services construe the full public funding of utilities, health care, education and the like as unfair subsidy and a constraint on trade. But the pitfalls of so-called Public- Private Partnerships for the provision of public facilities, such as hospitals, have become evident in western Europe, and more recently in the misgivings expressed by hitherto gung-ho provincial architects’ associations in Canada. George Monbiot, in Captive State 7 , documents how United Kingdom Private Finance Initiatives, created ostensibly to provide new and renovated health care facilities more cheaply and efficiently, would in fact reduce the number of beds, staff and hospitals, as well as access to care itself, if they were to provide the profits to attract private investors. If PPP can be understood as a Trojan Horse for the wholesale privatisation of health care, then architects face an unenviable predicament: the better their work, the more effectively they serve to gift-wrap the horse. Similarly, the provision of university buildings through corporate partnerships (for example, at the University of Toronto) was one of the steps towards the expansion of the corporate university, and the legitimisation of business as the dominant ethos on campus. The greater the aesthetic achievement of these projects, the more effectively they create legitimacy for the privatisation of public education. And the presentation of these buildings as exemplifying a Canadian architecture, perhaps by their subtle, sensitive and Aaltoesque use of regional materials, serves primarily to present them instead as a ‘Canadian’ architecture, as branded design in spite of themselves. If those who have written cogent critiques of globalisation cast doubt on the benefits of the ubiquity of the corporate ethos, there is nonetheless evidence in architecture of a backlash to the backlash, suggesting the resurgence among a younger generation of a Koolhaasian ‘pragmatism’. Actual Scandinavian designers, from whose
younger representatives one might expect better, appear to be busy surfing the waves of globalisation more directly, assisted by the globally ubiquitous Bruce Mau. As Christopher Hume reported of the recent Toronto [September 2004 at Harbourfront] exhibition SuperDanish 8 , one practice proposed reducing Denmark’s proportion of land in agricultural use from its current 66 percent to 20, using this smaller area to produce food and pharmaceuticals through genetically modified crops. The reader, one hopes, while aware of the limitations of the journalistic summary, hardly needs to be reminded of the controversy over GMOs. Another practice proposes factory- built housing to be shipped from Denmark all over the world. ‘Building would be focussed and economic,’ Hume dutifully notes, ‘Using local materials and culture is inefficient and only slows things down’. More circumspectly, though, he observes that the young practices’ ‘basic assumption — and it’s enough to cause some pause — is that design can solve the world’s problems. Forget politics, culture and economics; think instead of redesigning the planet, from Nature up.’ Global design Monsanto-style (or as one cynical observer put it, Maunsanto) continues, in the hands of some surfers, hiply oblivious to the weightier considerations of ethics and social justice. 1 Graham Owen, ‘Architecture on the Crest of the Wave’, OnSite 2 , Fall 1999 — Winter 2000. 2 Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia,’What is ‘Neo-Liberalism? A brief definition for activists’, www.corporatewatch.org 3 See his essays published in The London Review of Books , Harvard Design Magazine (Spring-Summer 2004) and his book Design and Crime (Verso, 2002). 4 Daniel Libeskind, ‘In defence of the ‘Wow!’’, The Globe and Mail, March 14, 2002, R1 — R3. 5 George Monbiot, The Age of Consent (Flamingo, 2003). 6 See Graham Owen, ‘Tectonic Craftsmanship’, Canadian Architect, April 1995. 7 George Monbiot, Captive State (Pan, 2001). 8 Christopher Hume, ‘Super Danish’, Toronto Star , September 23, 2004.
Graham Owen is Associate Professor of Architecture at Tulane University.
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