstone the work of Sam Mockbee’s Rural Studio. This work deserves our admiration and respect, but it runs two risks. First, it risks legitimating the call, favoured among neoliberal Western regimes, for volunteerism and faith-based initiatives as a means of relieving the state of obligations to the disadvantaged. This leads in turn to legitimation of the upward reconcentration of wealth expedited by tax reform that favours the uppermost income brackets. Second, localised pro bono work in architecture risks being construed or co-opted within architectural media machines as therapeutic or confessional forms of practice for the profession as a
In an earlier contribution to this journal [ OnSite 2, 1999] I outlined a number of ways of understanding globalisation and its effects upon architectural culture and practice. The difference between working internationally and globalisation bears reiteration: globalisation weakens national programs, initiatives and boundaries. Globalisation established a new ethos, one in which the tenets of neoliberalism reign supreme: tenets that include, as Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia 2 have observed, the rule of the market, the cutting of public expenditure for social services and safety nets, deregulation, privatisation and the elimination of the concept of the public good, or community, replacing it with ‘individual responsibility’. By now these have become so familiar as to seem, to many, incontestable: natural, Darwinian truths eternal (apart from the brief aberrations of twentieth-century social democracy). All of them have had effects on architecture, altering not only opportunities to build but also attitudes within architectural employment and education.
Since 1999, inevitably, there have been changes on the scene.
*9/11 With the attack on the World Trade Center and the justification it provided for a condition of perpetual war, neoliberal calls for the reduction of government were joined by an irreconcilable increase in state surveillance and control (as evidenced in the successors to Total Information Awareness , and similar programs in North America, Western Europe and elsewhere). The
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local architecture | in a global world
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on |site 12
local architecture | in a global world
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