In addition, we should note the critique of economic localisation made by George Monbiot, in his remarkable and beautifully written book The Age of Consent 5 . The inconsistencies, contradictions and injustices that Monbiot observes in proposals to deploy localisation as an antidote to globalisation in the economic realm find their counterparts in the cultural realm as well. Determinations of what could constitute Canadian national identity today and tomorrow have been pursued, with varying degrees of rigour and success, by activists, journalists, pollsters, public intellectuals and social critics such as Michael Adams ( Fire and Ice ), Maude Barlow, Tony Clarke ( Silent Coup ), Stephen Clarkson ( Uncle Sam and Us ), Mel Hurtig ( The Vanishing Country ), John Ralston Saul and Jeffrey Simpson ( Star- Spangled Canadians ). Meanwhile, as these authors have enlarged the debate, the rebranding of Canadian architectural culture by some as North America’s Scandinavian Design Reborn has proven to have its own risks. Work in this idiom exhibits impressive craftsmanship and tectonic refinement; but in developed countries the craft object has become a luxury commodity. 6 From some perspectives, this initiative can appearbe a highly successful niche-marketing exercise, purveying the impressive craftsmanship and tectonic refinement of high-end custom country houses to those who, by virtue of wealth reconcentration, are able to appreciate it (‘Money creates taste’, as one of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms once put it; and that taste, once embodied as cultural capital, justifies concentrated wealth). One more effective litmus test, then, of whether a Canadian architecture can be re-envisioned has to do with whether architecture can once again be seen as a valid locus for public investment on a broad scale. At the level of world trade organisations, multilateral agreements on the provision of
For the global celebrity practitioner, when it comes to local cred, brand labels are, it seems, interchangeable. *the question of a Canadian architecture Can the local re-expand to the scale of the nation? Local practices based on material culture would experience difficulty doing so, since at the national scale in Canada they would re-encounter industrialised cross-border networks of distribution and product development. The regional cannot by definition be national in terms of scale, and regions, being defined by local climatic, ecological, material, or cultural conditions, often cross arbitrary national borders. The focus in recent years on cities as economic engines, as city-states, offers another lens with which to view this question — cities as localised concentrations with global reach — but the difficulty here is that consumption and images of status, so easily made apparently indispensable components of urban life, are also so easily globalised.
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local architecture | in a global world
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