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The Globalisation of Modern Architecture

Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
The Globalisation of Modern Architecture:
The Impact of Politics, Economics
and Social Change on Architecture
and Urban Design since 1990

Robert Adam
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
The Globalisation of Modern Architecture:
The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on Architecture
and Urban Design since 1990,
by Robert Adam

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2012 by Robert Adam

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-3905-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3905-1

List of Illustrations ............................................................ xi

Preface ........................................................................ xvii

Where We Are Today ........................................................ 1

Architecture, Urban Design, Politics and Economics

Part I: Setting the Scene

A: A Short History of Globalisation and Architecture
from 500 BCE to 1939 CE ................................................... 7
Empires and Birth of Faith-Based Styles................................ 7
European Discovery and the Enlightenment ........................ 10
Colonisation and the Spread of European Culture ................. 13
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

The First Great Globalisation .......................................... 16

Nationalism, Internationalism and the Birth of Modernism ...... 19
B: The New World Order 1945 to 1992: Global Commerce,
Politics and the Triumph of Modernism ................................. 29
Establishing Global Institutions........................................ 29
The Cold War and Victory of Modernism .......................... 33
The Golden Age of Capitalism and Heroic Modernism ........... 44
The Breakdown of the Post-War Consensus and a Crisis
of Confidence in Architecture ..................................... 49
Western Recovery and the Fragmentation of Architecture ...... 57
Setting the Stage for the Global Economy ........................... 66

Part II: The New Global Era and the Global Elite
The End of the Cold War and the Dawn of the New
Global Era ................................................................. 75
The Social and Cultural Impacts of Globalisation ...................... 80
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
viii Table of Contents

The Supremacy of the North-Atlantic Economies...................... 87

Architectural Practice and the Response to Global Opportunities.. 89
Architects and the Transnational Capitalist Class ...................... 97
Cities and the Global Elite................................................. 100

Part III: How Globalisation Makes Things the Same

The New Structure of Global Trade..................................... 109
A Transformed Political Landscape and the Global City............. 116
The Universal Trading City ............................................... 121
Reflexive Modernism....................................................... 123
The Symbolism of the Global City ....................................... 129
The Global Suburb.......................................................... 133
Deterritorialisation and the Non-Place.................................. 138
Consumerism, the Globalisation of Markets and Branding .......... 144
Tourism Redefined and the Branding of Cities ........................ 153
The Birth of the Iconic Building and the Bilbao Effect................ 159
Iconic Architecture: Practice and Theory............................... 166
Star Architects ............................................................... 177
Global Architects............................................................ 183
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Part IV: How Globalisation Keeps Things Different

The Breakdown of the Nation State and Revived Identities ......... 195
Cultural Rights and the International Response ....................... 200
Identity Politics and the Complexity of the Global
Condition................................................................. 203
Personal and Social Identity ............................................... 206
‘Glocalisation’ and New Trading Conditions .......................... 211
The Local and the Global in Environmentalism ....................... 214
Critical Regionalism: the Modernist Response to Localism ......... 218
Sustainability and Locality ................................................. 224
Identity and Reflexive Modernism....................................... 233
Contextual Urbanism ...................................................... 240
Traditional Architecture ................................................... 256

Conclusion: The End of the Era, What Now?

The Present and the Future ............................................... 277
The 2008 Bank Crash and End of North Atlantic Supremacy ....... 278
Power Moves East .......................................................... 283
Changing Global Priorities ................................................ 287
Urban Crisis in the Emerging Economies............................... 293
Iconic Architecture Reassessed ........................................... 299
Indigenisation and Hybridised Returns.................................. 305
The Next Modernism? ..................................................... 315

Index .......................................................................... 323

1. Roman Doric Column York, Northern England

Photograph Jamie Adam
2. Roman Doric Column, Leptis Magna, Libya
Photograph author
3. Convento de São Francisco, Olinda, Brazil
Photograph author
4. Drayton Hall, South Carolina
Photograph author
5. Gateway of India, Mumbai
Photograph author
6. Technical College Building; Leningrad
7. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
8. Luftgaukommando, Dresden
9. Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago
Photograph © Jeremy Atherton 2006
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

10. Opera House, Leipzig

Photograph author
11. US Embassy, Athens
Printed with permission of Sotiris N Papadopoulos OMADA 80
12. Conrad Hilton in front of model of Istanbul Hilton
Printed with permission of the Hilton Hotel Group
13. Legislative Assembly Building, Chandigarh, India
Photograph Ananya Banerejee
14. Apartment Buildings, Ulitsa Zhukovskogo, St Petersburg, Russia
Photograph Anton Glikin
15. PanAm building, (now the MetLife Building), New York
Photograph Elizabeth Stanley
16. Boston City Hall, Boston
Photograph Michael Wennberg
17. Children’s’ Home and Tripolis Office Complex, Amsterdam
Photograph Peter Drijver
18. Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, California
Photograph author
19. House VI, Cornwall, Connecticut
Photograph Dick Frank, courtesy Eisenman Architects

20. Place de la Republique, Troyes, France

Photograph author
21. Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton Theological Seminary,
Princeton, New Jersey
Photograph John Blatteau
22. Portland Building, Portland, Oregon
Photograph courtesy Michael Graves & Associates
23. Lloyds Building, London
Photograph author
24. Parc la Villette, Paris
Photograph Alessandro Venerandi
25. Canary Wharf, London
Photograph author
26. View of Hong Kong
Photograph author
27. Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India
Photograph courtesy HCP Design and Project Management PVT Ltd
28. Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig
Photograph author
29. “Where the World Comes to Bank”
Courtesy Emirates Bank
30. View of West Bay, Doha, Qatar
Photograph author
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

31. World Trade Center, Central Business District, Beijing

Photograph author
32. View of Dubai suburb
Photograph author
33. Poster advertising a new suburb, Kerala, India
Photograph author
34. Suburban villa, Guangzhou, Canton, China
Photograph author
35. View of the City of London
Photograph author
36. International Terminal, Dubai airport
Photograph author
37. Palace of the Arts Reina Sofia, Valencia
Photograph author
38. Beijing National Stadium (Bird’s Nest)
Photograph Pjk
39. Opera House, Guangzhou, China
Photograph Hufton+Crow
40. Capital Gate Hotel, Abu Dhabi
Photograph courtesy RMJM

41. Burj Khalifa, Dubai

Photograph author
42. Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, England
Photograph Abigail Benouaich
43. Project for Gazprom Building, St Petersburg, Russia
Illustration courtesy RMJM
44. Section of CITIC HQ project, Hangzhou, China
Illustration courtesy Foster+Partners
45. Apartment tower, 8 Spruce Street, New York
Photograph Jasmin Stanley
46. Torre Velasca, Milan
Photograph Marco Bove
47. Menara Mesiniaga Tower, Kuala Lumpur
Photograph courtesy T.R. Hamzah and Yeang
48. Indian Parliament Library, New Delhi
Photograph Architectural Research Cell
49. Bank of America Tower, 1 Bryant Park, New York
Photograph Jasmin Stanley
50. 30 St Mary Axe (“the Gherkin”), London
Photograph author
51. John Lewis Store, Leicester, England
Photograph Satoru Mishima
52. Apartment building, Johannisstrasse in Mitte, Berlin
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Photograph Ludger Paffrath

53. View of Seaside, Florida
Photograph author
54. View of Centre, Poundbury, Dorset, England
Photograph Stephen Hardy
55. View of Vauban district, Freiburg, Germany
Photograph John Thompson
56. South Street Seaport, Fulton Street, New York
Photograph Jasmin Stanley
57. Souq Waqif, Doha, Qatar
Photograph author
58. Yu Garden Bazaar, Old City, Shanghai, China
Photograph author
59. Rue de Laeken, Brussels
Photograph courtesy Gabriele Tagliaventi
60. New House, Cooperstown, New York State
Photograph Durston Saylor
61. Shriram Junior High School, Mawana, Uttar Pradesh, India
Photograph Deependra Prashad
62. Favela, Caxias do Sul, Brazil
Photograph Tetraktys

63. Museum of Liverpool, Liverpool, England

Photograph Philip Handforth, courtesy 3XN
64. 1WTC, New York
Image © SOM
65. Burj al Arab, Dubai
Photograph author
66. Rajbari, North Calcutta, India
Photograph Ananya Banerjee
67. Lakeside villa, Huangzhou, China
Photograph author
68. Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens
Photograph author
69. Telefunken-Hochhaus, Berlin
Photograph Roger Wollstadt
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Colour Illustrations
A. Helmond City Library, Helmond, Netherlands
Photograph Christian Richters
B. Berlier Industrial Hotel, Paris
Photograph courtesy Dominque Perrault Architecture
C. View towards Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
Photograph author
D. Suitcase House Hotel, Beijing, China
Photograph Gary Chang
E. Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh
Photograph courtesy Miralles Tagliabue EMBT
F. View of Pudong, Shanghai, China
Photograph author
G. View of Dharavi, Mumbai, India
Photograph Arne de Knegt for Artefacting
H. View of Västra Hamnen district, Malmö, Sweden
Photograph author
I. Borgo Città Nuova, Alessandria, Italy
Photograph Gabriele Tagliaventi

Charts
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

1. Outward Foreign Direct Investment 1990–2006

2. Nationalities of Global Architectural Firms 2006
3. Cumulative Totals of Architectural Branch Offices in Different Global
Regions 1990–2006
4. Numbers of Transnational Corporations 1992–2008
5. Numbers of Internet Hosts 1993–2006
6. National Debt as a Percentage of GDP 2006–2011
7. Comparative Real National Growth Rate GDP 2006–2010
8. Comparative Projected National GDP to 2050
9. World Cities Survey 2009
10. Projected Top Ten Cities by 2025
11. Projected Top Ten Cities for Middle Class Growth by 2025

This project began with the idea that any study of architecture and
urban design today must begin with an understanding of how these
activities sit in the modern world. This much is so obvious that it
barely needs to be said. So, what is it that characterises the modern
world? Today, most discussions of architecture in particular start
with an arts-based, technological or philosophical view of the
modern world. These are, of course, legitimate in their own terms
but these things are not the way that most people conduct their lives
in the modern world—the people who occupy the buildings, the
people who commission the architects and urban designers, the
people who see the buildings and occupy the new places. Beyond
individual experience the modern world is primarily navigated
through social interaction, the way society is ordered and the
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

struggle of everyday life—the social, political and economic

structure of society. In design terms, this is what society demands of
buildings and places, how society demands it and how society
provides the resources to make it. These things lie at the core of all
activity in the built environment. And yet, very little contemporary
architectural description and theory is presented in these terms at
any level of detail. I decided that this would be a legitimate
framework for a description of recent architecture, at least as
relevant as a description of architecture and urban design as an
artistic, technological or philosophical pursuit, if not so intellectually
attractive.
Examining recent history, I had to ask what it was in the social,
political and economic condition that was unique to modern life—
“modern” meaning the last few decades. The fashionable word
“globalisation” kept emerging in descriptions of the late twentieth
century and, indeed, it became clear that there was something
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
xviii Preface

about the way the world had become more connected in this period
that seemed to be particular. This led me to a study of some of the
huge body of work on globalisation produced in recent decades. I
came to see the current phase of globalisation as an aspect of the
modern political and economic condition that had a clear beginning
and, as my studies stretched to the end of the first decade of the
twenty first century, seemed to develop some sort of end. Global
interconnectedness was not all that was going on during this period
but it was unusually significant. I have, therefore, used globalisation as
a summary term and core concept for the recent modern condition.
Exploring sociology and economics in particular led me into both
unfamiliar and familiar territory: unfamiliar as areas of academic
study but familiar as the stuff of newspapers and current affairs. No
field of interest seemed to be excluded and quite soon I came to see
architecture and urban design in a different light. Stripped of the
primacy they held when seen from the professional perspective,
architecture and urban design took their proper place as secondary or
more probably tertiary activities in the broader structure of society.
This led to me see every design debate as a minor facet of larger
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

forces and, if anything had any significance at all in architecture and

urban design, it would have its place in the wider picture. If this was
the case, as surely it must be, change in society would be reflected by
change in architecture and vice versa. Everything that was happening
was therefore in some way relevant and, although I may have
disapproved of something that was happening in my own professional
field, my approval or disapproval was much less important than the
fact that it pointed to the social, political and economic forces that
lay behind it. This illuminated architecture and urban design in often
surprising ways.
This seemed to me to be a fruitful area for study but dauntingly
wide. Everything I have written here is just a point in my studies
when I felt I had to put it down in some coherent form. There is
always another book to be read, another fact to be discovered and
another area to be explored—as so many of my friends and
colleagues tell me all the time.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
The Globalisation of Modern Architecture xix

The width of the subject is such that I have so many people to

thank for all manner of information and advice that I am almost
bound to miss some of them. I can start at the beginning with my
father, once a general practitioner, who stimulated in me a restless
curiosity, an interest in the role of current affairs in all aspects of life
and a reluctance to take anything at face value. I have the privilege of
continuing these discussions with my father in his mid-nineties and
he was able to correct some of my twentieth century history.
Remaining at a general level, throughout my research and while
writing this book I have been running a large architectural and urban
design practice. My fellow directors have given me passive support
and many of my staff have taken an interest and given me active
encouragement. Staff in the urban design course at the University of
Strathclyde, where I have a visiting professorship, have been an
invaluable source of information, debate and encouragement in what
has been an otherwise academically lonely pursuit. Fellow members
of the international charity, INTBAU, that I helped to set up, have
been both friends and valuable informants on events and attitudes
around the world. Through them and associated organisations I have
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

been able to travel to Brazil, Russia, India, China, the USA (where I
have many friends), Iran, Libya, Israel and most of the European
countries. My work and academic activities have also taken me to
Canada, Qatar, Dubai and Japan.
Many others have helped me in one aspect or another of a very
broad subject area. Tony Chapman of the Royal Institute of British
Architects organised a RIBA conference in Barcelona based, or so he
told me, on my suggested subject of identity. Paul Finch, an old
friend and sometime ideological sparring partner, gave me great
encouragement by publishing my first paper on globalisation in the
Architectural Review and then asked me to speak on the subject at
the World Architecture Conference, also in Barcelona. My
attendance at these events and the talks given by major global
architectural figures gave me invaluable first-hand information on
attitudes in the architectural profession. Individuals have helped me
in a number of certain subject areas. Ben Bolgar identified useful
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
xx Preface

sources on urbanism and Hank Ditmar used his personal experience

to check the history of New Urbanism. My colleague Mark Hoare
checked my account of the sustainability movement. My nephew
Jasper Chalcraft and his partner Monica Sassatelli, both sociologists,
have guided me on source material from time to time. Calder Loth,
formerly the Senior Architectural Historian of the Commonwealth of
Virginia, helped me with the history of the conservation movement
in the USA. Peter Oborn of Aedas gave me his valuable time to
discuss global architectural practice. John Hare, Professor Paul
Richens of Bath University and Robin Partington gave me a great
deal of information on the development of digital drafting.
The right photographs were important to illustrate the text and
provide a parallel narrative. They come from mixed sources—
private, professional and archive. Many friends and colleagues took
or provided me with photographs of buildings and places around the
world. Many architectural practices were generous in their donation
of illustrations. I am very grateful but I will not list them here
individually as they are credited in the List of Illustrations.
As with any book drawing on a very wide range of sources, I have
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

relied on many authors, papers, articles, events, broadcasts,

observations and conversations. The book is synthesis of these
sources structured to tell a particular story. I hope that all those
whom I quote are content with the context of their material and that
readers will refer to the footnotes to identify the many authorities
who have unknowingly assisted me.

Robert Adam, March 2012

Architecture, Urban Design, Politics

and Economics
As I look at the world at the moment of writing, momentous events
are unfolding around us. The greatest economic recession since the
Great Depression has not yet run its course, the fragility of the
European Union has been exposed, and the underpinning of the
North Atlantic economies has been shaken to the core, their
economic and political systems all undergoing radical reform as they
attempt to extricate themselves from a legacy of crippling debt. In
the east, the two great emerging economies have grown stronger.
India, its growth largely self-generated, has been virtually untouched
by the economic crisis. China, which had funded much of the
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

borrowing frenzy that brought down the United States and Europe,
experienced a decline in exports but its economy has continued to
grow steadily and it has emerged as the world’s second-largest
economy. At the same time, the USA, from the confidence of its
position as the only world superpower after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, is seeing its global influence decline as it tries to extricate
itself from decline and two inconclusive foreign wars. Meanwhile,
the largely Muslim south Mediterranean states are at various stages in
a revolution that has swept across the region, toppling dictators and
creating the uncertainties of democracy in nations with no democratic
history. At such times, we know from experience that cultural and
artistic change will follow these major economic and political
changes, locked together as they are in an inescapable embrace.
Architects and urban designers are commissioned by commercial
and political clients who have no choice but to respond to these

economic and social conditions. Although they are significant

participants in cultural and artistic developments, architects and
urban designers are first and foremost service industries and minor
players in the broad sweep of social and political developments. No
major social changes can be traced back to architecture. Even though
urban design can change lives it, too, follows political and economic
directions. It must be clear that any assessment of architecture and
urban design would be inadequate without a full account of how
wider changes in society have driven them.
****

However, when I look at my world of architecture and urban design,

I see no seismic change to equal the momentous political and
economic shifts that the press reveals daily. High Modernism still
dominates architectural practice; globally famous architects are still
the heroes of the profession and in demand by status-seeking cities;
glass tower blocks are still under construction; and great networks of
boulevards are planned around iconic buildings and mega-blocks in
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

new developments around the world.

Looking back at other major political and economic revolutions,
we can see the direct effect on architectural and urban theory and
practice. The end of the Second World War sealed the victory of
Modernism; the breakdown of the post-war consensus in the late
1960s and the oil crisis of the 1970s opened the way for the
simultaneous—and apparently contradictory—rise of the baroque
Modernism of high-tech and the ironic historicism of Postmodernism;
and the recession of the early 1990s led to the collapse of
Postmodernism and the resurgence of Modernism. This is, of course,
hindsight. On the ground, the picture is always more complex. In
the 1950s and early 60s much post-war reconstruction was carried
out by followers of the classical tradition, while old-school
modernists were still practicing in the 1980s and 90s (Oscar
Niemeyer is still designing at the time of writing aged 103), and
Postmodernism has survived well into the new century.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
Architecture, Urban Design, Politics and Economics 3

It is a common observation that the broad patterns of historic

change are only clearly observed by looking back. The effects and
outcome of even the most dramatic historic events often do not
manifest themselves for some time. Our perception of current
change is hampered by the fact that, while all aspects of society are
linked, all historical events and ideological shifts do not occur in an
identical time frame: in particular the inertia of social and cultural
change is not matched by the drama of catastrophe, revolution and
invention. This has been explained by the concept of “cultural lag,” a
term coined by the sociologist William Ogburn in 1922.1 He
identified a time lag between changes in what he called material
invention and non-material culture. While Ogburn limited the
concept to rapid advances in technology, technology cannot be
isolated from fast-moving events in politics and economics. Ogburn’s
concept can be expanded with reference to the idea of multi-speed
history put forward by the French historian Fernand Braudel, leader
of the Annales school of historiography.2 Braudel believed that “past
and present mingle inextricably together,”3 but divided the
movement of historical time into three broad categories: longue durée
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

[long duration], moyenne durée [medium duration] and evénéments

[events]. While events came and went and soon became, according
to Braudel, “dust,” they were played out against a slower moving and
often cyclical history, which in turn occurred within a framework of
gradual and geographic change (in which he included culture). This
provides a useful framework for understanding how slow-moving
cultural change can coexist quite naturally with more rapidly moving
events.
But even without reference to the slow movement of cultural
change, there are good reasons why changes in architecture and
urban design move relatively slowly. At the most elementary level,
the real product takes a long time to come to fruition. A major
building, from the time of conception to occupation, will rarely take
less than five years, and commonly ten. Urban design is even more
slow-moving. A major urban design project may take twenty years
or more to complete and, indeed, it is highly likely that the original
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
4 Where We Are Today

design will have been overtaken by changing circumstances well

before its completion. The complexities, high capital costs and
commercial risks in architectural and urban design practice have
established the need for a long, informal, post-qualification
apprenticeship in the construction-industry design professions.
Architects and urban designers rarely reach any position of influence
before the age of forty and, indeed, the professional rule-of-thumb
definition of a “young architect” is someone below forty years of age.
Most designs will, therefore, be under the control of (if not actually
designed by) men or women who ended their formal education at
least twenty years previously. Add to this the project lead time
(noted above) and most practitioners may be well into their fifties
before they have a substantial body of work behind them, and major
international architects are often beyond formal retirement age.
It has been empirically observed that artists and scientists form
their critical creative outlook in their twenties, and recent research
by Timothy Salthouse places the peak of cognitive ability at about
twenty-seven.4 This refines the pioneering work undertaken by
Harvey C. Lehman in 1953, who charted the creative peak across
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

different sciences and arts between twenty-six and forty, the

maximum “age of achievement” being at around forty.5 This seems to
indicate that architects and urban designers, whose full-time
education is unusually long, will have established their creative
outlook at about the time they complete their formal education and
will have reached the peak of their ability before most have
established their reputations.
Architects pay lip service to the creativity of youth but, for
practical reasons, achievement in the profession is largely for the
middle-aged and beyond. Major architects are likely to be acting out
creative ideas formed some thirty years previously. This is bound to
have a restraining influence on progress and change in architecture
and urban design.
The slow pace of architectural and urban design culture makes it
hard to detect the influence of major political and economic events
on these disciplines. This creates a complex picture where an
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
Architecture, Urban Design, Politics and Economics 5

ideological position that has arisen in response to long-past

circumstances is confronted by new conditions as they arise. We also
know that social, economic and political developments will affect
design, and we know from past observation that, when the
appropriate historical distance allows us to see through the
confusion, architecture and urban design will change to reflect the
new realities on the ground.

****

Many of the social, political and economic events that affect our way
of life at present can be traced back to the Black Monday financial
crash of 1987 and the recession of the early 1990s. Until 2008, the
period from about 1992 to 2008 had been one of unusual stability in
the North Atlantic economies and was named by economists the
“Great Moderation.” This was also the period when China, India, the
countries of the former Soviet Union, and many other nations,
entered into the free-market system which the North Atlantic
countries had established after the Second World War. The Great
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Moderation in the North Atlantic countries was, consequently, part

of a more widespread global political and economic condition usually
called “globalisation.” Although the world economy had been
interdependent for decades, if not centuries, increased communication
and political conditions at the end of the twentieth century were
quite different from previous periods of partial or total global
interaction. The 1992 to 2008 period can therefore be distinguished
from these previous versions of globalisation and termed the “New
Global Era.”
While the dramatic events following 2008—still playing out at
the time of writing—will have a profound effect on our future way
of life, our response to these events will be seen in the context of the
New Global Era for some time. Some of the ideals of architecture
and urban design may well pre-date the New Global Era, but the last
two decades will have had a significant impact. To understand what is
happening now in society and in architecture and urban design, we
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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6 Where We Are Today

must examine the New Global Era in detail and try to understand
how the disciplines of architecture and urban design have responded,
and how this will influence their future response.

References
1. William F. Ogburn. Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original
Nature. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1922.
2. Fernand Braudel. La Méditerranée et Le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de
Philippe II. Paris: A. Colin, 1949.
3. Fernand Braudel. “Personal Testimony.” Journal of Modern History 44 (4)
(1972): 467.
4. Timothy Salthouse. “When Does Age-Related Cognitive Decline
Begin?” Neurobiology of Aging 30 (4) (2009): 507–14.
5 Harvey C. Lehman. Age and Achievement. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1953.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

SETTING THE SCENE

A: A Short History of Globalisation

and Architecture from 500 BCE to 1939 CE
The New Global Era is only the latest manifestation of a process of
global interconnection that has been developing since the dawn of
mankind. As with every period of global interaction, there is
something very particular about this last stage of globalisation, but
some of the underlying forces behind it have their origins in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To understand the present
condition, and to see how it differs from previous periods, we must
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

take a brief overview of the history of globalisation.

Empires and Birth of Faith-Based Styles

The process of connecting different parts of the world to one another
began 70,000 years ago when Homo sapiens, gifted with an intellect
that allowed for adaptation to an alien environment, walked out of
Africa. The process of connecting the disparate communities created
by this first human migration would have to wait more than 60,000
years, until the Neolithic revolution established levels of organisation
and a concentration of power that facilitated the creation of empires.

Figure 1. (left) Roman Doric Column, York, Northern England

Figure 2. (right) Roman Doric Column, Leptis Magna, Libya

Ancient empires standardised architecture across continents.

The ancient empires were never global in the strict sense of the
word but, between the fifth century BCE and the fifth century CE,
the Persian, Roman and Han empires created connections of power
and culture over great distances. The Greek historian Polybius,
writing in the second century BCE, understood the significance of
the emerging Roman Empire: “Formerly the things which happened
in the world had no connection among themselves … But since then
all events are united in a common bundle.”1 By the second century
CE, the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Oenoanda could propose the
concept of a global humanity: “In relation to each segment of the
earth, different people have different native lands. But in relation to
the whole circuit of this world, the entire earth is a single native land
for everyone, and the world a single home.”2
While empires were based on conquest and power, trading routes
created cultural connections over thousands of miles: Indian
sculptures were imported to ancient Rome; from the Han Empire
onwards, the Silk Road traded luxury goods over 6,500 kilometres;
and in the fifth century BCE, Aramaic was being spoken along the
Middle-Eastern trading routes from the Nile to the Indus.
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The ancient world saw the establishment of two major globalising

forces that are active to this day: the great monotheistic religions of
Christianity and Islam. In the first century CE, Saul of Tarsus opened
up a Middle-Eastern tribal sect to a universal membership that
eventually led to its adoption as the official religion of the Roman
Empire around three centuries later. In the seventh century CE a
merchant from Mecca, Abu al-Qasim Muhammad, following a
mountain-top revelation, transcribed the Quran as the word of God
and proclaimed that there was no god but Allah for all mankind.3 As
the Prophet Muhammad, he and his followers set in motion a wave
of conquest and conversion that, a century after his death, spanned
from Spain to India.
With power and religion came culture. One expression of that
culture was architecture. The Roman Empire spread classical
architecture and the temple form from North Africa to England.
Christianity spread the use of the Roman hall or basilica for religious
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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10 Part I

assembly, and reproduced more or less literal copies of major centres

of worship throughout Europe in the succeeding centuries. Muslim
Mughal rulers introduced a Persian architectural style throughout the
Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth century CE. The architectural
styles of the two monotheistic religions are derived from the types
already prevalent at the time and place of their first wave of
expansion. The symbolic association of religion with its architecture
has spread geographically specific styles around the globe as
Christianity and Islam, to this day, continue their expansion.

European Discovery and the Enlightenment

It was the European voyages of discovery from the fifteenth to the
seventeenth centuries that finally connected all human settlements
across the world, creating a condition that can properly be called
“global.” The discovery of the Americas and Australia by Europeans
from 1492 to 1606 created for the first time a condition whereby all
humans on earth could, in principle at least, know of one another.
As European exploration, occupation and trade expanded, the
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two major powers in the East, China and Japan, were entering long
periods of self-imposed trading isolation. The Japanese policy of
isolation, or kaikin, was unbroken from 1641 to 1853. The Chinese
policy of hai jin, or “sea ban,” was first instituted by the Ming
dynasty, and trading restrictions continued intermittently during the
Qing dynasty from the seventeenth century onwards. In 1793 the
Emperor Qianlong rebuffed a British trading overture by King
George III, pointing out that “we possess all things. I set no value on
objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's
manufactures.”4 The advanced civilisations of the Indian subcontinent
had never constituted a nation, and their continuous power struggles
left them open to organised and competing European campaigns for
trading dominance backed by force. The newly discovered continents
of America and Australia, on the other hand, were at a significantly
lower level of material development and their populations quickly
succumbed to European diseases, conquest and colonisation.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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Setting the Scene 11

These conditions favoured European domination of world trade

and, by the end of the eighteenth century, as Immanuel Wallerstein
pointed out, “successive expansions have transformed the capitalist
world-economy from a system located primarily in Europe to one
that covers the entire globe.”5 By this time, European knowledge of
the geography and varied peoples of the world had a profound
influence on the predominantly science-based and rationalist
philosophical movement, the Enlightenment. From the Enlightenment
arose principles that have echoed down the following centuries to the
present, and lie at the foundation of current globalising institutions
and ideals.

****

The seventeenth century European Wars of Religion and the English

republican revolution, or Civil War, initiated a radical reconsideration
of the concept of government.
The rights of groups or individuals to religious and personal
freedom in the face of long-accepted autocratic monarchies or states
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were examined in England, most notably by the English philosopher

John Locke. Locke wrote in 1689, in the Second Treatise on Civil
Government, that “every man has a property in his own person: this
no-body has any right but to himself.”6 The search for religious
freedom initiated the increased colonisation of North America,
where Locke had a part in the drafting of the Fundamental
Constitutions of Carolina, which declared that “civil peace may be
maintained amidst diversity of opinions, and our agreement and
compact with all men may be duly and faithfully observed.” These
ideas found their way into the American Declaration of
Independence in 1776 as “unalienable rights” of the individual to
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
In practice, the relationship of these rights to those of the state
was independently defined in 1648 by the Treaties of Westphalia,
which ended thirty years of European religious wars. This gave
religious groups some rights of worship, but otherwise gave states
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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12 Part I

absolute rights over their citizens. Although European dominance in

the succeeding centuries exported the Westphalian concept of the
autonomous nation state to the rest of the world, the dilemma of
how to reconcile unalienable and universal rights of the individual
with the rights of the state over the lives of its citizens was not
resolved until the twentieth century.
In his Carolina Constitution, Locke specifically recognised the
rights of “natives of that place” and Enlightenment philosophers
could, as Christopher Martin Wieland wrote in 1788, “regard all the
peoples of the earth as so many branches of a single family, and the
universe as a state, of which they, with innumerable other rational
beings, are citizens, promoting together under the general laws of
nature the perfection of the whole.” 7 This view of mankind was not
based on any kind of global equality but a belief, expressed by
Immanuel Kant towards the end of the eighteenth century, that “the
history of mankind viewed as a whole, can be regarded as the
realisation of a hidden plan of nature,” so that “all the capacities
implanted by her [nature] in mankind can be fully developed.”8 This
plan was to be led by Europeans. In 1800, Johann Gottlieb Fichte
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pointed out that “the most civilized nations of modern times are the
descendants of savages,” and so present-day primitive peoples will in
future become civilised in turn: “It is the vocation of our race to
unite itself into one single body, all possessed of a similar culture.”9
A. R. J. Turgot had already explained in the mid-eighteenth century
that this would lead to state where “the human mind [is] enlightened
… and isolated nations are brought closer to one together. Finally
commercial and political ties unite all parts of the globe; and the
whole human race ... advances, ever slowly, towards greater
perfection … What perfection of human reason!”10 Distinct traces of
these ideas can be found today in American foreign policy11 and the
founding principles of the United Nations.
In the Enlightenment, the idea emerged for the first time that, as
Fontenelle put it in 1688, “unreasonable admiration for the ancients
is one of the chief obstacles to progress.”12 In 1796 Nicolas de
Condorcet predicted that after “successive changes in human
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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Setting the Scene 13

society,” the sun will shine “on an earth of none but free men, with
no master save reason; for tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid
or hypocritical tools, will have disappeared.”13 By 1814, the Comte
de Saint-Simon could, with confidence, reverse the long-standing
idea that antiquity represented an ideal for the modern world,
declaring that “the golden age is not behind us, but in front of us.”14
In the eighteenth century, rapid industrial change, republican
revolution and a greater awareness of the peoples around the world
who did not share these “advances” led to a widespread belief in “the
total mass of the human race moving slowly forward.” 15 The state of
affairs that pointed most directly to this future state of grace was
modernity. This progress would, apparently inevitably, be driven by
the European (and now North American) societies that had
pioneered this industrial and social change. The idea of a moral duty
of enlightened Europeans and North Americans to deliver their
version of progress and modernity to other nations around the globe
has survived into twentieth and twenty-first century political thought
in the North Atlantic countries. As John Gray tells us: “We live
today amid the dim ruins of the Enlightenment project, which was
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the ruling project of the modern period.”16

Colonisation and the Spread of European Culture

Armed with advanced technology and industrial power combined
with a belief in superiority in progress, modernity and religion, the
European states traded, conquered and colonised their way around
the world in the nineteenth century. In 1854, the English Cardinal
Newman expressed a view common among his contemporaries, that
European civilisation was “so distinctive and luminous in its
character, so imperial in its extent, so imposing in its duration, and
so utterly without rival upon the face of the earth” that it could
justifiably “assume to itself the title of ‘human society,’ and its
civilization the abstract term ‘civilization’.”17 Global culture therefore
became European.

Figure 3. (left) Convento de S Francisco, Olinda, Brazil, 1585.

Figure 4. (right) Drayton Hall, South Carolina, 1742.

When colonisers destroyed native culture, the home architecture

of the colonists became the architecture of the colony.

The Americas had already become the cultural outposts of

Spain, Portugal, France and Britain, their indigenous populations
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decimated by disease and genocide or banished to the margins. In

the nineteenth century, Australia and New Zealand followed the
same pattern under British colonisation. Language, government,
urban design and architecture were direct models or developments
of their European originals. By this time, European Russia had
already taken over vast and sparsely populated areas to the north and
east, and moved south into the small, mineral-rich Transcaucasian
countries, and east to the islands bordering Japan. This created a
huge uniform European administrative, urbanised and linguistic zone
stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific under Russian control.
The Indian subcontinent and much of the Asian Pacific rim were
colonised by Britain, France and Holland, but here, as with the
predominantly French colonisation of the African southern
Mediterranean nations, well-established and ancient cultures vied
with European cultural imports. Directly imported classicism and
gothic revival competed with established architecture, not only
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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Setting the Scene 15

between native and colonial architects but also among the colonial
architects themselves, some of who became enthusiastic orientalists,
moving from half-understood hybrids to full-blown local styles.
Sub-Saharan Africa became the victim of a frantic European land-
grab right through to the mid-twentieth century as latecomers to
European nationhood sought status with the few remaining colonial
opportunities. As tribal boundaries and cultures were subsumed by
arbitrary borders, colonial languages were imposed, complete
European administrative systems introduced and, without traditions
of monumental architecture, colonial styles established.
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Figure 5. Gateway of India, Mumbai; George Wittet; 1924. Indo-Saracenic

architecture by a British Architect.

When colonisers encountered societies with a developed tradition of

monumental architecture, on occasion hybrid styles emerged.

Not even the isolated Asian states were immune. The American
navy forced Japan to open its markets to international trade in 1858.
In the Opium Wars from 1839 to 1860, Britain forced the Chinese
Qing dynasty to lift trade and tariff limitations and, with other
European powers, took trading outposts under colonial control.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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16 Part I

Although these important ancient cultures retained their political

systems and national identity, Japan in particular enthusiastically
adopted European institutional structures, uniforms, male dress and,
in major cities and trading areas in China and Japan, buildings
appeared in European styles.

The First Great Globalisation

By the final decades of the nineteenth century, under the stabilising
influence of the Pax Britannica, the world entered its first modern
global era. In 1848 Karl Marx observed that “in place of the old local
and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in
every direction, universal interdependence of nations.”18
Facilitated by the development of ocean-going steamships and few
restrictions on travel, the largest movement of peoples the world had
ever seen took place. Without accounting for internal migration
within the great nation states and the travels of colonisers and
traders, by the end of the nineteenth century three million people
were migrating each year: some twenty million Europeans migrated
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to the United States; it has been estimated that more than twenty
million Chinese emigrated to the Americas and Southeast Asia; the
British Empire enabled and encouraged the emigration of Indians to
Africa and the West Indies; convict transportation declined and the
British government provided financial incentives to Australian
immigrants from the 1840s, much assisted by the 1851 gold rush.
International capital could move freely around the world. The
first trans-Atlantic telegraph was laid in 1861. 1840 saw the creation
of the first human rights organisation with a global agenda: the British
and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. A number of global agreements,
such as the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property
in 1883 and the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and
Artistic Works in 1886, regulated trade between nations. Between
1873 and 1912 the major Eastern powers adopted the Gregorian
calendar, and in 1884 the meridian was almost universally agreed to

be in Greenwich, England (France held out for a Paris meridian for

another twenty years).
In 1919, John Maynard Keynes described the peak of this first
modern global era with a caricature of a London capitalist in 1914:
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his
morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such
quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early
delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by
the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and
new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without
exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.
... The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial
and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion ...
were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and
appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary
course of social and economic life, the internationalisation of which
was nearly complete in practice.19

As industrialisation became more widespread in the later nineteenth

century, it became clear that the key to success in the international

arena was the garnering of capital, the advancement of heavy
industry, and the creation of well-equipped, substantial and loyal
armed forces. All this required size and political and economic
control, as well as a clearly defined nation with a large and patriotic
population. Existing nations developed national myths to galvanise
their citizens, and new nations such as Germany, Italy and Greece
were forged out of shared ethnic identities. National competition
started to limit the prevailing laissez-faire conditions: the movement
of people started to be controlled, nations and empires became
protected trading zones, and national unity created an identity (often
a fictionalised history) set in opposition to similarly devised identities
created by rival nations.
In architecture, nationalist sentiment found an outlet in various
manifestations of national romanticism. In Britain, the Arts and
Crafts movement, and later the baroque revival, set out to re-create

a national style first from the vernacular and then the English
baroque. A newly unified Germany also adopted the baroque revival,
looking to the great baroque and rococo architecture of early
eighteenth century German ascendancy for inspiration. Italy, in turn,
looked to its illustrious renaissance past to guide the architecture of
urban expansion following unification. Greece turned to a Beaux
Arts version of neo-classicism to tie the new state to its long-lost
ancient civilisation. Russia revived its distinctive Russo-Byzantine
style. In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright developed the Prairie
Style which, as the name suggests, was seen as a unique expression of
American national character. The Shingle Style and Greene and
Greene’s American Arts and Crafts buildings also self-consciously
created “a new and native architecture”20 for the United States.
The rise of nationalism, as the nineteenth century turned into the
twentieth, created a dangerous mixture of industrial power, jingoism,
militarism and economic competition. The first modern global era
was destroyed in an orgy of industrialised warfare with the start of
the First World War in 1914, ending what was for many privileged
Europeans a golden era.
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Nationalism, Internationalism and the Birth

of Modernism
From the start of the First World War in 1914 to the fall of the
USSR in 1989 nationalism and internationalism were uneasy
companions.
Dramatic and highly visible technological advances were linked to
an optimistic idea of modernity that seemed to float free of old
national boundaries. Henry Ford, possibly the most symbolically
significant figure of the new industrial and consumer modernity,
summed it up in 1929:
Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do
by preaching, propaganda, or the written word. The aeroplane and
wireless know no boundary. They pass over the dotted lines on the

map without heed or hindrance. They are binding the world

together in a way no other system can. The motion picture with its
universal language, the aeroplane with its speed, and the wireless
with its coming international programme—these will soon bring
the world to a complete understanding.21

At the other end of the spectrum, the German dictator Adolf Hitler,
now the most potent symbol of the dangers of nationalism, said in his
election campaign of 1932: “There’s so much internationalism, so
much world conscience, so many international contracts; there’s the
League of Nations, the Disarmament Conference, Moscow, the
Second International, the Third International—and what did all that
produce for Germany?”22
The tensions inherent in the combination of internationalism and
nationalism can be seen in the attempts to create the first supra-
national political organisation. The devastation and the international
impact of World War I inspired the thirty-one signatories of the
Treaty of Versailles and thirteen others to sign the Covenant of the
League of Nations in 1919, so creating the first permanent
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

international security organization. The primary aim of the League of

Nations was “to promote international co-operation and to achieve
international peace and security.”23 However, as the Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini memorably put it, “The League is very well when
sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out,”24 and it
failed in its primary objective. Although the US President, Woodrow
Wilson, was one of the principal exponents of the League of Nations,
the US Senate blocked American membership. Signatories with
extreme nationalist governments left one by one: Japan and
Germany in 1933, Italy in 1937, Spain and Russia in 1939. The
period between the two world wars were, in fact, marked by a series
of nationalist conflicts that included the Greco-Turkish war, the
Italian colonisation of Ethiopia, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria,
and the Spanish Civil War. Although the League of Nations would
not formally disband until 1946, to all intents and purposes it ceased
to operate at the outbreak of the Second World War.

Internationalism and nationalism both found their own expression

in contemporary art and architecture. Internationalism, combined
with a belief in the revolutionary and transformative power of new
technology, found expression though the various movements that
came to be gathered under the title of “Modernism.” In 1919, Erich
Mendelsohn, lecturing at the Berlin Arbeitsrat für Kunst, or Art Soviet,
said:
What today is the vision and faith of a single individual, will one day
become a law for all. Therefore all trends seem necessary to
achieving the goal, and hence to solving the problem of a new
architecture … just as every epoch that was decisive for the
evolution of human history united the whole known globe under its
spiritual will, so what we long for will have to bring happiness
beyond our own country, beyond Europe, to all peoples.25

Much as the League of Nations was influenced by the Enlightenment

ideals of a universal humanity—and in particular the philosophy of
Immanuel Kant—Modernism was influenced by the Enlightenment
idea of modernity and the inevitable and universal progress of
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mankind. This was coupled with the nineteenth-century romantic

concept of the avant-garde, where “modernity is the transient, the
fleeting, the contingent,” and the artist must look “in the deep
unknown to find the new.”26
In the fast-moving world of painting and sculpture, Modernism in
its various guises—such as Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism and
Vorticism—made a significant impact with sophisticated collectors.
Its revolutionary ambitions did not, however, make it so attractive to
the slower-moving world of architecture where work was largely
commissioned by establishment organisations or wealthy individuals,
and national identity was still a potent force. Early Soviet Russia,
however, did at first find the radical philosophy and international
ambitions of Modernism a perfect fit for its Marxist ideals of
international revolution. There was a brief flowering of Modernist
Constructivism until the USSR turned to Russian nationalism under
the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. In the unstable German Weimar
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Setting the Scene 21

Republic the Bauhaus School was established in 1919, and taught a

revolutionary design philosophy linked to socialist thinking and a
commitment to the modernity of machine production. This was
closed down when the National Socialists came to power. In other
European countries Modernism was largely a minority choice for a
few rich patrons with an interest in the arts, but by 1932 there was a
sufficient body of work and unity of style for a highly influential
exhibition of modernist architecture to be mounted at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York and published as the “International
Style.”
The “International Style” title stuck for about thirty years until the
style did, indeed, become international, although it was, in reality, a
European or Western style. It was claimed that it was a
“contemporary style, which exists throughout the world”,27 but for
the American architect John Gaw Meem in 1934 it was clear that it
“reflects contemporary Western civilisation, especially our devotion
to the ideal of scientific truth.”28 As with the Enlightenment
philosophers, early Modernism coupled Western culture with an
evangelical superiority towards other cultures.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Also in accordance with Enlightenment thinking, Modernism was

explicitly opposed to the continuation of tradition, including national
traditions; as Kasimir Malevich said in 1924: “Life must be purified of
the clutter of the past.”29 The ferociousness of modernist opposition
to traditional architecture was however matched by the persistent
predominance of the traditional.
Under National Socialism in Germany, the vernacular Völkisch
Movement from the early twentieth century took on a new lease of
life alongside a stripped classical style that expressed the imperial
ambitions of the government. Although the Fascist state in Italy was
not averse to the progressive symbolism of Modernism, its
pretentions for the recreation of Imperial Rome were promoted with
grandiose simplified classicism. In Russia, Stalin too favoured an
elemental classicism, but with rich applied decoration, often with
explicit Soviet symbolism, that gave it a distinctly Russian character.

Among the democratic countries, Britain transformed its Arts and

Crafts architecture into a mock-Tudor nationalism that appealed to
its burgeoning house-buying public. Alongside this, classicism was
promoted both as a revival of the simple architecture of the early-
nineteenth-century Regency as well as a more high-blown style
appropriate for the world’s largest Imperial power. In the United
States, owing to the coincidence of independence with the high point
of imported British classicism, the national style continued to be
resolutely classical. This manifested itself either in the Colonial
Revival or in a high-style Beaux Arts classicism (inherited from a
French system of architectural education) that was applicable to neo-
classical public monuments as well as the development of the great
American invention, the skyscraper. American Beaux Arts teaching
was exported to a newly republican China where it proved adaptable
to the creation of a modern and monumental version of Chinese
traditional architecture.
In spite of widely different political ideologies and nationalist
sentiments, in inter-war Western architecture a stripped-down form
of classicism was almost universal. Across the various architectural
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

expressions of ethnic origins, national identity, empire, or the

aspiration to empire lay powerful influence of an inventive and
modern traditional architecture with origins in Sweden and France.
At the 1923 World Exhibition to celebrate the tercentenary of
the southern Swedish port of Gothenburg, a new and imaginative
classicism particular to Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries
impressed international visitors. The new Swedish architecture, later
called “Swedish Grace,” combined a spare Nordic vernacular with a
revival of early-nineteenth-century neo-classical Biedermeier. It was
both simple and highly original, and part of a wider flourishing of the
decorative and applied arts in Scandinavia. New Swedish design was
widely admired and highly influential throughout Europe. Two years
later, at the important Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs
et Industriels Modernes, Swedish design took thirty-five Grands Prix
and forty-six Gold Medals.

Although the new Swedish design was, for all its originality,
clearly based on classical traditions, in the sentiment of the time it
conformed to the rule of the 1925 Paris Exposition, in that it was only
open to anyone "whose production presents ... clearly modern
tendencies. That is to say, any copying or counterfeiting of ancient
styles is strictly forbidden.” Indeed, while the Exposition included a
modernist Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau by Le Corbusier and a
Constructivist pavilion for the USSR by Konstantin Melnikov, it was
most notable for the introduction of the new Style Moderne (much
later called “Art Deco” in abbreviation of the exhibition title). The
Style Moderne, like new Swedish design, was a liberal interpretation of
classical traditions, by turn stripped down, re-ordered and heavily
decorated with novel patterns. The style was primarily decorative
and could absorb Egyptian, Aztec, Cubist, Expressionist and other
influences. Its freedom, modernity, joie de vivre and adaptability gave
it widespread appeal, and Style Moderne buildings were designed
throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia.
In spite of later art-historical attempts at categorisation, the
boundaries between stripped-down nationalist classicism, designs
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

influenced by the new Swedish Classicism, Style Moderne, and even

the fringes of more doctrinaire Modernism were not at all clear cut.
Some architects would remain dogmatically attached to the
traditional or the modernist, whereas others would switch from one
style to the other at will.30 In spite of an undoubted atmosphere of
aggressive or defensive nationalism where even resolutely
internationalist Modernism could be attacked as a German import,31
a predilection for formal simplicity (even if it sometimes had lavish
surface decoration) was shared by most architectural styles and
nations.

Figure 6 (top left). Technical College Building; Leningrad, Gegello and Krichevsky;
1932. Revolutionary Modernism, known as “Constructivism” in Russia.

Figure 7 (top right). Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Dondel, Aubert,
Viard and Dastugue; 1937. French Style Moderne.

Figure 8 (bottom). Luftgaukommando, Dresden; Wilhelm Kreis; 1938. Fascist

architecture.

Architecture in the 1920s and 30s took different directions expressing

nationalism, internationalism and more, but the distinctions between
styles were not always clear.

In the dark days of the Great Depression, in the years before the
outbreak of the Second World War, Modernism had been outlawed
in the totalitarian states and, although very few buildings were
constructed, had become the radical choice for younger architects in
the European democracies. Modernists, expelled by the Nazis from
the influential Bauhaus School, left Germany and became established
in Britain and the United States. Following the 1930 Stockholm
Exhibition, Swedish architecture began a seamless shift towards
Modernism. By the time the global social, political and economic
order came to be re-written at the cessation of hostilities, these
cultural shifts would transform the art and architecture of the post-
war world.

References
1. Polybius, Universal History, mid-second century BCE.
2. Diogenes of Oenoanda, from an inscription on a portico wall in the
ancient city of Oenoanda, Lycia (in modern Turkey) on the third and
fourth century BCE Greek philosopher Epicurus, inscribed late second
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

century CE.
3. Quran 7:158.
4. E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland. Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking
Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1914, 322–331.
5. Immanuel M. Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the
Changing World-System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991,
163.
6. John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government, 1689, Chapter 5,
Section 27.
7. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmpolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.
New York: Norton, 2007, xv.
8. Immanuel Kant. “Perpetual Peace.” 1795, Eighth Thesis. From Ted
Humphrey, trans., Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and
Morals: A Philosophical Essay. Hackett Publishing Co., 1983, 163.
9. Arthur Herman. The Idea of Decline in Western History. New York: The
Free Press, 1997, 25.
10. Ibid., 26.

11. For example, from the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington D.C.
September 8, 2010, “A Conversation with U.S. Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton.”: “the world is counting on us today, as it has
in the past. When old adversaries need an honest broker or fundamental
freedoms need a champion, people turn to us.”
12. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. Le Progrès des Chose. 1688
13. Nicolas de Condorcet. 10th Epoch: Future Progress of Man. 1796
14. Comte de Saint-Simon. Réorganisation de la Société Européenne. 1814
15. Jaques Turgot. Plan d'un Ouvrage sur la Géographie Politique. 1751
16. John Gray. Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the
Modern Age. London: Routledge, 1995, 145.
17. John Henry Cardinal Newman. The Idea of a University. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960, 189.
18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party,
Chapter 1, 1848.
19. John Maynard Keynes. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. New York:
Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920, 8.
20. Special Citation by the American Institute of Architects, 1952.
21. Henry Ford. My Philosophy of Industry. London, Harrap, 1929, 11–12 .
22. Quoted by Nayan Chanda. Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers,
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalisation. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2007, 279.
23. Covenant of the League of Nations, 1919.
24. Benito Mussolini’s response to the League of Nations’ condemnation of
the conduct of Italy’s war in Ethiopia in 1936.
25. Erich Medndelsohn. “The Problem of a New Architecture,” lecture to
members of Arbeitsrat für Kunst, 1919, quoted by Ulrich Conrads.
Programmes and Manifestos on 20th-century Architecture. London: Lund
Humphries, 1970, 55.
26. Charles Baudelaire. “The Painter of Modern Life,” (1859). In Selected
Writings on Art and Artists, edited by P.E. Charvet, 402. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981, 402.
27. Henry-Russell Hitchcock & Philip Johnson. The International Style. New
York: Norton, 1995, 35.
28. John Gaw Meem. “Old Forms for New Buildings.” American Architect
145 (1934): 10–20.

29. Kasimir Malevich. “Suprematist Manifesto Unovis,” 1924, quoted by

Ulrich Conrads in Programmes and Manifestos on 20th-century Architecture.
London: Lund Humphries, 1970, 87.
30. For example, the British Architect Oliver Hill. His work included the
modernist Midland Hotel in Morecombe, England, the Arts and Crafts
Court House in Argyll and Sutherland, Scotland, and the Queen Anne
style Long Newnton Priory, Tetbury, England.
31. In particular, the publication by the leading British architect Sir Reginald
Blomfield, in which he asks: “Are we to accept this Modernism as a step
forward, or are we to regard it as a step downhill which, if unchecked,
will end in the bankruptcy of Literature and the Arts?” Sir Reginald
Blomfield. Modernismus: A Study. London: MacMillan and Co., 1934, v.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

SETTING THE SCENE

B: The New World Order 1945–1992:

Global Commerce, Politics and the Triumph
of Modernism
Establishing Global Institutions
The world order re-formed after the Second World War to a
framework of power, economics and culture that would last for
more than half a century. The United States took up its position as a
major international power and came out of the political and
economic isolation of the preceding inter-war period.
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In 1904, the Harvard-based German psychologist, Hugo

Munsterberg, drily proclaimed, “the duty of America is to extend its
political system to every quarter of the globe: other nations will thus
be rated according to their ripeness for this system, and the history of
the world appear one long and happy education of the human race up
to the plane of American conception.”1 When Congress rejected
United States membership of the League of Nations, however, it
reflected a contradictory, inward-looking national mentality borne of
a legacy of refugee immigration, continental proportions and two
benign land borders. This same isolationism lay behind the Smoot–
Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which sought to protect United States
farming and industry from foreign competition after the Wall Street
Crash of the previous year. International retaliation deepened the
crisis and prolonged the Great Depression such that it was only lifted
by industrial mobilisation on the United States’ entry to the Second
World War.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
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30 Part I

Not only did the war draw the United States, somewhat
reluctantly, into the international arena, it heightened its long-
established sense of moral ascendancy and provided popular
recognition of the political power of its huge economy. Alongside a
new international role came an understanding that earlier isolation
had exposed rather than protected the United States from conflict
and the risks of global trade. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbour
forced the United States into the war (economic and moral support
for Britain had been in place for some time), the first moves were
made to define the post-war world.
In August 1941, Britain and the United States issued a joint
statement, later called “The Atlantic Charter,” which defined Allied
objectives in the Second World War. This included a popular right
to self-determination, the lowering of trade barriers, global
economic cooperation and advancement of social welfare. By
September, the ten governments at war with the Axis powers agreed
to the principles of the Charter. At the end of the year, when the
United States became one of the Allied combatants, President
Roosevelt devised the name “United Nations” for the Allies. In 1942,
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the United States, the USSR, Great Britain, the Republic of China
and forty-five other nations signed the United Nations Declaration,
based on the Atlantic Charter, in which the signatories, in a clear
reference to the United States Declaration of Independence, agreed
to “defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to
preserve human rights and justice.” At the end of the war, after a
United Nations Conference on International Organization in San
Francisco, the “Charter of the United Nations” was drawn up,
founded on, but greatly expanding, the “United Nations
Declaration.” This had to be legitimised, first by the agreement of the
four signatories of the “United Nations Declaration,” plus France,
and then by the majority of the other participants. In October 1945,
the United Nations was created to “maintain international peace and
security” and harmonise “the actions of nations.” A new supra-
national political order was thus created to replace the discredited
League of Nations, with the United States as a major sponsor, and
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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Setting the Scene 31

according to a charter based on the political ideals of the North

Atlantic liberal democracies.
During the war, the framework was also established for
international monetary control. In 1944, a conference of the forty-
four Allied powers at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, USA,
agreed that in a post-war world there would be global open markets
and the free movement of capital. The Bretton Woods Conference
established a system for regulating exchange rates based on the US
dollar and set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank. Although, the system could not come into full force
until 1959 (when all European currencies became convertible) and
collapsed in 1971 (see below), economic internationalism, the
principles of global free trade and the core international economic
institutions are still effective today.
In the final stages of the Second World War the full horror of
Nazi atrocities became apparent, and the Human Rights Commission
of the United Nations, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of the
recently deceased President), felt that the “Charter of the United
Nations” did not provide sufficient protection of the individual
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against oppressive states. In 1948, the “Universal Declaration of

Human Rights” was adopted by the United Nations. This gave the
individual rights over and above his or her state. These rights
included those of property ownership, religious freedom, participation
in government and even paid holidays. They also included
entitlement “to a social and international order” (Article 28) and the
provision that no “State, group or person” could do anything to
destroy these rights (Article 30). Today we see the Declaration as
something close to a universal truth, but at the time it was
unprecedented, and its adoption was not universally supported. It is
not surprising that in 1948 the Soviet Bloc countries, South Africa
and Saudi Arabia abstained (the last for religious reasons), but it was
also opposed at the time by the American Anthropological
Association as expressing only “the values prevalent in the countries
of Western Europe and America.”2 Its principal drafters were,
indeed, either from Western Europe or North America, or had been
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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32 Part I

educated in American institutions. Even now, objection remains

outside the sway of North Atlantic culture; as Ziauddin Sardar said in
1998: “since an autonomous, isolated individual does not exist in
non-Western cultures and traditions, it does not make sense to talk
of his or her rights.”3
By 1950 the framework for international trade and political
interaction that remains in place to this day had been established.
This included the promulgation of the same European Enlightenment
principles that had guided the creation of the United States and the
central role of the US dollar in the world economy. The centre of
power shifted from one English-speaking nation to another; Britain
had been bankrupted by the war and would soon be driven to
dismantle its formerly pre-eminent empire. The United States
remained as one of the few combatants in the Second World War
with very little territorial damage and, unlike the other principal
combatants, had an economy stimulated rather than wrecked by the
war. From its newly dominant position the United States advanced
its political and trading position by providing financial support to the
ravaged economies of Europe, encouraged Britain to break up its
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empire, and ensured that its own power was accompanied by

military alliance and advantageous conditions for American products.
The only check on the universal spread of American-led trade and
political ideology was the formation of the Soviet Bloc, the
communist victory in China and the Cold War. The USSR, although
a United States wartime ally and with its economy crippled by
invasion, was dominated by a fiercely nationalist Russia and espoused
a communist political system explicitly hostile to the capitalism and
libertarianism by which the United States defined itself. The defeat of
Germany allowed the USSR to consolidate its power and add to the
boundaries of the pre-Soviet empire the newly “liberated” nations of
Eastern Europe. As the USSR exercised more coercive power over
the Eastern European countries now under its sway and closed their
borders, the new political landscape came to be known as the “Cold
War”—an expression coined by the British author and journalist
George Orwell in 19454 and taken up by the US journalist, Walter
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Setting the Scene 33

Lippmann, with his 1947 book of the same name. By 1949, a civil
war in China had established another communist regime in Asia,
which was at first allied with its Russian neighbour. The growing
power and influence of the United States and its possession of the
nuclear bomb created an arms race and increasing hostility and
paranoia within both the USA and the USSR.
The Cold War would not only define world politics for the next
forty-four years, it would also be instrumental in setting the scene
for major cultural changes in the post-war world.

The Cold War and Victory of Modernism

In the United States, the war had accelerated the economy out of the
Great Depression. Wartime technological advances in electronics
and aviation created new industries, and military automobile
construction turned into a huge expansion in private motoring. The
growth of service industries and favourable international trading
conditions created a vigorous consumer economy. Car ownership
and low-interest mortgages for private housing led to the massive
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urban sprawl that continues to distinguish American life. The new

consumer economy was more than an economic success story for the
United States: the US came to be seen by many countries as the fount
of modernity and progress. Economic growth and a rising standard of
living were politically linked with liberty, personal freedom and
modernity, and defined as the essential ingredients of the American
way of life. This was deliberately contrasted with the struggling
economies and the repressive regimes of the Soviet Bloc, which had
rejected the European Recovery Progam, or Marshall Plan, owing to
its non-negotiable trading conditions with the USA. This excluded
the USSR from the Organisation for European Economic Co-
operation, formed to administer the Marshall Plan, which later
became the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD)—the free trade system based on the
leadership of the United States. Free trade, modernity, prosperity

and the way of life of the United States became weapons in the Cold
War, weapons that would include art and architecture.
The association of modernity and progress with new directions in
the arts had already been grasped by revolutionary European
modernists in the pre-war years. Although it had its adherents and its
own brand of artistic and architectural modernity, the United States
received a major influx of pioneering German modernists when they
fled from Nazi persecution in the 1930s. The Bauhaus founder
Walter Gropius moved first to Britain and then to the United States
and, from 1938 to 1952, was Chairman of the Harvard Graduate
School of Design, teaching with his Bauhaus colleague Marcel
Breuer. In 1938 the Armour Institute of Technology (later the
Illinois Institute of Technology) asked the pioneering German
modernist, Mies van der Rohe, to be the Director of its Department
of Architecture. These influential figures joined home-grown
modernists such as Louis Kahn (Dean of the Yale School of
Architecture from 1947 to 1957), Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames
to transform American architecture. The relocation of the early
pioneers, their obligation to their new homeland and their interaction
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

with United States commercial architectural firms brought about an

important reorientation of Modernism away from its original
association with socialism, to the service of the free market and
commerce. Although the rapid suburban expansion of private
housing was generally traditional in form, wealthy sophisticates
commissioned fashionable modernists for trophy houses. Public
housing and high-status institutional buildings turned increasingly to
the new style, drawing on the incongruent benefits of economy and
ostentatious novelty.
Speaking from his adopted United States, in the same year as the
publication of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the
architect Walter Gropius, seemed to echo the ideals of the United
Nations:
I would like to suggest that in a period when the leading spirits of
mankind try to see human problems on earth as an interdependent

entity, any chauvinistic sentimental national prejudice regarding the

development of architecture must result in narrowing limitations.
The emphasis should be on, “Let us do it together,” with each
nation, each individual giving his share without giving up regional
expression, the emphasis being on teams rather than on individuals.
I dare say that we are today much more influenced by each other
than in former centuries, because of the rapid development of
interchange and intercommunication. This must be welcome, as it
enriches us and promotes a common denominator of understanding,
so badly needed.5

Although these sentiments in isolation seem laudable, they must be

seen in the context of the views of Dean Acheson, one of the
architects of the Marshall Plan and US Secretary of State from 1949
to 1953, who said that, “in the final analysis the United States [is] the
locomotive at the head of mankind, and the rest of the world is the
caboose.”6
The Soviet Bloc understood this very well. They described the
“International Style,” promoted by Gropius, as “cosmopolitan” in a
wholly negative sense: “As in other capitalist countries, building in
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

predominantly formalist and subordinated to the cosmopolitan

ideology of American imperialism. This is why buildings look alike
whatever their location … shapeless boxes are an expression of the
profit hunger of monopoly capitalism under American dominance.”7
While in the early years after the war there was a brief flirtation with
Modernism in the Eastern European states, Russian influence and the
promotion of Modernism as propaganda for American modernity
persuaded even pre-war pioneers to recant. In 1949 at the Congrès
Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in Bergamo, Italy, the
Polish architect Helena Syrkus, a prominent pre-war modernist, told
an audience including Le Corbusier, Josep Sert and Ernesto Rogers8
that “the countries of the east have come to the conclusion that we
should have a greater respect for the past.” The Soviet Union took
great care to train architects from their new client states, some of
which had responded most positively to Modernism in the pre-war
years (such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary), with architectural education
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36 Part I

Figure 9. Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago; Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe; 1956.
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Figure 10. Opera House, Leipzig; Kunz Nierade; 1960.

After the Second World War architecture divides

between East and West.

in Moscow or organised tours for professionals in Moscow and

Leningrad (St Petersburg). Literal versions of Russian classicism,
such as the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, were rare.
Soviet-trained architects were instead encouraged to adapt
architecture from approved historical periods.9
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the United States
government used agencies such as the CIA and the United States
Information Agency (USIA)—an organisation created by the
Department of State to promote United States culture abroad—to
actively promote modernist art and architecture as an expression of
free thinking and liberty alongside more seductive consumer items,
all representing the American way of life. As Raymond Loewy put it
in a speech to the Harvard Business School in 1950: “The citizens of
Lower Slobovia may not give a hoot for freedom of speech but how
they fall for a gleaming Frigidaire, a stream-lined bus or a coffee
percolator.”10 Travelling exhibitions were organised, such as the
1955 “50 Years of American Art” curated by the Museum of Modern
Art, showcasing modern industrial design alongside modernist
architecture, which went to Paris, Zurich, Barcelona, Frankfurt,
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London, The Hague, Vienna and Belgrade. Architects, planners and

engineers were taken on study tours to the USA in the late 1940s and
early 1950s, and met luminaries such as Lewis Mumford and
European émigrés including Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.
Germany was a special case for attention, and an exhibition called
We’re Building a Better Life [Wir bauen ein besseres Leben] was staged
in West Berlin, Stuttgart and Hanover before going to Paris and
Milan in 1952. This included an ideal dwelling built in the
appropriately named George-Marshall-Haus pavilion and featured
technically advanced American consumer products with, as its
curator Edgar Kaufmann said, an “emphasis to be placed upon [the]
fortunate outcome of American economic philosophy.”11
Embassy building had always been an exercise in national
propaganda and, as an anonymous article in Arts and Architecture
declared in 1954: “the United States Government is making modern
American architecture one of its most convincing demonstrations of
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38 Part I

the vitality of American culture.”12 Embassy designs went to

modernists such as Walter Gropius (Athens), Josep Luis Sert
(Baghdad) and Edward Durrell Stone (Delhi). Pietro Belluschi,
leading American modernist and chair of the selection board, rather
patronisingly “felt great elation to think of the possible influences of
that such design many have on local architects.”13 This attitude was
not limited to state institutions. In a close parallel to Stalin’s gift of a
building to Warsaw, the Benjamin Franklin Foundation, founded by
Eleanor Dulles (sister of the head of the CIA), gifted Berlin the
Kongresshalle, a cultural centre designed by the American modernist
architect Hugh Stubbins Jnr., complete with a quotation on “the love
of liberty” by Benjamin Franklin in the entrance. Even the
construction of luxury hotel chains were harnessed to carry the
American message abroad. In 1957 Conrad Hilton wrote in his
autobiography that each of his foreign hotels was a “laboratory”
where the peoples of the world could “inspect America and its ways
at their leisure” as “bulwarks against the communist threat.”14
As the original home of Modernism, Western Europe was fertile
ground for this propaganda, and young architects who had been
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radical promoters of Modernism in the pre-war years returned from

military service to a continent ready for the construction of a new
and better world. Modernism offered freedom from the nationalism
that had led to conflict, a synergy with technological advances
accelerated in the war, but now directed to the peacetime economy,
an industrial attitude to construction that would speed up
reconstruction, a clean modernity that looked to an optimistic future
rather than a discredited past, and a radicalism that was required to
reform out-dated social structures. In addition, it was highly
commended by its earlier Nazi proscription. In the context of the
time it was irresistible but, as left-of-centre governments came into
power and social reform was seen to be more urgent than the spread
of consumer durables, it did not have quite the flavour of the capitalist
evangelism promoted by the continent’s American paymasters.
Many devastated cities in continental Europe sought to forget
their recent ordeal and rebuilt their pre-war fabric. Britain, destitute
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Setting the Scene 39

Figure 11. (left) US Embassy, Athens; Walter Gropius; 1961. Modernist embassy
designs were used by the USA as built propaganda to convey a modern and free
society.
Figure 12. (right) Conrad Hilton in front of model of Istanbul Hilton. Hilton
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Hotels were designed as microcosms of the American way of life and were promoted by
Conrad Hilton as cultural ammunition in the Cold War.

The United States made modern architecture into a cultural weapon

in the Cold War.

but with the optimism of the victor, gradually re-built and re-
ordered its bomb-damaged cities in the latest modern style.
Germany, in a monumental national struggle for recovery, often
kept to original but improved city plans, but built in an economic
elementary Modernism. Where new towns were constructed or new
areas laid out, the memory and survival of the dirty and cramped
conditions that the industrialised countries had inherited from the
nineteenth century led to a drive for rationality, cleanliness and open
space. Socially conscious planning had been proposed by modernist
urban reformers in the 1930s. New developments, such as the
growth of car ownership and the opportunity for tall buildings, were
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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40 Part I

combined with a “rational” segregation of different use functions and

methods of transport, changing space between buildings into space
around buildings and a paternalistic attitude to the population.
Orderly ranks of monolithic modernist structures set in urban parks
and crossed by elevated roads were published as the way for the
future in Europe and the USA. After the war, the destruction
resulting from the conflict was combined with the deliberate
destruction of historic areas, designated as slums, and pre-war urban
planning theories could at last be realised by governments energised
to control and intervene to create a better society.
The frivolity of the Style Moderne was dismissed as inappropriate
for the serious business of creating a new society and it quickly
became little more than a period piece. Simplified classicism,
however, survived along with its pre-war practitioners but, as
architecture schools around the world gradually abandoned their
classical teaching and it was all but banned by reform-minded trade
journals, it passed into obscurity. A few solitary practices soldiered
on supported by loyal private and wealthy clients or building
restoration.
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Within a decade, the architecture of the post-war era in the non-

communist countries was almost universally modernist. In 1948,
Henry Russell-Hitchcock, who had mounted the International Style
exhibition in 1932, could confidently assert that “we could now
consider International Style to be synonymous with the phrase
‘Modern Architecture’.”15 In 1952, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime
Minister of the newly independent India, commissioned Le
Corbusier and a team of European modernists to design Chandigarh,
a new capital for the Punjab State that would be "symbolic of the
freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past, an
expression of the nation's faith in the future.”16 In 1955, the
American architect Pietro Belluschi could return from his travels
abroad and report that “throughout the Eastern countries we visited,
architecture is a superficial imitation of the more obvious western
forms … And this is happening not only in Baghdad or in Agra or in
Karachi but in Italy, in France, and even in Finland, wherever
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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Setting the Scene 41

reconstruction of bombed-out areas has taken place.”17 In 1956

President Juscelino Kubitschek of Brazil launched a competition for a
new capital as “the dawn of a new day for Brazil.”18 Lúcio Costa won
the contest for the urban plan, working with the leading Brazilian
modernist, Oscar Niemeyer. In Iraq in 1957, in the final days of the
Hashemite kingdom, Walter Gropius was commissioned to design
the new University City. In these projects and many more, in nations
free from Soviet influence, the attraction of novelty and the
association of Modernism with modernity and progress had a
particular appeal.
In 1956, events in the Soviet Union signalled a change of
direction. Stalin had died in 1953 and, after a power struggle inside
the communist party, one of Stalin’s inner circle, Nikita Khrushchev,
came to power. In the so-called “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth
Party Congress he denounced Stalin’s oppressive policies and
adopted a policy for the improvement of living standards with the
objective of catching up with Western standards. This included
liberalisation of the arts and a more open dialogue with the United
States, which led to the 1958 “US-USSR Agreement on Cultural
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Exchange.” Arising out of this agreement, in 1959 the USIA took a

version of its German We’re Building a Better Life exhibition to the
American National Exhibition in Moscow. A lavish display of
consumer goods and imagined lifestyle of an “average” American
family in a typical prefabricated “dream home” were explicitly
designed to attract the envy of Russian visitors. As one of the advisers
to the exhibition made quite clear, this was intended as a third front
in the Cold War: “By spurring the Russians to increase production of
consumer goods we may be helping ourselves more than we are
helping them”19 A tour of the exhibition by Vice President Richard
Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev embarrassed the latter into making the
famous and manifestly false defence20: “You think the Russian people
will be dumbfounded to see these things but the fact is that newly
built Russian houses have all this equipment right now.”

Khrushchev had already signalled the end of Stalinist traditional

architecture in a speech to the Soviet All-Union Conference for
Builders and Architects in Moscow in 1954. He told architects that
they “must know the new progressive materials, reinforced concrete
sections and parts and, most of all, must have an excellent
understanding of construction economy.”21 This gave a licence for
architects to join with industrial designers in the new project to catch
up with the United States by taking on the role of technocrats and, in
the interests of efficiency and economy, explore new forms under
the politically acceptable banner of “experiment.” It also allowed
Soviet designers to give additional legitimacy to their work by re-
connecting with their own revolutionary Constructivist past. In 1957
a revived competition for the un-built Palace of the Soviets in
Moscow was particularly significant: the original 1931 competition
had included entries from many leading modernists but the choice of
a monumental classical design signalled the start of two decades of
obligatory traditional architecture approved by Stalin. The 1957
competition could again include proposals for unambiguously
modernist designs, with a reasonable anticipation of success (the
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project was in fact abandoned). In the 1960s a utopian housing

scheme was planned for a new district of Moscow by Mosproject 3,
also known as the Institute of Standard and Experimental Projects,
which was not only clearly modernist but included the Soviet ideals
of communal living pioneered by early Constructivists. Modernism
was re-established in the Soviet Union and became the style of the
“Khrushchev’s modernisation.”
By 1960, with the Soviet Union finally converted, Modernism
could legitimately claim to be the International Style. The success of
this North Atlantic architectural movement was complete.
Throughout the world, in the name of liberty, capitalism, socialism,
reform or efficiency but, above all, modernity and progress, there
was a new architecture based on an aesthetic break with the past,
expressive geometry and the explicit use of new materials.

Figure 13. Legislative Assembly Building, Chandigarh, India; le Corbusier; 1962.

States could use North Atlantic Modernism to mark out their modernity and claim
their place in the new world order.
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Figure 14. Apartment Buildings, Ulitsa Zhukovskogo, St Petersburg, Russia; 1960s.

After Stalin’s death, the USSR used industrialised Modernism to accelerate its building
programme and express its progressive ambitions.

By the end of the 1960s Modernism had become a global style.

The Golden Age of Capitalism and Heroic Modernism

The 1950s and 1960s were the “Golden Age of Capitalism” in the
OECD. This was the American Post-War Economic Boom, the
German Wirtschaftswunde, the Italian Miracolo Economico or Economic
Miracle, the Japanese Izanami period (a mythological allusion), and
the French Trente Glorieuses or the Glorious Thirty years (in fact it was
twenty-three, but the allusion to the Les Trois Glorieuses days of the
1830 revolution was irresistible). The British Prime Minister, Harold
MacMillan, told his political party in 1957 that “most of our people
have never had it so good,” although a sclerotic industrial system and
the dismantling of the British Empire had in fact by now reduced the
former world power to a second-league nation. Nonetheless, in the
1960s, the coming-of-age of the post-war generation fuelled a
remarkable outburst of creativity that briefly put Britain at centre-
stage in a new popular youth-based consumer culture.
The communist countries did not fare so well. In the Soviet
Union, Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” was not secret for long and the
apparent relaxation of Russian tyranny led to unrest in Poland and
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full-scale revolution in Hungary, which was brutally suppressed. A

persistent exodus of skilled workers from East Germany through the
jointly controlled city of Berlin led to the construction of the Berlin
Wall, a highly visible symbol of popular communist failure. The
United States faced down the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban
Missile Crisis and the USSR suffered an exceptionally poor harvest in
1963, threatening starvation and leading to a major depletion of gold
and foreign currency reserves. In 1964 Khrushchev was deposed by
Leonid Brezhnev who led the Soviet Union until his death in 1982.
For the first decade of his rule, Brezhnev presided over a
conservative period of moderate growth, but with a forty per cent
increase in military expenditure. He also restored the powers of the
KGB, put dissident writers on trial and overturned Khrushchev’s
cultural reforms. Now reduced to a pared-down Modernism and
without any latitude for new thinking, architecture in the Soviet
Union under Brezhnev was largely represented by utilitarian pre-cast
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Setting the Scene 45

concrete apartment blocks or a pale shadow of more dynamic

developments in the West.
Communist China, at first allied to Russia and then at
loggerheads, was crippled first by The Great Leap Forward, a hugely
disruptive programme to transform China from an agricultural to an
industrial economy, and then, in 1966, the culturally and economically
devastating Cultural Revolution. As China turned in on itself in an
orgy of economic and cultural self-destruction and factionalism it
would have no significant part to play in international economic and
political affairs until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. There was
little enthusiasm or economy to support anything more than sparse
and impoverished construction. Official architecture was influenced
by post-war Russia and its Beaux Arts inheritance, creating an up-
scaled reinterpretation of Chinese traditional architecture.
The combination of a capitalist system, liberal-democratic
government and Keynsian economics (of state intervention in a
market system) in the OECD countries now appeared to be so
successful that a permanent equilibrium seemed to have occurred. In
1960, the American sociologist, Daniel Bell, called this “the End of
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Ideology,” arguing that all ideological debate of the past had become
irrelevant in the face of the superiority of the capitalist and liberal-
democratic system, and society would only now be subject to
technocratic refinement.22 In architecture too, the great style debates
of the past seemed to be over forever. There was a professional
consensus that Modernism was the only legitimate direction for the
future. To suggest otherwise would be a regression to a discredited
past, a denial of the historical process itself, and did not warrant
recognition, let alone debate. While in the United States and Britain
in particular traditionally designed housing was still the predominant
product constructed for open-market sale, this was simply ignored or
regarded as a temporary aberration, soon to be corrected. Operating
in a condition of complete self-confidence, modernist architecture
entered into a heroic age.
For a decade there was an extraordinary period of architectural
creativity. Unified behind a moral belief in the pursuit of a new
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46 Part I

future, building design branched out in a number of different

directions that would set the aesthetic agenda for modernist
architecture to this day. Carried along by the same sense of destiny
and reassured by their technocratic conviction, cities, governments
and corporations gave the architectural profession full rein.
Pre-war pioneers continued to practice. Mies van der Rohe
perfected geometrically refined glass-walled structures. With his
influence on architects such as Gio Ponti and Minoru Yamasaki and
commercial firms such as Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the sheer-
façade corporate office tower achieved a definitive form. Le
Corbusier’s work entered a new phase that turned from rational
rectilinear structure to expressive sculptural form. The rather
eccentric late-period work of the great American nationalist
architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, occasionally took a similar direction.
These free forms were developed into dramatic structural
expressionism in the designs of architects such as Eero Saarinen, Pier
Luigi Nervi and Frei Otto. Walter Gropius, while contributing to the
definitive office block with his PanAm Building in New York,
occasionally turned to elemental historical forms (figure 15). Heavily
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abstracted allusions to the past, often reduced to little more than

proportions, were also employed by Wallace Harrison at the Lincoln
Center in New York and by Leslie Martin in Britain, but most
powerfully by Louis Khan.
Above all, the architecture that has remained emblematic of the
period is the large concrete-clad structure that owes its origins to the
most influential building of the post-war era, Le Corbusier’s 1947
Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles. Massive and domineering buildings
such as Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles’s Boston City Hall in the
US (figure 16), more delicate concrete structures such as Ernö
Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in London or Kenzo Tange’s geometric
concrete in Kurshiki City Hall in Japan were built in cities around the
world. In 1966 the British architecture critic, Reyner Banham, gave
the type its own name with his book The New Brutalism: Ethic or
Aesthetic. The term was originally coined by the British architect-

couple Peter and Alison Smithson in 1953 from the French béton brut,
raw concrete, but the translation to the more aggressive English
expression seemed to better express its uncompromising assertiveness.
Among the variety of modernist experiments of the period were
the beginnings of the architecture that would emerge in the following
decades. Alvar Aalto, a Finnish architect whose work went back to
the Swedish classicism of the 1920s, and Aldo van Eyck from Holland
looked for a way to make Modernism more sympathetic to human
scale and local conditions (figure 17). The sculptural forms of Sydney
Opera House by Jorn Utzon and the projects of Arata Isosaki, on the
other hand, renounced the core functionalist ethos of Modernism for
buildings that advertised their presence by simply being extraordinary.
Archigram, a small group of young architects in 1960s London, also
published fantastic projects proposing a technologically driven future
with huge structures and mechanical imagery. In 1963, a young
American architect, Robert Venturi, after a scholarship at the
American Academy at Rome, a two-year European tour and nine
years of teaching, built a house for his mother in Philadelphia and
three years later published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.
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The house and the book, in their different media, questioned the
central modernist tenets of aesthetic authenticity and the rejection of
historic style. It would take a major shift in the social, political and
economic condition to bring each of these isolated experiments to
centre stage.

Figure 15. PanAm building, (now the MetLife Building), New York; Emery Roth &
Sons with Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi; 1963. European modernists
abandoned their socialist ideals and adapted their architecture to the commercial
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demands of the expanding capitalist economy of the USA.

Figure 16. Boston City Hall, Boston; Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles; 1969.
Concrete became a major expressive medium with Brutalism, named after the French
for “raw concrete”, béton brut.
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Setting the Scene 49

Figure 17. Childrens’ Home and Tripolis Office Complex, Amsterdam; Aldo van
Eyck; 1960 and 1990. A number of architects set out to humanise the mechanical
and industrial legacy of Modernism.

The 1960s, the heroic decade of Modernism.

The Breakdown of the Post-War Consensus

and a Crisis of Confidence in Architecture
A wide range of social and political developments came together in
and around 1968, signalling the breakdown of the post-war
consensus and launching a decade of economic crisis and political
instability.
Cold War paranoia had drawn the United States into a disastrous
war in Vietnam. By 1965 there were American troops on the
ground, and by 1968 they were fighting an increasingly savage
conflict in ever-increasing numbers. The growing United States army
was made up of conscripts from a post-war generation raised on a
heady mixture of American libertarianism and consumerism. The
combination of the “Alternative Culture” that had gathered in the
“Summer of Love” in San Francisco the year before and the massacre
of civilians at My Lai by their conscripted contemporaries were

toxic. Student protests became increasingly violent, leading to a

generational confrontation and the shooting of students at Kent State
University two years later. Social unrest in the US was not restricted
to war protest. The “Long Hot Summer” of race riots in Detroit left
forty dead in 1967, and in 1968, the civil rights activist, Martin
Luther King, was assassinated by a white supremacist.
Unrest spread to European cities and took on its own dynamic as
young people combined anti-war protest with deep-rooted
resentment of the complacency of their ruling classes. In May 1968,
Paris and eventually the whole of France erupted as students,
anarchists and trade unions joined together to shut down the
country. President de Gaulle, wartime leader and national hero,
went into hiding. In Germany, Andreas Baader and other left-wing
revolutionaries bombed department stores in Frankfurt-am-Maine
and killed three members of the public in a protest against right-
wing oppression and the Vietnam War. This would lead to the
establishment of the Red Army Faction or Baader-Meinhof Gang
that would intermittently terrorise Germany over the next thirty
years.
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The Soviet Bloc, China and India had their problems. Reform of
industry to a more capitalist profit-based system in the USSR in 1965
was adopted by the Eastern European client states. This led to
demands for more widespread reform and, in January 1968,
Czechoslovakia liberalised its political system. In March, students in
Poland rioted and occupied their university buildings. The Polish
students were expelled and a period of repression followed. In
August, the Soviet Union and other Soviet Bloc countries invaded
Czechoslovakia and deposed Alexander Dubēek, its reformist leader.
In the same year, China had entered into its latest phase of cultural
self-destruction and Mao Zedong initiated the “Down to the
Countryside” movement that exiled young intellectuals to rural
areas. Many died from malnutrition, disease and overwork. India,
suffering from withdrawal of international aid following war with
Pakistan, devalued the rupee in 1966 and, in 1969, the Congress

Party, which had ruled India since independence, split following a

poor showing in the 1967 election.
It was, however, the creation of Israel—one troubled outcome of
the Second World War—that finally brought down the post-war
economy. The establishment of a Jewish state where none had
existed for two millennia and the expulsion of the predominantly
Muslim Palestinian population created instability in the Middle East
that persists to this day. Moral, financial and military support from
the United States and guilt-ridden Europe linked the North Atlantic
nations to the aggressive actions of the new state. The oil, which had
fuelled the Western economies, came largely from Muslim countries
that were appalled by the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. When
Israel annexed land from Egypt, Syria and Jordan and occupied the
whole of Jerusalem—the second-most holy Muslim city—after the
Six Day War in 1967, Arab members of the Organisation of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) wanted the organisation to
take retaliatory action on the US and its allies. Frustrated by inaction,
in 1968 three Arab nations created a sub-group of OPEC, the
Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries. In 1973,
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when the Israelis again defeated their Arab neighbours in the Yom
Kippur War, the Arab world was outraged and the new organisation
embargoed oil exports to Western Europe and the USA. As the fuel
that had driven post-war growth dried up, the Western economies
faltered, leading to a sharp drop in world trade, high unemployment
and record levels of inflation.
The economic crisis was compounded by political scandal and, in
the United States and Britain, political instability. In 1973 the
Watergate scandal broke and by the following year, after proof of his
complicity in crime and deception, United States President Nixon
was forced to resign in favour of his undistinguished Vice President.
The term of his successor, Jimmy Carter, was dogged by the
economic crisis and ended with the national humiliation of the
kidnapping of American embassy staff following the 1979 Islamic
revolution in Iran. In Germany, Willy Brandt, the figurehead of the
German post-war recovery, first as mayor of Berlin and then as
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52 Part I

Chancellor, resigned in 1977 when one of his advisers was found to

be an East German spy. In 1974 the British Labour government came
to power without a majority, and an election the following year gave
them a majority of just three. Weak government, unemployment,
inflation and poor industrial relations in Britain led to the
enforcement of a three-day working week and the rationing of
power.
As the confidence of the Golden Age waned, attitudes to the
natural and built environment changed. The wreck of an oil tanker
off the British coast in 1967 and an oil and chemical fire in Ohio,
USA in 1969 drew public attention to the damaging effects of post-
war industrial expansion and established popular support for a
burgeoning environmental movement. Greenpeace was founded in
Canada two years later. On the other hand, the destructive effects of
new development on historic places were evident every day. In
Britain and the United States there had been organisations and laws
to protect historic buildings and places for some years, but these had
limited effect. In 1968, Britain passed laws to prevent the demolition
of historic buildings and commissioned studies of major historic
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cities. In 1969, in an address to the European Conference of

Ministers responsible for the Immovable Cultural Heritage, Prince
Albert of Belgium stated that “we are beginning to realize that the
preservation and enhancement of historic sites must … be
understood and recognized by the public at large, not as a nostalgic
rear-guard action by a select few, but as a modern concept.” In 1972,
the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation
(UNESCO) published the World Heritage Convention, which linked
built and natural heritage and declared 1975 as the European
Architectural Year. In the same year, a National Neighbourhood
Conservation Conference was held in New York, which launched a
series of city-based conservation organisations. In the US in 1978 the
Federal Government created the Heritage Conservation and
Recreation Service to strengthen the operation of the National
Register of Historic Places.

The growth of the Heritage Movement was a direct response to

widespread disillusion with the destruction of historic cities and the
intrusion of deliberately incongruous buildings. Familiar places—
receptacles of memory and symbols of communal identity—had
become strange and uniform. By the end of the 1960s, the thrill of
novelty had worn off the modernist re-building programme. Ten-to-
fifteen-year-old buildings were no longer new, and some were
already beginning to show alarming signs of deterioration. Gratitude
for spacious living and good plumbing felt by the first inhabitants of
the vast new public housing projects had passed, and there came a
nostalgia for the streets that had been lost to the non-places between
modernist blocks. Theories of a better life with streets in the sky,
free from the soot of industry and recreation in sunlit parks had in
reality created social isolation, fragmented lives and urban deserts.
Two events drew these tendencies into sharp focus. In Britain in
1968, a gas explosion in one apartment in a twenty-two storey block
killed four residents living below. The block, Ronan Point in East
London, had been completed only two months previously and was
built in one of the rapid construction systems used by cities to speed
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up the delivery of their new housing targets. The media coverage of

this event created a widespread crisis of confidence and drew
attention to the wider failings of the architectural type. In 1972, in St
Louis, Missouri, the city authorities blew up the first part of a
housing project built in 1954 to provide 2,870 apartments in
accordance with the latest modernist planning theories. Although the
failure of the development had a political as well as architectural
background, the destruction of such a large high-profile complex
became emblematic of the failure of all such schemes and was later
held up by the critic, Charles Jencks, as “the day Modern architecture
died.”23
The architectural profession responded to this seismic shift in
attitudes to their work by turning both inwards, and outwards.

Figure 18. Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, California; Cesar Pelli; 1975.
Modernist materials were used to create buildings that were more sculpture than an
expression of their function.
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Figure 19. House VI, Cornwall, Connecticut; Peter Eisenman; 1975. Eisenman
pioneered an architecture that went beyond function and introduced deliberate
complexity inspired by the landscape and the architect’s own ideas.

In the 1970s Modernism began to move away from the principles

of functional and structural expression.

Brutal concrete structures were abandoned, but many architects

simply shifted to glossier or lighter materials. With the justification
of Modernism through the logic of function discredited, the field was
open to pursue other philosophies for inspiration. Function could be
contradicted, form could be arbitrary and Modernism could enter
into a new level of self-indulgent invention. The American architect
Peter Eisenman, with his House IV in Connecticut built between
1973 and 1975, deliberately contorted the rational grid and use of
space to create a record more of the architect’s design process than
the function of the house—a process he called “postfunctionalism.”
Cesar Pelli designed the Pacific Design Centre in Los Angles in 1975
as a huge blue-glass sculptural form little related to the internal
function, as much a self-advertisement as a building (figure 18). The
ubiquitous tower block followed suit, becoming less a subject for
rational form than a sculptural opportunity, slick curved and cubic
forms vying with complex exteriors such as Arata Isozaki’s 1974
Gunma Museum in Japan. Engineering and the 1930s ideal of
modular components could be exaggerated to create aesthetic
drama. Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano won the competition to
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build a new cultural centre in Paris in 1971. The design exposed the
structure and mechanical engineering on the outside in a deliberate
reference to the fantasies of the Archigram group creating a Baroque
form of Modernism.
In a contrary move to engage the disaffected public, and following
in the theoretical slipstream of Robert Venturi’s book, a number of
architects re-engaged with the traditions that had been expunged
from architecture by Modernism. The most direct attempt to assuage
public disquiet with the stylised strangeness of Modernism was to
return to a mythical past when tradition rather than style dictated
architectural form—the vernacular. This had the double advantage of
drawing on local materials and types and minimal impact. In Britain,
where it was called the “neo-vernacular,” it had a profound influence
on the private housing market, which persists to this day, but in its
heyday was inflated for use on almost all building types. In the USA it
was represented most distinctly by the indigenous Shingle Style.
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56 Part I

Figure 20. Place de la République, Troyes, France; 1970s. New Vernacular. Concern
with the preservation of the character of towns led to a new popular architecture loosely
based on local historic precedent.
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Figure 21. Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton, New Jersey, USA; John
Blatteau at Ewing Cole Cherry Parsky Architects; 1982. Traditional and classical
architects emerged from the shadows in the wake of a crisis of confidence in
Modernism.

Figure 22. Portland Building, Portland, Oregon; Michael Graves; 1980. The
building that launched postmodern classicism, an architecture that would define the
next decade.

As confidence in Modernism faltered, traditional architecture

reappeared in the mainstream.

Populism also took the form of direct engagement with the public
in both town planning and architecture in the form of “community
architecture.” This could be either a planning process where
architecture took second place or, as with the Swedish architect
Ralph Erskine, a process where public participation influenced the
design of buildings. A more direct attack on modernist planning was
made by the Krier brothers, Rob and Léon, from Luxembourg.
Once the crack appeared in the modernist monolith, architects
who had already been practicing in a very literal classical style, such
as John Blatteau in the US and Quinlan Terry in Britain, came out of
the shadows. Even established architects turned to recognisable but
deliberately different historical forms, such as Ricardo Bofill in Spain,
Robert Stern and even the old modernist crusader Philip Johnson in
the United States, and James Stirling in Britain. The wider move
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58 Part I

away from the certainties of Modernism was recorded by the critic

Charles Jencks in 1975 under the term “Postmodernism,” taken from
recent French literary theory.24 In literature, Postmodernism was a
populist reaction to Modernism and became a philosophical term
when Jean-François Lyotard used it to describe the end of the “big
idea” of modernity and the advent of uncertainty and diversity (“I
define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives”25).
Postmodernity in architecture could also be broadly defined as the
breakdown of the orthodox beliefs of post-war modernity but, when
expressed visually, it would unavoidably take on a particular and
recognisable form.

Western Recovery and the Fragmentation

of Architecture
Financial and political instability instigated a series of shifts in world
affairs. The cost of the Vietnam War, high inflation and the first
American balance-of-payments and trade deficit in the twentieth
century led President Nixon to take the US dollar off the gold
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standard in 1971. This ended the currency equilibrium set up by the

Bretton Woods System in 1944. Cooperation over world trading
relationships were, however, too important to abandon and, in
1974, the United States created the “Library Group” made up of
financial officials of the United States, the UK, West Germany,
France and Japan. This became the Group of Five, or G5 (the G6
when Italy joined in 1975, and the G7 when Canada joined in 1976)
which together with the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, which had survived the collapse of the Bretton Woods System,
monitored and controlled the free-market international economic
system. Ironically, uncontrolled exchange rates promoted the
movement of capital internationally as it stimulated speculation on
exchange rates. At the same time, increased revenues from higher oil
prices in the Middle East were too great to be absorbed by the sparse
populations of the Arab countries and, paradoxically, were invested
in the same countries that had suffered from the 1973 embargo
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Setting the Scene 59

(demonstrating the futility of future embargos). As the Middle

Eastern states suddenly found they had among the highest Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in the world, they imported
foreign expertise to set up governmental institutions and develop
their cities. Architects and urban designers from Britain in particular
(many states had been British protectorates until 1971) and from the
United States found employment in the Middle East when work was
scarce at home.
The word “globalisation” began to enter common usage, and the
Apollo XI moon landing in 1969 gave popular momentum to the
concept of one earth and global interdependency. Although the word
had existed in economic literature since the 1960s, its more general
use has been traced to American Express advertising in the mid-
1970s.26 In 1979 it had appeared in an EEC document and its use
accelerated in official documentation into the 1980s.27 In 1972 at the
United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, it is
claimed that René Dubois first used the catch phrase “Think
Globally, Act Locally.” This has been disputed, but by 1980 the
phrase had become sufficiently well-established to be the title of a
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conference on future trends in Canada and remains a catchphrase to

this day. While a new global perspective was emerging, the first signs
of identity politics emerged on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1973,
Finland gave the Sami, the nomadic peoples who ranged across the
north of the Nordic countries, a legal right to their own parliament
within the Finnish State. Other Nordic countries eventually
followed. In 1977 the Canadian government gave the province of
Quebec unique language rights, the first of a series of acts that
eventually led to the recognition of Quebec as a “nation” within the
state of Canada.
Fragile economic conditions were changing the industrial base in
the North Atlantic economies. The assembly-line process and worker
protection of the Fordist manufacturing system faltered as markets
declined and the consumer economy stimulated a demand for
product variety. While the North Atlantic economies began to move
away from heavy manufacturing to service industries, the electronics
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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60 Part I

industry had begun to accelerate, facilitating automation and “just-in-

time” manufacture. The first electronic data-communication network
was established by the US Department of Defense in 1969, and the
first e-mail was sent three years later. Microsoft was founded in 1977
and the first mobile phones were tested in 1979.
A revolution in Iran in 1979, deposing the Shah in favour of a
fundamentalist Muslim state, was followed the next year by an
opportunist attack on Iran by Iraq. A sudden drop in oil exports from
these major producers triggered an energy crisis. Saudi Arabia
increased supplies to compensate, but the effect was to drag the
world economy into another recession. Ronald Reagan was elected
president of the USA in 1981 as the recession was coming to an end
and, working closely with the new right-wing UK Prime Minister,
Margaret Thatcher, transformed the free-market economic system
and the world balance of power. Together, the two politicians
embarked on a mission to cut back state intervention and spending in
their countries, rejecting the Kenysian economic policies of the post-
war years. Margaret Thatcher brought down the once-powerful
British trades unions and set in motion the privatisation of state-
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

owned industries. The UK also deregulated the international banking

system, placing London at the centre of the growing international
banking economy. Reagan lowered state spending and decreased
taxation to liberalise the economy while increasing defence spending
to contain the Soviet Union, which he called “the Evil Empire.”
Privatisation and the liberalisation of markets were pursued to some
extent by many of the North Atlantic economies and were the
foundation of the “Washington Consensus,” a liberal economic policy
named and promoted by the Institute for International Economics in
1969—the “consensus” being the agreement of the IMF and the
World Bank, also based in Washington, DC. This policy was best
known for its imposition on failed economies as a condition of rescue
plans by the IMF. While the economies of the UK, the United States
and Western Europe expanded in the 1980s, many developing
economies did not fare so well.

The building boom that followed the economic boom was defined
by the growth of Postmodernism. When Charles Jencks identified
and named the style in 197528 there were few projects to illustrate it.
The term was, however, the subject of debate among architects in
1980 when several projects established Postmodernism as a major
new architectural direction.
Jencks was on the committee chaired by the Italian architect
Paolo Portoghesi for the first architecture pavilion at the Venice
Biennale in 1980. This was entitled “The Presence of the Past” and
featured the Strada Novissima (the Newest Street) with a series of
facades all in a free interpretation of classical architecture. Chosen
participants included Robert Venturi, Charles Moore and Thomas
Gordon-Smith from the USA; Paolo Portoghesi and Aldo Rossi from
Italy; Hans Hollein from Austria; Ricardo Bofill from Spain; and
Léon Krier from Luxembourg. Versions of the display were sent to
Paris and San Francisco and it was widely published, to the dismay of
modernist architecture critics. Jencks later regretted that this
exhibition focused the wider postmodern phenomenon into, what he
called, “Postmodern Classicism,”28 but the association stuck as more
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classical projects appeared.

That year, the established US modernist architect Michael Graves
won a competition for the Portland Building in Oregon, which
Graves described as “making classical classifications,” and which the
local press described as “the Temple.”30 It was a revolutionary design
at the time, and was to become one the defining buildings of
Postmodernism (figure 22). Equally revolutionary was the maverick
US architect Philip Johnson’s design for the AT&T headquarters
building in New York, under construction at the time and well-
published in illustration. This stone-clad tower had a full width
broken pediment at roof level, and a neo-classical entrance hall. In
France, Ricardo Bofill was also planning a huge new development in
Montpellier as a formal monumental classical composition. In
London, Terry Farrell had just designed a small and temporary
pavilion as a capricious interpretation of a classical temple and
established himself as the leading postmodernist in Britain. As
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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62 Part I

Western economies grew, developers, corporations and academics

would demand versions of the new and fashionable Postmodernism
which fitted so well with the prevailing climate of wealth,
ostentation and excess.
In 1980, Robert Davis employed two married Miami architects,
Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, to plan a new town on
the south Florida coast called Seaside. The new town would be a
test-bed for New Urbanism, an American planning theory based on a
return to “the urban conventions which were normal in the United
States from colonial times until the 1940s”31—in other words, before
Modernism and the American post-war suburban explosion.
The Prince of Wales, heir to the UK throne, made a dramatic
entry into the modernist-postmodernist architectural debate in 1984
at the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
In a controversial speech he asked, “why can’t we have those curves
and arches that express feeling in design? … Why has everything got
to be … functional?” and hoped “that the next 151 years will see a
new harmony … in the relationship between architects and the
people of this country.” In 1988 he engaged Leon Krier to plan the
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

new town of Poundbury in the county of Dorset. The status and

influence of the Prince of Wales, not just in Britain but worldwide,
gave a major boost not only to the more literal practitioners of
Postmodernism (his speech resulted in a major project for Robert
Venturi in London), but also for a small but growing group of
classical revivalists.
Many members of the architectural establishment were unhappy,
not just in Britain, and not just with the intervention of a highly
influential non-expert in their field, but with the new direction that
architecture seemed to be taking. By 1980, any architect under the
age of 50 in the Western nations would have been trained exclusively
in modernist schools where the inclusion of any literal elements from
the pre-Modernist past would have been an anathema. Richard
Meier, a disciple of Corbusier, reflected the view of many architects
when he said that he saw Postmodernism “as a stylizing of

architecture as mere decoration,” was “very much against it,” and did
not think that it had “any enduring quality or value.”32
One response was a short paper, “Towards a Critical Regionalism,
Six Points for Architecture of Renaissance” published in The Anti-
Aesthetic, Essays on Post-Modern Culture in 1983. The American-based
British architectural critic Kenneth Frampton set up a theoretical
position that he called “Critical Regionalism” (a term originally used
by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in 1981 for a localising
strand of Modernism) defending Modernism and attacking
Postmodernism. The essay offered “a contemporary architecture of
resistance … free from fashionable stylistic conventions, an
architecture of place rather than space, and a way of building
sensitive to the vicissitudes of time and climate.”33 In practice, this
popular idea led to conventional modernist buildings that used local
instead of industrial materials, and had some site-specific features or
a highly abstracted or symbolic reference to something local.
There were also successful architects whose work seemed to
follow the core principles of Modernism who were raised to the level
of heroes by their profession. By the late 1970s, the work of
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

architects such as Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Nicholas

Grimshaw and Michael Hopkins in Britain, Renzo Piano in Italy,
Gunter Behnisch in Germany, some of the work of Skidmore
Owings and Merrill in the USA, and others, had been identified as a
type and given the name “High Tech.” Although the designs were
based on an assembly of engineering and servicing components—
what Rogers called “the rich potential of modern industrial
society”34—in practice the parts were often individually designed,
highly engineered and expensive. Equally, the principles behind the
designs implied that there should be flexibility in the application of
the components, but this too proved to be elusive. Famous High
Tech buildings such as the Pompidou Centre and the Sainsbury
Centre by Norman Foster needed extensive reconstruction or
servicing soon after construction. This architecture did, however,
project a strong image of innovation, efficiency and modernity which

was attractive both to the architectural profession and those

organisations that wished to project a similar image.
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Figure 23. Lloyds Building, London; Richard Rogers; 1986. High-Tech: the
mechanical tradition of Modernism turned into decoration.

Figure 24. Parc la Villette, Paris; Bernard Tschumi; 1987. Deconstruction: an

architectural style that used philosophical ideas to put sculptural effect before
function.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

New directions in Modernism were established in the 1980s.

While the High Tech architects claimed justification for their

work according to the established modernist principles of efficiency
and function, other architects were developing theories that found
their innovation and modernity by going beyond anything so prosaic.
Some architects were inspired by the literary and linguistic theories
of “Deconstruction” of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida,
theories that Derrida himself admitted were complicated and difficult
to explain. His theories were based on the principle that ideas and
texts have no one fixed meaning but are built up of layers of
interpretation that can be deconstructed and reinterpreted to provide
new, complex and even arbitrary possibilities for understanding.
Derrida could not understand why architects would be interested in
his ideas of “anti-form, anti-hierarchy, anti-structure—the opposite
of all that architecture stands for.”35 But Peter Eisenman and Bernard
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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66 Part I

Tschumi were not only interested in, but actively engaged with
Derrida.
Eisenman had pioneered “this new theoretical base”36 in the 1970s
with postfunctionalism (see above). In the 1980s a new generation of
architects in their forties were attracted by the intellectual challenge
and opportunities for originality offered by Deconstruction. Bernard
Tschumi, a Swiss-French architect, won a competition for the design
of Parc de la Villette in Paris in 1982 and filled it with seemingly
arbitrary collections of pavilions and landscape where “the culture of
architecture is endlessly deconstructed and rules are transgressed,”37
so that there is no simple or single interpretation of the design (figure
24). Tschumi was fortunate to be able to build, and so bring
Deconstruction to the attention of the profession. The Polish
architect Daniel Libeskind found it hard to persuade clients that his
theory of “moving layers of construction enables one to recover
modes of awareness quite removed from the initial hypothesis of
rationality,”38 would make a satisfactory building, but finally won the
competition for the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 1989 with a
dramatic sculptural design. Libeskind and his near contemporary
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Zaha Hadid earned their living and developed their ideas through
teaching throughout the 1980s. They were, nonetheless, popular with
the architectural profession, because they saw themselves, as Hadid
said in 1983, as “reinvestigating Modernity” to “go forward along the
path paved by the experiments of the early Modernists.”39 They
provided the radical alternative to Postmodernism that the profession
craved and, in time, this would bring them fame and success. Their
future would, however, be determined by international events.

Setting the Stage for the Global Economy

In May 1983, the American economist Theodore Levitt published an
influential paper, “The Globalization of Markets,” in the Harvard
Business Review, where he stated that “The world's needs and desires
have been irrevocably homogenized” and that “the global corporation
operates with resolute constancy—at low relative cost—as if the
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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Setting the Scene 67

entire world (or major regions of it) were a single entity; it sells the
same things in the same way everywhere ... Ancient differences in
national tastes or modes of doing business disappear.” He predicted
that “only companies that adopt a global approach to markets will
achieve long-term success.” Levitt had understood the impact of a
dramatic expansion of international communication and trade. Air
passenger numbers would double in a decade, multinational news
corporations began to take over national media, Direct-to-Home
(DTH) satellite television was launched, and fax machine ownership
multiplied by a factor of eighty. The United States’ share of world
GDP reached an all-time high in 1985, by 1983 McDonalds had
restaurants in thirty-two countries, and MTV was launched in 1981
with MTV Europe broadcast from 1987. The expansion of
international affairs went beyond trade and culture. The World
Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), known by
the name of its Chair Gro Harlem Brundtland, was convened by the
United Nations in 1983 to address growing concern “about the
accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural
resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

and social development.” This led to the 1987 Stockholm Conference

and the publication of Our Common Future, the first attempt to bring
environmental sustainability into the international political arena,
and which introduced the definition of sustainable development that
is still in use today.
The Russian economy and those of its Eastern European satellites,
unlike the OECD countries, stagnated. Brezhnev died in office aged
seventy-five in 1982, and was followed by two leaders in their late
60s or 70s, neither of whom survived for more than eighteen
months. This gerontocracy was mirrored across the eastern
European states. Throughout the Soviet Bloc there was a lack of
political initiative but an urgent need to reform a failing industrial
and agricultural system. When a much younger Mikhail Gorbachev
came to power in 1985, he attempted to restore Soviet finances.
One of Brezhnev’s final acts had been to order the invasion of
Afghanistan and launch a futile and expensive war. President
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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68 Part I

Reagan’s policy of increased defence spending and confrontation also

led to a commensurate increase in Soviet defence expenditure, which
it could ill afford. Gorbachev improved relations with the United
States and reached an agreement on a reduction in defence spending.
In 1988, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan. At home, he
introduced perestroika [restructuring] of the Soviet industrial system,
and accompanied this with glasnost [openness], giving greater
freedom of speech to encourage participation in his reforms from a
cowed and unmotivated population. Although some private
ownership was permitted, the intention was to allow the Soviet
system to recover and modernise rather than bring about a root-and-
branch transformation. The system was, however, too entrenched to
deliver significant results, and poor export performance and two bad
harvests created consumer shortages among populations now able to
openly criticize the system. When the people of the Eastern
European states became restive, Gorbachev made it clear there
would be no more intervention from the Soviet Union. Hungary
quickly established a multi-party system and freedom of travel,
setting up a chain reaction that led in 1989 to the breaching of the
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Berlin Wall separating East and West Germany and the opening up
of European borders. The liberalisation of Eastern Europe raised
expectations among many of the constituent nations of the Soviet
Union, and one-by-one they began to demand more autonomy. The
political situation rapidly spiralled out of control and there was a
failed reactionary coup d’état. Gorbachev recovered power, but by
the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was formally disbanded and
fragmented into fifteen republics. Russia became a democratic nation
and the first elected President, Boris Yeltsin, banned the Communist
Party and called in the IMF, the World Bank and the US Treasury
Department to establish a free-market economy. The Cold War had
come to an end in Europe.
In China, Mao Zedong died in in 1976. After a two-year power
struggle with Mao’s wife and three associates—the “Gang of Four”—
a reforming leader, Deng Xiaoping, took control. This put an end to
twenty-five years of botched attempts to modernise through forced
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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Setting the Scene 69

restructuring, misguided social and political initiatives and, according

to recent research,40 the death of forty-five million people. Deng
Xiaoping took a different path, reminding the Communist Party in
1978 that “Engels never flew on an aeroplane; Stalin never wore
Dacron,” and declaring that “Socialism and the market are not
incompatible.” China would achieve the “Four Modernisations,” first
proposed in 1963, of agriculture, industry, science and technology,
and defence by whatever means possible—as Deng Xiaopeng put it:
“It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white provided it catches
mice.” In 1979, Deng negotiated diplomatic recognition from the
United States and visited in the same year, going to the Boeing and
Coca Cola factories, and signing cooperation agreements on science,
technology, education, commerce and space. In the following years,
agricultural marketing and pricing were liberalised, private enterprise
was permitted and the state was decentralised. In 1980, the first
Special Economic Zone was created with the objective of attracting
foreign investment, promoting exports and setting up a localised
market-driven economy. It was followed by twelve others. In 1984,
fourteen coastal cities were opened up to foreign economic
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investment, and controls on residence were lifted so that

underemployed farmers could move from the countryside to provide
labour for expanding industries. After decades of stagnation, Chinese
GDP had doubled in just ten years.
Although the transformation of China was remarkable, all did not
go smoothly. One step in economic liberalisation was the lifting of
price controls in 1988, but this led to galloping inflation and in a few
months prices rose by ninety-five per cent. Panic buying led to a
shortage of durables and consumer products, and in Shanghai the
authorities had to distribute food and fuel. Construction came to a
halt, and workers lost their jobs. When they returned to their
villages things were no better and, desperate for work and without a
social security system, they came back to the cities. At the end of the
year, the government admitted that the precipitate removal of price
controls had been a failure but, by this time, the trust of the people
had been lost. In 1989 it became worse, unemployment continued to
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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70 Part I

rise, economic growth fell to its lowest level since 1978, and money
stopped circulating. Discontent and opposition grew rapidly, fuelled
by the new climate of free speech and protest in the academic
community. The death (from natural causes) of a disgraced liberal
reformer, Hu Yaobang, was the spark that ignited outbursts of
protest throughout the country cumulating in a mass demonstration
in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.41 Ten years of carefully managed
reform were on the brink of collapse. With memories of the
devastation of the Cultural Revolution fresh in the minds of the
leaders, and with an eye to the chaos then engulfing the Soviet
Union, the leadership savagely suppressed the demonstrators,
rounded up protestors nationwide and purged public institutions of
political liberals.
As one of the critical factors in the protest had been financial
hardship, the government realised that the only way to maintain
stability without the risk of political unrest was to ensure that the
economy continued to grow and deliver individual prosperity. As
Deng Xiaoping said three years later: “We should persist in taking on
two tasks: one is to carry out reform and opening up, the other is to
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

clamp down on various criminal activities. And we must attach equal

importance to both,”42—criminal activities being, of course, political
opposition. Although the government moved to the left—and even
the scriptwriter of a popular but critical television programme, River
Elegy, was driven into exile—industrial modernisation and
economic liberalisation continued unabated. In 1990, the Shanghai
stock exchange reopened forty years after Mao Zedong had closed it
down, and a new financial district, Pudong, was founded on the
opposite bank of the Yangtze River. China unambiguously confirmed
its place in the international free-market economy.
What became known outside China as the “Tiananmen Square
Massacre” was the first such protest to have been fully exposed to the
world media. The resulting suspension of World Bank loans and the
withdrawal of foreign direct investment in China demonstrated that
it was no longer possible to combine political isolation with open
international trade. In addition, the 1989 protests made it clear that
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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Setting the Scene 71

entry into the global trading system also meant entry into the
established supra-national political order. Immediately after the
suppression of the protest, non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, founded in
Britain and the United States respectively, began to focus on Chinese
abuses of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and new
organisations such as Human Rights in China were established in
New York. In spite of a claim that “Asian values” put the welfare of
the collective over that of the individual, political leaders from the
North Atlantic states in particular persisted in criticism of the
Chinese state on its human rights record.
China and Russia opened up their economies to the free
movement of capital in the 1980s and early 1990s, and in 1992 they
were joined by India, the last major protectionist economy. The
world economy could now claim to be genuinely global. As China
and Russia discovered, however, membership of the World Bank and
IMF system was not without conditions. The supra-national political
and economic system had at its core the New World Order, the
institutions and methodology established under the leadership of the
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United States after the Second World War. This included not only
financial regulation based on United States and UK law, but also a
political and ethical framework that was based on Enlightenment and
North Atlantic ideals. This would have a profound effect on social,
political and cultural development as the world entered the New
Global Era that defines the world today.

References
1. Hugo Munsterberg. The Americans. New York: McClure, Philips, 1904,
6.
2. Ronald Nitzen. A World Beyond Difference: Cultural Identity In The Age of
Globalisation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, 92–3.
3. Joost Smier. Arts Under Pressure: Promoting Cultural Diversity in the Age of
Globalisation. London: Zed books, 2003, 172–3.

4. George Orwell. “You and the Atomic Bomb.” Tribune, October 19,
1945.
5. “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?” New York, Bulletin of
the Museum of Modern Art XV 3, Spring 1948. Symposium in MOMA,
February 11, 1948.
6. Said to McGeorge Bundy, quoted by Douglas Brinkley & Dean
Acheson. The Cold War Years, 1953–71. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993, 133.
7. Handbuch für Architekten. Berlin: Verlag Technik, 1954. Quoted by
David Crowley in “Europe Reconstructed, Europe Divided.” In Cold
War Modern: Design 1945-1970, edited by David Crowley & Jane Pavitt.
London: V&A Publishing, 2008, 45.
8. Helena Syrkus. “Art Belongs to the People.” In Architecture Culture 1943-
1968, edited by Joan Ochman. Rizzoli, New York, 1993, 120.
9. David Crowley, ibid.
10. Raymond Loewy. Never Leave Well Enough Alone. Baltimore: The John
Hopkins University Press, 2002, xxiv.
11. Edgar Kaufmann Jnr (curator). “What is Modern Design?” Museum of
Modern Art, New York, Distrib. Simon Schuster, 1950, 8
12. Quoted by Liane Lefaivre in, “Critical Regionalism: A Facet of Modern
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Architecture since 1945.” In Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity

in a Globalized World, edited by Liane Lefaivre & Alexander Tzonis.
New York: Prestel Verlag, 2003, 31.
13. Pietro Belluschi. “Regionalism in Architecture.” New York:
Architectural Record, December 1955, 132–9.
14. Annabel Jane Wharton. Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels
and Modern Architecture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 35.
15. “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?” op. cit., 298.
16. Jawaharlal Nehru, from a speech on visit to the project on April 2,
1952. Official Website of the Chandigarh Administration:
http://chandigarh.gov.in (accessed September 2011).
17. Pietro Belluschi. The meaning of Regionalism in Architecture. New York:
Architectural Record, December 1955, 131–9, 325.
18. From a speech by President Juscelino Kubitschek on October 2, 1956,
on his first visit to the site of Brasília Brazília with Oscar Niemeyer and
the war minister, General Henrique Teixeira Lott. The phrase was
repeated frequently and the Presidential Palace, also designed by

Niemeyer, was named the Palácio da Alvorada, the Palace of the Dawn.
www.mimoa.eu (accessed September 2011).
19. Norman K Winston as told to Leonard Gross in “Six Things Mikoyan
Envied Most in America.” New York: This Week Magazine, March 29,
1959.
20. Richard H. Shepard. "Debate Goes on TV over Soviet Protest." New
York Times, July 26, 1959.
21. Pravda and Izvestia, December 20, 1954, reproduced in Joan Ochman,
ed. Architecture Culture 1943-1968. New York: Rizzoli International
Publications, 1993, 184.
22. Daniel Bell. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the
Fifties. New York: Free Press, 1960.
23. Charles Jencks. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York:
Rizzoli, 1984, 9.
24. John Barth. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Washington DC: Atlantic
Monthly, August 1967.
25. Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
1979. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, xxiv.
26. Nitzen, op. cit., 47.
27. Nayan Chanda. Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

and Warriors Shaped Globalization. New Haven: Yale University Press,

2007, 246.
28. Charles Jencks. “The Rise of Post Modern Architecture.” Architectural
Association Quarterly 7 (4) October/December 1975.
29. Charles Jencks. The New Paradigm in Architecture. London: Academy
Editions, 2002, 115.
30. Barbarelle Diamonstein. American Architecture Now. New York: Rizzoli,
1980, 57.
31. Leon Krier. “The Poundbury Master Plan.” Prince Charles and the
Architectural Debate, London, Architectural Design 59 5/6, 1989.
32. Diamonstein, op. cit., 113.
33. Hal Foster, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Post-Modern Culture. Seattle:
Bay Press, 1983.
34. Frank Russell, ed. Architectural Monographs: Richard Rogers + Architects.
London: Academy Editions, 1985, 12.
35. Bernard Tschumi. “Six Concepts.” Lecture, Columbia University,
February 1991. In Architecture and Disjunction, edited by Bernard
Tschumi. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996, 250.
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
74 Part I

36. Peter Eisenman. “Post Functionalism.” In Oppositions 6. Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, Fall 1976. Reprinted in Charles Jencks & Karl Kropf,
eds. Theories and Manifestos of Contemporary Architecture. Chichester:
Academy Editions, 1997, 267.
37. Bernard Tschumi, “The Pleasure of Architecture.” London, Architectural
Design 47 (2) 1977, 216.
38. Daniel Libeskind. Between Zero and Infinity. New York: Rizzoli, 198.
Reprinted in Charles Jencks & Karl Kropf, op. cit.
39. Zaha Hadid. Planetary Architecture Two. London: Architectural Association,
1983.
40. Frank Dikötter. Mao’s Great Famine, The History of China's Most
Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962. New York: Walker & Company,
2010.
41. John Naisbitt & Doris Naisbitt. China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New
Society. London: Harper Collins, 2010, 58–9.
42. Records of Comrade Deng Xiaoping's Shenzhen Tour, People’s Daily
Online, January 18, 2002:
http://english.people.com.cn/200201/18/eng20020118_88932.shtml
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

THE NEW GLOBAL ERA AND THE GLOBAL ELITE

The End of the Cold War and the Dawn

of the New Global Era
In the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the
retirement of the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1992, the
economic and political world system was transformed. A series of
events and technological changes came together to create the period
referred to here as the “New Global Era.” This was quite unlike the
last great global era at the turn of the twentieth century either in its
extent or effect, its international and local impact making it the
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defining characteristic of the age. It has had a major effect on the way
of life of almost everyone on the planet, and it drives our political,
social and economic system today. It was inevitable that a seismic
shift in world affairs of this scale would also transform contemporary
cultural and artistic practice.
As the economist Joseph Stiglitz said: “With the fall of the Berlin
Wall in late 1989, one of the most important economic transitions of
all time began.”1 The breaching of the Wall was a deeply symbolic
event; it was the precursor of the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991, and the end of the Cold War. But this was only one of number
of critical events that took place during these four years.
Although the communist economic system was discredited by its
contribution to the failure of the Soviet Union, at this time the rival
free-market system, represented by the OECD, did not seem to be
in good health either. On October 19, 1987 the US stock market in
one day fell further than the worst day of the crash that launched the

Great Depression in 1929. This was named “Black Monday” with

deliberate reference to the “Black Tuesday” of October 1929. The
causes of this crash are not universally agreed. A simultaneous
announcement of a new law restricting take-overs, a United States
trade deficit and a housing loan crash may have conspired to create a
classic share-selling panic, exacerbated by automated selling. The
market quickly recovered but the economic fundamentals did not
and, in 1990, the United States economy entered a nine-month
recession. In the UK, high inflation driven by rapid economic
expansion and attempts to harmonise with the continental European
economy led to punitive interest rates and a savage three-year
recession from 1990 to 1992. These two economic failures marked
the end of the Reagan and Thatcher booms of the 1980s, and brought
down the latter in a Conservative Party coup d’état in 1990 and
Reagan’s Republican successor, president George H. W. Bush, in the
1992 election.
Germany, the engine of the continental European economy,
survived the crises of Anglo-Saxon economies, partly supported by a
sudden growth in population after re-unification with recently-
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liberated East Germany. In 1992, however, Germany also entered

into a recession, bringing down its economic partners: France, Italy,
Spain, Portugal, Denmark and the Benelux countries. In 1991 an
asset-price bubble crippled the Japanese economy, and the country
entered the “lost decade” of zero economic expansion.
Outside the OECD countries, however, major changes were
taking place that would transform the free-market system. In 1990,
as part of its staged entry into the world economy, China reopened
the Shanghai stock market. In 1991, a financial crisis and near
bankruptcy drove India to reform its restrictive economic controls
and open up the economy to attract foreign investment. In 1992,
Yegor Gaidar, deputy Prime Minister of Russia and an economist,
following advice from the IMF, the World Bank and the United
States, liberalised foreign trade, prices and the currency in a socially
devastating “shock therapy” to propel the moribund Russian
economy into the free-market.
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The New Global Era and the Global Elite 77

As the United States and European countries emerged from their

recessions in the 1991 to 1994 period, they operated in an entirely
new international economic climate. Three major nations and some
of their former satellites, previously closed to free trade and with
about fifty per cent of the world’s population, had not only opened
for business, but had done so by joining the trading system that had
been established by OECD countries in the years after the Second
World War. Furthermore, financial trading itself was just entering a
new period of internet transactions, as in 1991 the World Wide
Web was launched and E-trading began. The development of
advanced information technology (IT) was an essential ingredient in
the new economy. As Manuel Castells says, “if there were no
computers and no global telecommunications … there would be no
global economy and world-scale communication.”2
The development of this new open international trading climate
was called “globalisation” which, as we have seen above, was a term
that had come into common usage in the 1980s. In the coming years
its impact would far outreach the international exchange of capital,
but the idea of globalisation is still frequently defined in accordance
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with its economic foundations. In 1987, in the American Banker,

globalisation was defined as “a short-hand term for the various forces
transforming capital markets and the financial service industries on a
world-wide basis.”3 In 2002, Anne Krueger, the first deputy
managing director of the International Monetary Fund, defined
globalisation as: “a phenomenon by which economic agents in any
given part of the world are much more affected by events elsewhere
in the world.”4 Or more simply put by the French sociologist, Alain
Turraine, it is “the triumph of capitalism practically, politically and
intellectually.”5
Capital markets do not, of course, exist in isolation, and the
operation of a free market in financial transactions will have a
widespread economic impact. This is described by American
economist, Jagdish Bhagwati, as the “integration of national
economies into the international economy through trade, direct
foreign investment (by corporations and multinationals), short-term
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78 Part II

capital flows, international flows of workers and humanity generally,

and flows of technology”6 (chart 1).
Once it becomes possible, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist
Milton Friedman famously said, “to produce a product anywhere,
using resources from anywhere, by a company located anywhere, to
be sold anywhere,”7 the consequences will not stop with investment
and industry. Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator of the
Financial Times, makes it clear that “the economics of globalisation are
… the driving force for almost everything else.”8 The political
economist Andrew Sobel provides a comprehensive list of “almost
everything else”:
Globalization consists of multiple processes by which people in one
society become culturally, economically, politically, socially,
informationally, strategically, epidemiologically, and ecologically
closer to peoples in geographically distant societies. These processes
include the expansion of cross-border trade, production of goods
and services via the multinational corporation, outsourcing of work
across borders, movement of peoples, exchange of ideas and
popular culture, flow of environmental effects and disease from one
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state to another, and routine transfer of' billions of dollars across

borders in an nanosecond. They connect communities, cultures,
national markets for goods and services, and national markets for
labor and capital. The food we consume, clothes we wear, jobs we
perform, air we breathe, water we drink, cars we drive, transport
that delivers our goods, information we access, capital that powers
our economies, services we use, computers we use, places we
travel, education we seek, diseases we contract, drugs and therapies
we employ to combat illness, and just about every aspect of day-to-
day life have some global component. The world is figuratively
shrinking as activities in one nation increasingly spill over to
influence activities in other nations.9

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The New Global Era and the Global Elite 79
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Chart 1. Outward Foreign Direct Investment 1990–2006

The impact of the New Global Era was clear to most observers.
Speaking to a meeting of the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1995, President Clinton saw the emerging
condition as “the most intensive period of economic change since the
industrial revolution.”10 On an individual level, Friedrich Schorlemmer
describes (from 1993) how the collapse of an orderly communist
society could lead to a personal crisis:
The joy of freedom is at the same time a falling into a void. Now let
everyone look after himself. What are the rules? Who’s in charge?
… the West's caravan moves on, calling to us: “Come with us. We
know the way. We know the goal. We don't know any way. We
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80 Part II

don't know any goal. What is certain? That everything’s uncertain,

precarious. Enjoy our lack of ties as freedom.”11

We also have the unique testimony of Nelson Mandela, released

from twenty-seven years in prison in 1990: “What struck me so
forcefully was how small the planet had become during my decades
in prison; it was amazing to me that a teenage Inuit living at the roof
of the world could watch the release of a political prisoner on the
southern tip of Africa.”12

The Social and Cultural Impacts of Globalisation

The political drama that ushered in the New Global Era also gave it
particular public and academic prominence. According to historian
Richard Crockatt, globalisation became “the most discussed paradigm
for the post-cold war international order.” The advantage for the
historian and commentator was that it “could be shown to have had a
history and to that extent it could be employed to link the period of
cold war with what preceded it and followed it.”13 There have been
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more cautious and revisionist views of the supposed economic and

social dominance of global finance and institutions, most notably
from Pankaj Ghemawat in his recent book, World 3.0,14 but despite
frequent exaggeration and simplification we are, even according to
Ghemawat, at the very least in a semi-global era. In recognition of
the importance of the phenomenon, sociologists in particular have
struggled to find a satisfactory definition of globalisation.
Looking for a more fundamental and society-based definition of
globalisation, many sociologists go beyond simply recording well-
recognised changes in economics, capitalism, information technology
and travel.
A commonly observed outcome of extended social and economic
contact through travel, communication and commerce is the
homogenisation of culture and place. The Swedish social
anthropologist Ulf Hannerz sums this up succinctly: “Humankind has
… bid farewell to that world which could … be seen as a cultural

mosaic, of separate pieces with hard well-defined edges. Cultural

connections increasingly reach across the world.”15 This is expressed
territorially by the sociologist Anthony McGrew as “a process of
deterritorialization: as social, political, and economic activities are
increasingly ‘stretched' across the globe they become in a significant
sense no longer organised solely according to a strictly territorial
logic.”16 A more nuanced view is that while some aspects of society
may be homogenised, globalisation also fragments others. Martin
Albrow considers “that the multiplication and diversification of
worlds rather than homogenization or hybridization better express
the dominant forms of cultural relations under globalised
conditions.”17 The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai combines
this with a discussion of the widely perceived sense that
homogenisation is in reality Americanisation or Westernisation:
“Globalization does not necessarily or even frequently imply
homogenisation or Americanisation, and to the extent that different
societies appropriate the materials of Modernity differently, there is
still ample room for the deep study of specific geographies, histories,
and languages.”18
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The speed of communications and travel which creates the

condition for a homogenised or potentially homogenised world will
also create a new relationship between time and space. The
sociologist Roland Robertson describes globalisation as “a concept
[that] refers both to the compression of the world and intensification
of consciousness of the world as a whole.”19 Ulrich Beck believes that
“from now on nothing which happens on our planet is only a limited
local event; all inventions, victories and catastrophes affect the whole
world, and we must reorient and reorganize our lives and actions,
our organizations and institutions, along a 'local-global' axis.”20
While the social definitions of homogenisation, fragmentation and
space-time compression can be mutually inclusive, there is not the
same unanimity as to whether globalisation is modern or Postmodern.
For the sociologists Peter Berger and Anthony Giddens there is no
ambiguity. Berger sees globalisation as “au fond, a continuation, albeit
in an intensified and accelerated form, of the perduring challenge of
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82 Part II

modernization.”21 Giddens is equally emphatic: “one of the

fundamental consequences of modernity … is globalization.”22
Giddens defines modernity in a number of ways, principal among
these is as “a post-traditional order.”23 As increased contact with
Western culture (which Giddens believes is post-traditional and
modern) has undermined the basis of traditional societies, in
accordance with his own definitions, there is some logic to his view.
He has little time for the idea of Postmodernism. He is of the opinion
that “we have not moved beyond modernity but are living precisely
through a phase of its radicalization.”24 But, as according to Giddens
this means that “we have entered into a period of high modernity,”25
we are at least in a phase of modernity that is “post” an earlier “low”
or “original” period of modernity, even if we are not in a
Postmodern state as defined by Jean-François Lyotard.26
If, on the other hand, the definition of modernity is taken roughly
in accordance with that of Lyotard, as based on a “metanarrative”
such as progress or liberal democracy or Enlightenment rationality,
then either globalisation is driving the world to another metanarrative,
which would be a homogenised or westernised condition, or it is
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fragmenting into a complex series of views of the world. Those who

adopt the latter view see globalisation as a Postmodern phenomenon.
This is the position of Jan Aart Scholte, who says that “global
relations have, by eliminating territorial buffers, intensified
intercultural contacts and heightened general awareness of cultural
diversity and contingency. Many people have thereby come—in line
with postmodernist precepts—to regard their knowledge as socially
and historically relative.”27 Martin Albrow takes the slightly different
view that the “Modern Project” has reached its conclusion in a
version of the End of History which is, consequently, the end of
modernity: “Globality promotes the recognition of the limits of the
earth but is profoundly different from modernity in that there is no
presumption of centrality of control. The unification of the world
which was the outcome of the Modern Project generates the
common recognition that the project has ended.”28 The disturbing
outcome of the “new era of postmodernity,” as noted by Mike
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The New Global Era and the Global Elite 83

Featherstone, is “that we are seeing the generation of global

conditions in which certain groups of people are becoming involved
in situations demanding more flexible classifications, situations in
which it is not possible to refer to one set of overriding cultural rules
which can arbitrate without ambiguity.”29
The flexible and indeterminate condition which Featherstone
describes, and the lack of overriding rules, combined with the scale
and anonymity of the global capital market, can be dangerous and
unsettling to existing interests and vulnerable groups. The
globalisation of the world economy is, however, largely seen as
inevitable. Anne Krueger believes that “globalization is like
breathing: it is a not a process one can or should try to stop; of
course, if there are obvious ways of breathing easier and better one
should certainly do so.”30 The anthropologist Ronald Niezen believes
that “no one, however much they may wish to, can isolate
themselves to the point of living a simple existence, outside the reach
of global institutions.”31
There are, nonetheless, many who see the global economic
system as undemocratic and its many outcomes as, in various ways,
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damaging. These include important participants in the process such

as John Cavanagh, director of the Institute of Policy Studies in
Washington and Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner and former
Chief Economist of the World Bank. Cavanagh wrote in 1996:
“globalisation is a paradox: while it is very beneficial to a very few, it
leaves out or marginalises two-thirds of the world’s population.”32 In
2002, Stiglitz gave his view based on his intimate working knowledge
of its economic operation and impact:

Globalization can be a force for good: the globalization of ideas

about democracy and of civil society have changed the way people
think, while global political movements have led to debt relief and
the treaty on land mines. Globalization has helped hundreds of
millions of people attain higher standards of living, beyond what
they, or most economists, thought imaginable but a short while ago
… But for millions of people globalization has not worked. Many

have actually been made worse off, as they have seen their jobs
destroyed and their lives become more insecure. They have felt
increasingly powerless against forces beyond their control. They
have seen their democracies undermined, their cultures eroded.33

But Stiglitz believes that “the problem is not with globalisation, but
with how it has been managed.”34 These insiders share a concern, if
not an outlook, with anti-globalisation protestors who come together
as informal associations, ranging from anti-capitalists to threatened
indigenous peoples, to protest at global economic forums such as the
World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999 or the G8 Conference
in Genoa in 2001. These groups are themselves, however, global and
organise through global instruments. The social anthropologist,
Jeffrey Juris, observes that “global justice activists have made
innovative use of global computer networks, informational politics,
and network-based organisational forms.”35 Ronald Niezen sees the
same principles at work as “the indigenous peoples’ movement has
made use of human rights and institutions of global governance in
order to shelter their collective ‘traditional’ ways of life.”36
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Many of these protestors represent groups or interests that are

frustrated by their powerlessness in the face of the huge force of
global capital and corporations. Even for willing entrants to the
global free market, the outcome could be devastating. In the years
after the creation of the new financial order, the free movement of
capital in and out of countries created a series of financial and
political crises in south-east Asia, Russia and South America. These
led to the fall of governments and financial hardship for millions of
the citizens of those countries.

****

In 1997 a number of countries in Eastern Asia had enjoyed three

decades of vigorous growth, known as the East Asian Miracle. The
economies of Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines,
while strong, were protected by government controls on capital and

international transactions. Under pressure from the IMF and the

United States Treasury, these countries were persuaded to open up
and liberalise their economies, so expanding the global investment
market. Full membership of the global economy, however, did not
just mean openness to investment, it also meant openness to
speculation. Indonesia lifted currency controls in July 1997 at a time
when it had a high foreign debt. Speculators, predicting devaluation,
created a run on the currency. This crippled an otherwise strong
economy and the loss of trade in the region dragged the other East
Asian countries into their own economic crisis. Fifteen per cent of
Thai males lost their jobs, a quarter of the South Korean population
fell into poverty, and there were inter-ethnic riots in Indonesia.
The economic slowdown brought about by the East Asian Crisis
reduced the global consumption of oil. This tipped the shaky
economy of Russia, which relied on natural resources for eighty per
cent of its export income, into increasing debt. The “shock therapy”
of 1992, recommended by the IMF, the World Bank and the US
Treasury, had dramatically reduced the standard of living in Russia
while creating a robber-baron economy, where newly-rich oligarchs
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linked to the government protected their capital by moving it out of

the country. With little investment in industry, Russia had become
dependent on the minerals in its vast hinterland, and its economy
was thus highly vulnerable to commodity-price fluctuations. The
drop in oil prices, the cost of a war in Chechnya and the national
debt panicked investors: inflation rose to eighty-four per cent, and
on August 13, 1998 the Russian stock exchange crashed. Four days
later, the government devalued the rouble (which dropped by
seventy per cent against the US dollar), defaulted on its domestic
debt and declared a moratorium on payment to foreign creditors. By
the end of the next year an unwell and exhausted president Boris
Yeltsin resigned and Vladimir Putin came to power.
In the summer of 1998 a general widespread loss of confidence in
emerging economies led to a run on the Brazilian currency—which
then spread to the other South American countries—recovering

from a 1980s debt crisis and a period of economic stagnation dubbed

their “lost decade.”
This series of global financial crises were, according to Joseph
Stiglitz in his book Globalisation and its Discontents,37 to a significant
extent the outcome of the rationalisation of the new global economy
on the North-Atlantic model. This economy was managed by the
IMF and the World Bank, organisations set up after the Second
World War, and all largely controlled by the United States and its
original European allies and operating under the liberal-economic
principles of the Washington Consensus. It was to these organisations
that troubled economies turned for financial assistance, which was
often tied to enforced economic and even political re-structuring.
The financial models used, appropriate for the political, legal and
fiscal structures long established in the United States and Europe,
were unsuitable for less stable emerging economies and often
deepened an existing crisis. They were seen less as a bail-out for the
countries in trouble than protection for international bankers and the
North-Atlantic financial infrastructure. The only major countries to
survive this process relatively unscathed, China and India, had
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maintained some control over their markets and avoided the full
economic liberalisation of the Washington Consensus.
In the 2000s, the East Asian countries and Brazil recovered. The
North Atlantic countries, however, eventually enjoyed an
unprecedented seventeen years of economic stability. Triumphant
economists dubbed it the “Great Moderation,” and the economics
journalist, Gerard Baker (now Managing Editor of the Wall Street
Journal), wrote on January 19, 2007 in The Times: “Economists are
debating the causes of the Great Moderation enthusiastically,” and
put the apparent success at the door of “the liberation of markets,”
the “creation of the secondary mortgage market” and “the power of
creative destruction,” concluding with the claim that “the turmoil of
free markets is the surest way to economic stability and prosperity.”38
In view of events a year and two days later, these comments would
seem ironic. World stock markets plunged, and by September 2008
the fourth-largest US investment bank, Lehman Brothers, filed for
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The New Global Era and the Global Elite 87

bankruptcy, and the United States government bailed out the

American International Group (AIG), which had insured against the
losses in the complex loan packages that were bringing down the
North-Atlantic financial system. The Great Moderation had collapsed
dramatically, and the North-Atlantic countries entered a long and
deep debt-driven recession, in which they remain at the time of
writing. China, India, Brazil and the East Asian countries were
virtually unaffected. While the Global Era may continue, 2008
probably marks the end of the North-Atlantic phase.
This is the background to world architecture and urban design
between 1992 and 2008. It is expected that these disciplines will
change in response to these global events. It is often the secondary
and sometimes surprising outcomes of these broad social, political
and economic transformations that have the most obvious impact on
the practice and aesthetic of architecture and urban design.

The Supremacy of the North-Atlantic Economies

While globalisation may be supra-national in its outreach, economics
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are unavoidably linked to national politics. As the New Global Era

was symbolically launched by the collapse of the bellicose Soviet
political system, the opponents of that system would inevitably
emerge as the victors. The economic success of free-market
capitalism, by which the United States and its allies had aggressively
identified themselves since the Second World War, was not only the
victor in the Cold War, but was the system which the defeated
nations eagerly sought to join.
As the east European political and economic situation changed,
the fragile political climate could easily have been reversed. Initially,
this restrained the US political hierarchy from any overt
triumphalism. President George H. W. Bush merely stated, when
asked by a journalist for a response to the fall of the Berlin Wall: “I
am pleased.”39 There was no such restraint in American society more
generally. The publication in 1989 of the paper “The End of
History?” by the American political scientist Francis Fukayama,40
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88 Part II

announced that this marked not just the defeat of a competitor nation
or its economic system but the final, irreversible and global triumph
of the north-Atlantic liberal democratic system itself. At first only
published in an academic journal, the paper made Fukayama famous
as it chimed perfectly with the long-standing American view of its
moral and political destiny and the mood of the time. Even the
American entertainment and news media giants, MTV and CNN,
tried to get in on the act. Viacom International chairman Sumner
Redstone tried to make an extraordinary connection with a claim
that: “We put MTV into East Germany, and the next day the Berlin
Wall fell.”41 Ted Turner, founder of CNN and the Goodwill Games
and maverick philanthropist, made a personal bid for the credit. "I
said, ‘Let's try and undo this. Let's get our young people together,
and let’s get this cycle together and let’s try to get some world peace
going and let's end the Cold War.’ And, by God, we did it.”42
The United States was now the sole superpower, and the
international economic and political order it had established with its
allies at the end of the Second World War was now the global
system. Once the threat of a return to communism in Eastern
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Europe had disappeared, the United States was not shy about what it
must do. In his 2000 State of the Union Address, President Bill
Clinton told Americans that “we must reach beyond our borders, to
shape the revolution that is tearing down barriers and building new
networks among nations and individuals, and economics and
cultures: globalization. It's the central reality of our time.”43 Steven
Lamy, professor of International Relations at the University of
Southern California, set out the underlying motives in 2001: “US
foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has involved a careful
use of power to spread an American version of liberal democracy:
peace through trade, investment, and commerce.”44 The American
political commentator, William Pfaff, describes it more succinctly
as, “an activist foreign policy which presumes that nations and
international society can be changed into something more acceptable
to Americans.”45

The new global financial order followed the political order. Alan
Murray, Deputy Editor of the Wall Street Journal, wrote in 1999: “the
nation far outstrips its nearest rivals in economic and military power
and cultural influence. America's free-market ideology is now the
world's ideology.”46 As the key to political and economic success of
smaller nations is to take sides with the most powerful nation, it was
the world that came to the North Atlantic economic system, and it
would follow that this would give a clear advantage to those that had
been operating within it for forty years. International trading
protocols were founded in Anglo-Saxon law, and the language of
business was English. As an executive at the US Public Relations firm
Porter Novelli said in 2000, America is “driving globalization for the
simple reason that the top global corporations are US-based. The top
institutions are US-based and the business schools that are training
people to be global executives are US-based. Likewise, ninety per
cent of the internet economy is US-based.”47 The dominant position
of US corporations engendered a domineering frame of mind.
American brokers, Merrill Lynch, believed that if they were
dissatisfied they could “go to the London Stock Exchange and say if
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you guys don't fix it, we're going to take our 25 per cent a year
volume elsewhere. If we do, the London Stock Exchange could
die.”48 In 1999 Wal-Mart (as it then was) could announce that as
“The United States has only 4.5 per cent of the world's population
… that leaves most of the world as potential Wal-Mart customers.”49
As the sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse said in 1994, globalisation
is, “in effect … a theory of westernisation by another name … it
should be called westernisation and not globalisation.”50

Architectural Practice and the Response

to Global Opportunities
The structure of architectural practice followed the same pattern as
other business organisations. As with any service industry,
architectural firms followed their clients or, if they were particularly
enterprising, opened offices where they thought the work might be.
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90 Part II

Figure 25. Canary Wharf, London; commenced 1987. The liberalisation of the
London Stock Exchange in the 1980s encouraged large commercial American
architectural firms to open offices in London to service American financial
institutions, creating a North American urban environment in Europe.

The liberalisation of financial trading led to the expansion

of international architectural practice.

American and, in particular, British firms had already opened

offices in the fast-developing and newly-wealthy Middle Eastern oil
states in the 1970s, when work was scarce in their own countries.
The deregulation of the London financial markets in 1986, and the
allocation of large areas of the old docklands (made redundant by the
containerisation of shipping cargo) to tax-exempt development four
years earlier, created a building boom and brought in American real
estate investors—and with them, their architects. The well-
established commercial Chicago firm, Skidmore Owings and Merrill
(SOM), opened its first foreign branch in London in 1986. The St
Louis based architectural and engineering practice, Hellmuth, Obata
and Kassabaum (HOK) opened its first foreign office in Hong Kong
in 1984, and then in London in 1988. The New York architects,
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) designed some of the major
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The New Global Era and the Global Elite 91

buildings in London’s docklands, and opened its first office outside

the United States in London in 1989. In 1990 the Baltimore firm
RTKL opened offices in London and Tokyo. These architectural
practices were large, well funded and had wide experience in the
delivery of large commercial buildings. As American banks and real
estate investors moved into the rapidly expanding financial centres of
London, American architectural firms provided an efficient, familiar
and tested service for their compatriots. Their range of services,
experience and pragmatic commercial outlook also made them
attractive to domestic developers capitalising on the growing global
commercial market.
SOM was the world’s leading modernist practice, and had been
responsible for establishing the glass-walled office block as the
standard commercial type. It was also the first to develop a corporate
public persona, its buildings being identified by the firm rather than
the individual designer. When it opened its London office it had a
total of 1,400 employees, far larger than any European practices.
HOK eventually expanded to ten offices outside the US, but also
established a European network of partner firms to respond to the
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

demands of globally operative clients to match their presence in

European capitals.51
Robert Cioppa, partner at Kohn Pedersen Fox, explained the
thinking behind the practice’s expansion to the urban geographer
Donald McNeill: “The strategy at the time [was based on] a universal
notion that London would become a financial centre, as it was
bridging the time zones between Asia and the United States, and that
there would be a significant shift in financial institutions to London.
So we serviced financial clients, but there were also the developers
coming here under the same premise, so it became a service-oriented
move.”52

Chart 2. Nationalities of Global Architectural Firms 2006

For these large firms, the boom years of the 1980s gave them
their first opportunities to expand outside the United States. As the
financial and corporate sector grew beyond the established centres of
New York, London, Toyko and Hong Kong in the 1990s, these
practices and others opened new offices to respond to the market.
The example set by the American firms of size and range of services
was followed by British and Australian architects in particular, taking
advantage of the global English-speaking business culture. Indeed, by
2006, of the fifty-nine major international firms (with functioning
offices in more than one global region), fifty-one have their head
offices in Anglophone countries, and two were founded during the
British colonial period in Hong Kong (chart 2). The United States
hosted thirty-seven per cent of these firms. While British gross
domestic product is only fifteen per cent of that of the US, twenty-
five per cent of the global practices have head offices in Britain
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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The New Global Era and the Global Elite 93

(perhaps a combination of the legacy of Empire and an historic

association with the United States). Australia is next with eight per
cent, or five practices. The cumulative growth of these firms from
1989, as they established branch offices in other global regions,
follows closely other global indicators such as cross-border capital
flows and the growth of internet hosts53 (chart 3, see also charts 1, 4
and 5).
Two practices, with confusingly similar names, Aedas and
AECOM, illustrate two different commercial responses to the new
global business climate. The expansion of both firms has followed the
pattern of international corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A)
which enable firms to rapidly widen their geographic outreach and
create economies by pooling expertise, facilitated by the free
movement of capital. The years from 1992 to 2000 are known as the
“fifth merger wave,” notable against previous “waves” for its cross-
border mergers. In November 2006, The Sunday Times of London
reported that the “M&A boom is a truly global phenomenon.” In that
year, up to that month, there were US $289 billion of deals in the
United States, and Britain had reached US $80 billion. Piers de
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Montfort of Credit Suisse, said: “The common denominator is cheap

money … alongside the perennial need for public companies to
deliver growth in earnings to achieve premium ratings.”54 This was
the high point of the “sixth merger wave” that ended in 2008.
It has always been a dilemma for professional firms that, once
they reach a certain scale and become publicly quoted to attract
outside investment, they have to continue to grow to maintain
investor confidence. Structural limitations in their market can drive
them to acquire new firms solely for this purpose and can lead to
failure. This tends to limit the range of firms in the sector. Aedas and
AECOM by, respectively, matching changes in the emerging global
corporate profile and buying high quality firms on a broad front,
seem to have avoided this danger.

Chart 3. Cumulative Totals of Architectural Branch Offices in Different Global

Regions 1990–2006

Aedas was created in 2002 from a merger between the British

firm Abbey Holford Rowe and the Australian Hong Kong-based
architects LPT. The name “Aedas” was developed with a branding

firm to be unique, easy to pronounce, legible in multiple languages,

have good feng shui and, not least, be at the start of the Roman
alphabet. It was given a feeling of maturity and status, at least to
speakers of European languages, by being loosely derived from the
Latin for “build,” aedificare. It took over another British firm in 2003
and then abandoned all individual references to the origin of its
associates and used only the Aedas brand.55 In 2006 it merged with
east coast and west coast American architects, and in 2009 with a
Pakistani and Italian firm. It now has four offices in the Middle East,
twelve in Asia, sixteen in Europe, two in the US and one in Brazil. In
their 2006–7 Annual Review, the practice asked the rhetorical
question, “How do 1,900 creative team members in 26 offices
working in 11 key sectors spread across four continents work
successfully together?” and answered, “By sharing knowledge,
expertise and cultures … we apply our global resources through the
Aedas network to deliver progressive local solutions.”56 The company
has no headquarters: in 2004 the Chairman, Keith Griffiths, said that:
“in the electronic age you don't need to have a physical home base,”
but could operate with “a network/necklace of offices right across
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the world.”57 They do, nonetheless, operate from three principal

regional bases—Europe, the Americas and Asia—which they see as
culturally differentiated: the Asian offices, for example, have largely
indigenous staff.58 The concept of a major global architectural firm
operating under a single brand but with regionally autonomous
identities is possibly unique, but is a perceptive response to the
growth of similarly nationally-disengaged global corporations.
While Aedas is primarily an architectural firm, with naturally
associated services such as urban design, interior design and landscape,
architecture is only one aspect of the procurement of buildings.
Client companies often have little interest in the conventional sub-
divisions in consultant teams, which in any event differ from country
to country. SOM started as a structural engineering as well as an
architectural firm (the engineer John Merrill was one of the founders)
and HOK services included engineering. The United States did not
have the British tradition of an independent cost consultant or
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96 Part II

quantity surveyor. Large corporations are attracted by the prospect of

one point of contact for the procurement of large and often remote
building projects, seen less as architecture than investments. The last
decade has seen the rise of consultant conglomerates to answer this
demand. As the architectural theorist Neil Leach says: “In the highly
digitised age of the 21st century, architecture has become so
thoroughly enmeshed within a network of other disciplines that what
we are witnessing are new hybrid, mutant forms of practice that
serve to reinvent the discourse of architecture as we know it.”59
The name AECOM is an acronym of “Architecture, Engineering,
Consulting, Operations and Management.” It was founded in Los
Angeles in 1990 after a management buyout of a petroleum industry
engineering firm, which was already associated with two US
architectural practices: DMJM and Frederick R Harris. Unlike Aedas,
it has retained its headquarters in the United States, and is listed in
the Forbes 500 largest US firms with 45,000 employees. It also
retains its original engineering profile, offering services such as
energy and transportation consultation, and mining and geotechnical
services. Like Aedas, however, it has expanded through a series of
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

mergers and acquisitions, bringing in thirty companies which have

given it ready-made access to Eastern Asia by buying the Chinese
architects Citymark in 2007, to Europe and Australasia by bringing in
the British architects DEGW, and to the Middle East with the
purchase of the British project managers Davis Langdon, the last two
in 2010. In 2009 it bought in landscape and masterplanning expertise
with the well-established San Francisco firm EDAW, which already
had a strong global profile. In that year, its associated firms, which
had retained their original names with the AECOM suffix, were
subsumed under the single brand title of AECOM. The management
philosophy is different from that of Aedas, and is more centralised. As
the Virginia-based senior vice president, Jon Miller, said in 2010: “If
you’re going to be global, your expertise is not going to exist in every
location … If you have a project in Kuwait, but not the right people
for it on the spot, you can draw from other regions and establish the
right talent in the right location. The global market is changing.”60
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The New Global Era and the Global Elite 97

Through an aggressive policy of mergers and takeovers, by offering a

wide range of services and by concentrating on well-established and
successful firms, AECOM has secured a number of major projects,
from the construction management of the World Trade Center in
New York to the planning of the Olympic site in London.
As firms such as Aedas and AECOM have grown and widened
their geographical operations by agglomeration to provide
coordinated services to their global client base, they have established
offices in cities around the world which are themselves agglomerations
of global service industries.

Architects and the Transnational Capitalist Class

The major global cities, identified by Saskia Sassen in her book Global
Cities, function with “a complex of industries, such as advertising,
accounting, legal services, business services, certain types of banking,
engineering, and architectural services, etc., which assist, facilitate,
complement, and in many cases make possible, the work of large and
small firms and of governments.”61 These industries include
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concentrations of “producer services,” such as architecture, and

“production of these services benefits from proximity to other
services, particularly when there is a wide array of specialized firms.
Such firms obtain agglomeration economies when they locate close to
others that are sellers of key inputs or are necessary for joint
production of certain service offerings.”62 These “agglomeration
economies” are found in the centres where architects open their
branch offices, not just in the obvious locations such as New York,
London and Tokyo, but also in cities such as Abu Dhabi, Shanghai and
Mumbai. This agglomeration of migrant businessmen, traders and
professionals create their own supra-national community. Sassen
notes their effect on urban life: “The high-level professional
workforce in global cities is characterised by work and lifestyles that
distinguish it from early forms of a small elite of urban rich or the
broader middle class. Their numbers are large enough in many of
these cities and their preference for urban living is high enough that
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98 Part II

they have, as a stratum, re-inscribed a good part of the urban

landscape.”63
The existence of what Sassen calls a “transnational elite” has been
noticed by a number of sociologists and commentators. They are
called by different names, and are given slightly different profiles, but
the existence of such a distinct group is widely acknowledged. The
Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells calls them “managerial elites”; the
sociologist of international law Yves Dezalay refers to them as “global
functionaries” or “international elites”; the theological sociologist
James Hunter calls them “parochial cosmopolitans”; the urban studies
theorist Richard Florida has coined the term “creative class”; and the
architectural theorist Keller Easterling uses the term “orgmen.” The
sociologist Mike Featherstone, in recognition of their group identity,
calls them a “third culture.” Featherstone also cautions that only 1.5
per cent of the entire global labour force works outside its own
country, making this elite only a tiny proportion of even this small
group (which highlights their disproportionate power).64 Recognising
their growing social and economic significance, in the last fifteen
years some sociologists have made a particular study of the group.
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Peter L. Berger, drawing on the work of Benjamin Barber, Samuel

Huntingdon, James Hunter and David Martin, has divided globalising
groups into four cultures: Davos culture, or international business
culture (named after the annual World Economic Summit in Davos);
Faculty Club culture, or the culture of academics, foundations, non-
governmental organisations (NGOs) and multinational agencies;
McWorld culture, or the international purveyors of (largely western)
popular culture; and Evangelical Protestantism, a powerful, expanding
but often ignored instrument in the spread of American culture.65 He
does not specifically locate architecture or other professions in these
categories although Davos culture, “the culture of the elite and … of
those aspiring to join the elite,” is as close as his short paper will
allow.
The British sociologist Leslie Sklair has, however, made an
exhaustive study not only of this group, which he calls the
“Transnational Capitalist Class,” or TCC, but also of the position of
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The New Global Era and the Global Elite 99

architects within it. Sklair too has identified four globalising cultures
or, as he calls them, “fractions”:

(1) owners and controllers of TNCs (transnational corporations) and

their local affiliates
(2) globalising bureaucrats and politicians
(3) globalising professionals
(4) consumerist elites (merchants and media).66

He identifies four ways in which “the TCC is transnational (or

globalising):”

(a) The economic interests of its members are increasingly globally

linked rather than exclusively local and national in origin
(b) The TCC seeks to exert economic control in the workplace,
political control in domestic, international and global politics,
and culture-ideology control in every-day life through specific
forms of global competitive and consumerist rhetoric and
practice
(c) Finally, members of the TCC seek to project images of
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themselves as citizens of the world as well as of their places

and/or countries of birth
(d) Members of the TCC tend to share similar life-styles,
particularly patterns of higher education, and consumption of
luxury goods and services.67

It is very clear that architects would fit into his third fraction of
“globalising professions.” Sklair has, however, undertaken a study of
the “Transnational Capitalist Class and the Contemporary Architecture
in Globalizing Cities”68 and, rather than limit himself to his fraction of
globalising professionals (point 3 above), Sklair has found a place in
each of his fractions for the architects.
His first group, the owners of TNCs (point 1 above), are the
“corporate fraction,” and he allocates two kinds of architectural firm
to this group: “strong-delivery firms,” of which he lists the top thirty
fee earners (twenty-two of which are from the United States); and

“strong ideas firms,” which he categorises as the designers of iconic

buildings and the winners of professional awards.
The globalising bureaucrats and professionals (point 2 above) that
commission architects are the “state fraction,” and he divides these
into two groups: “globalizing states’ bureaucrats and politicians
and/or their nominees in official agencies,” and “interstate and
transnational bureaucrats and politicians” such as UNESCO officials.
Sklair’s third and most obvious category, globalising professionals
(point 3 above), seems to mop up the rest of the architectural
profession. He describes these as a “mixed bunch,” and includes
owners of major architectural firms (presumably excluding those he
has already listed in his “corporate fraction”), architectural educators,
architectural historians and “designers in general.” For Sklair, “what
unites them all is their globalising agenda within, more or less, the
confines of capitalist globalisation.”
Finally, in his “consumerist fraction,” he includes “those who use
their control of and/or access to the commercial sector and the
media to promote the idea of architecture as a transnational practice
in the realm of culture-ideology.” Sklair links this to the central
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interest of his paper in iconic buildings. His paper seems to imply

that, for architects, globalisation is a primary consideration.
Numerically, however, by far the largest sector of architectural
practice everywhere is small-scale and local. His reference to the
media and its promotion of transnational practice is, however,
important (although he does not make this point) as it is this media
that promotes global practices and their high-status international
projects as a standard to which ambitious architects should aspire.

Cities and the Global Elite

Sklair makes a specific observation that “Members of the TCC tend
to share similar life-styles, particularly patterns of higher education,
and consumption of luxury goods and services.”69 This phenomenon
is also noted by other commentators.

Manuel Castells gives a complete catalogue of “an increasingly

homogeneous lifestyle among the information elite that transcends
the cultural borders of all societies.” This includes:
… jogging; the mandatory diet of grilled salmon and green salad,
with udon and sashimi providing a Japanese functional equivalent;
the “pale chamois” wall colour intended to create the cozy
atmosphere of the inner space; the ubiquitous laptop computer, and
Internet access; the combination of business suits and sportswear;
the unisex dressing style, and so on. All these are symbols of an
international culture whose identity is not linked to any specific
society but to membership of the managerial circles of the
informational economy across a global cultural spectrum.70

Richard Florida describes the urban environment that attracts the

group he calls the “creative class”: “they want to work in progressive
environments, frequent upscale shops and cafes, enjoy museums and
fine arts and outdoor activities, send their children to superior
schools, and run into people, at all these places, from other advanced
research labs and cutting-edge companies in their neighborhood.”71
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Sklair’s Transnational Capitalist Class “seek to project images of

themselves as citizens of the world,” and their international mobility
is one of their defining characteristics. The Hungarian philosopher
Agnes Heller described the lifestyle of an imaginary member of this
mobile elite in 1995: “Let’s accompany her on her constant trips
from Singapore to Hong Kong, London, Stockholm, New Hampshire,
Tokyo, Prague and so on. She stays in the same Hilton hotel, eats the
same tuna sandwich for lunch, or, if she wishes, eats Chinese food in
Paris and French food in Hong Kong. She uses the same type of fax,
and telephones, and computers, watches the same films, and
discusses the same kind of problems with the same kind of people.”72
A similar lifestyle is reported by the principals of international
architectural practices. Norman Foster, in a telephone interview
with the journalist Martin Spring in 2007, says: “I've just come from
Madrid; it will be Milan tomorrow, Beijing on Thursday and Friday

and then St Petersburg. I thrive on all this travel: I love it.”73 Index
magazine, trying to interview Rem Koolhaas, notes that:
He might be in Los Angeles planning the new Universal Studios
Headquarters; in China, Rome, or Lagos, Nigeria, conducting
research with his students from the Harvard Graduate School of
Design; in Basel, fine-tuning Ian Schrager's upcoming New York
hotel with Herzog & de Meuron; in Seattle collaborating with
Microsoft on the new public library; in New York, San Francisco, or
Milan meeting with Prada; in Las Vegas with the Guggenheim; or,
more likely than not, on an airplane.

Koolhaas tells the journalist Jennifer Sigler with pride, “Do you
know that in the past week I've been swimming in Lagos, in Milan, in
Switzerland, in Rotterdam, in London, in L.A., and in Las Vegas?”74
In 1994, the anthropologist Jonathan Friedman identified this
international elite as a distinct cultural group with shared properties
and a common outlook.75 Norman Foster talks about his own office
in these terms: “Today in our London studio you can hear perhaps 35
languages spoken. It is so cosmopolitan that I sometimes joke that it
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is another country.”76 A South African executive describes how this

has affected the sense of identity of his generation: “The
multinational company is replacing the country as a concept of what
“home” is. [Young] people in my field … are more company citizens
than they are South Africans, English, Americans, Australians or
whatever … Citizenship of a multinational for them is much more
important than national citizenship—it gives them more sense of se-
curity and identity, more material reward and less pain … In the
modern age … there is much less reason to identify with a particular
country, especially in IT, finance and marketing.”77 Mike Featherstone
sees in this outlook a loss of identity with particular or local places:
“These are the groups which develop cosmopolitan dispositions and
have weaker attachment to localities. They value mobility, creativity,
syncretism, change and innovation.”78
The economic significance of the international elite as key
workers in the new global economy makes them a target group for
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The New Global Era and the Global Elite 103

cities wishing to attract the business activity which they represent. As

Ian Angell, leading commentator on the impact of information
systems, says, “knowledge workers are the real generators of wealth.
The income of these owners of intellectual and financial wealth will
increase substantially, and they will be made welcome anywhere in
the world.”79 John Griffith-Jones, chairman of the international
accountants KPMG, in a report to the mayor on maintaining London
as a global financial centre, said the city needs to be “like a hotel—
you have got to want to stay in it.”80
One outcome of making cities attractive to the international elite
is “gentrification,” with the elite as “gentrifiers.” Juliet Carpenter and
Loretta Lees describe the phenomenon:
Gentrifiers strive to be distinctive within their own cultural context,
and to mark themselves out from others, but internationally they
also adhere to a certain conformity, as the symbols used can be read
and identified by similar social groups cross-nationally …
Gentrification is thus one expression of the globalization of culture
in a Postmodern world, an example of how a process that ostensibly
aims to express difference results in a measure of global conformity
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and a lack of distinctiveness.81

While gentrification usually involves the upgrading and, as described

by Carpenter and Lees, homogenising of existing often run-down
urban districts, Saskia Sassen describes the rest of the urban
infrastructure that is required for, what she calls, “the hyperspace of
global business” as “state-of-the-art office buildings, residential
districts, airports, and hotels.”82
The consequences are described by an American executive: “I had
a two hour flight. I got out of the airport, into a taxi, went into a
glass office building, had a meeting and went to lunch at some fancy
restaurant within the same building, had a little bit more of a
meeting, got out, got into the cab, went back to the airport. I
could’ve been anywhere in the world, really.” 83 The global economy
and the requirements of the global elite have had a major physical
impact on the cities around the world that try to capitalise on the
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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104 Part II

considerable financial benefits of becoming recognised as a “global

city.”
Global elites and global cities are a product of the economy of the
New Global Era. The impact of this economy on the nations in which
these cities are located and, indeed, on the other nations which
would, as the newspaper The Economist said in 2007, “kill for a
thriving financial sector that produced highly paid jobs and juicy tax
revenues,”84 has been far-reaching. The status of the nation-state itself
and the major cities within it has been transformed, and with that
economic and political transformation has come a physical
transformation. As Saskia Sassen tells us, “in order to understand the
pronounced social and economic changes in major cities today, we
need to examine certain fundamental aspects of the new world
economy.”85

References
1. Joseph E Stiglitz. Globalization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin,
2002, 133.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

2. Jordi Borja & Manuel Castells. Local and Global, Management of Cities in
the Information Age. London: Earthscan, 1997, 9.
3. Nayan Chanda. Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and
Warriors Shaped Globalization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007,
254.
4. Martin Wolf. Why Globalization Works. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2005, 14–15.
5. Alain Touraine. “The New Capitalist Society.” In Identity, Culture and
Globalization, edited by Eliezer Ben-Rafael. Leiden: Brill, 2002, 270.
6. Jagdish Bhagwati. Defense of Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004, 3-4.
7. Quoted by Jan Aart Scholte. “Global Trade and Finance.” In The
Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations,
edited by John Baylis & Steve Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006 (2001), 600.
8. Wolf, op. cit., 14.

9. Peter L. Berger. ‘The Cultural Dynamics of Globalisation.” In Many

Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, edited by
Peter L. Berger & Samuel P Huntingdon. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002, 1.
10. Chanda, op. cit., 257–8.
11. Friedrich Schorlemmer. “Der Befund ist nicht alles,” Contribution to a
debate on Bindungsverlust und Zukunftsangst is der Risikogesellschaft,
October 30, 1993, Halle, manuscript, 1.
12. Nelson Mandela. Long Walk to Freedom vol. 2. Abacus: London, 2003, 3,
75.
13. Richard Crockatt. “The End of the Cold War.” In Baylis & Smith, op.
cit., 127–8.
14. Pankaj Ghemawat. World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It.
Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011.
15. Ulf Hannerz. “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures.” In Culture,
Globalisation and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the
Representation of Identity, edited by A King. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997, 107.
16. Anthony McGrew. “Globalization and Global Politics.” In Baylis &
Smith, op. cit., 22–23.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

17. Martin Albrow. The Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996, 149.
18. Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 17.
19. Roland Robertson. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture.
London: Sage Publications, 1992, 8.
20. Ulrich Beck. What is Globalisation? Cambridge, Polity Press, 1997
(2002), 11–12.
21. Wolf, op. cit., 18.
22. Anthony Giddens. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1991, 175–6.
23. Ibid., 2.
24. Ibid., 51.
25. Ibid., 176.
26. “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” Jean-
Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1979). Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 1984, xxiv.
27. Jan Aart Scholte. Globalisation: A Critical Introduction. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005, 262–3.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
106 Part II

28. Albrow, op. cit., 100.

29. Mike Featherstone. Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and
Identity. London: Sage Publications, 1995, 139.
30. Chanda, op. cit., 271.
31. Ronald Niezen. A World Beyond Difference: Cultural Identity In the Age of
Globalisation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, 168–9.
32. John Kavanagh. “Washington Institute of Policy Research.” In Graham
Balls & Milly Jenkins, ‘Too Much for Them, Not Enough for Us.”
Independent on Sunday, July 21, 1996.
33. Joseph E Stiglitz. Globalization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin,
2002, 248.
34. Ibid., 214–5.
35. Jeffrey S. Juris. “Networked Social Movements: Global Movements for
Global Justice.” In The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited
by Manuel Castells. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004, 341.
36. Niezen, op. cit., 74.
37. Stiglitz, op. cit.
38. Gerard Baker. “Welcome to ‘the Great Moderation’.” The Times,
January 19, 2007.
39. http://millercenter.org/president/bush/essays/biography/5 (accessed
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

October 2011).
40. Francis Fukayama. “The End of History?” The National Interest, Summer
1989, 4.
41. Naomi Klein. No Logo. London: Flamingo, 2000, 116–7.
42. Ibid.
43. Marjory Ruth Lister. “Globalisation and its Inequities.” In Globalization
and Identity, edited by Alan Carling. London: IB Tauris, 2006, 32.
44. Steven Lamy. “Contemporary Mainstream Approaches: Neo-Realism
and Neo-Liberalism.” In Baylis & Smith, op. cit., 221.
45. William Pfaff. Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1989, 5.
46. A Murray. “The American Century: Is it coming or going?” The Wall
Street Journal, December 27, 1999, 1.
47. James Davison Hunter & Joshua Yates. “The World of American
Globalisers.” In Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary
World, edited by Peter L. Berger & Samuel P Huntingdon. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002, 350.
48. Ibid., 344–5.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
The New Global Era and the Global Elite 107

49. Keller Easterling. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its

Masquerades. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, 88.
50. Nederveen Pieterse. “Globalisation as Hybridisation.” International
Sociology 9 (2) (1994): 15.
51. Donald McNeill. “The Global Architect: Firms, Fame and Urban
Form.” London: Routledge, 2009, 14–15.
52. Ibid.
53. Own research, 2008.
54. Dominic Rushe & Louise Armistead. “The Global Deal Machine.” The
Sunday Times, November 19, 2006, 3–5.
55. McNeill, op. cit. 28.
56. Ibid., 27.
57. Ibid., 27–8.
58. Personal interview with Peter Oborn, Deputy Chairman of Aedas,
2011.
59. Neil Leach. “Hyperhabitat Programming the World.” Digital Cities,
London Architectural Design 79 (4) July/August 2009, 89.
60. Aaron Seward. ‘Making it Big’, New York, The Architects’ Newspaper,
June 16, 2010
http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=4637
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

61. Saskia Sassen. The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001, 332.
62. Ibid., 104.
63. Ibid., 244–5.
64. Mike Featherstone. “Postnational Flows, Identity Formation and
Cultural Space.” In Identity, Culture and Globalization, edited by Eliezer
Ben-Rafael. Leiden, Brill, 2002, 504.
65. “Four Faces of Global Culture.” National Interest 49 (1997), 23.
66. Leslie Sklair. “The Transnational Capitalist Class and the Discourse of
Globalisation.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs,
www.theglobalsite.ac.uk, 2000, 2–3.
67. Ibid., 3–4.
68. Leslie Sklair. “The Transnational Capitalist Class and Contemporary
Architecture in Globalizing Cities.” International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 29 (3) (2005): 485–500.
69. Sklair, 2000, op. cit., 3–4.
70. Manuel Castells. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell,
2000, 446–8.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
108 Part II

71. Richard Florida. Cities and the Creative Class. London: Routledge, 2005,
151.
72. Agnes Heller. “Where are we at Home?” Thesis Eleven 41 (1995).
73. McNeill, op. cit., 35.
74. Interview with Rem Koolhaas, 2000.
www.indexmagazine.com/interview/rem_koolhaas.shtmln (accessed
October 2011).
75. Featherstone, in Ben-Rafael, op. cit., 510.
76. Norman Foster. Rebuilding the Reichstag. London: Weidendfeld and
Nicholson, 2000, 17.
77. Ann Bernstein. “Can South Africa be more than an Offshoot of the
West?” In Berger and Huntingdon, op. cit., 211.
78. Featherstone, in Ben-Rafael, op. cit., pp 497–8.
79. Ian Angell. “The Information Revolution and the Death of the Nation
State.” Political Notes 114. London: Libertarian Alliance, 1995, 2.
80. James Ashton. “On Top of the World.” Sunday Times, November 11,
2009, 5.
81. Juliet Carpenter & Loretta Lees. “Gentrification in New York, London
and Paris: And International Comparison.” International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 19 (1995): 288.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

82. Saskia Sassen. A Sociology of Globalisation. New York: Norton, 2007,

176.
83. Hunter & Yates, op. cit., 333–4.
84. “Magnets for Money.” The Economist, September 15, 2007, 22.
85. Sassen, 2006, op. cit. 329.

Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
A. Helmond City Library, Helmond, Netherlands; Bolles+Wilson; 2010. Reflexive
Modernism: standard modernist architecture, modern by reflecting on the historic
modernity of its antecedents.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

B. Berlier Industrial Hotel, Paris; Dominique Perrault Architecture; 1990.

Supermodernism: neutral modern architecture applied to different building functions

C. View towards Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, Frank Gehry, 1997. Iconic
Architecture: extraordinary buildings as city marketing.

D. Suitcase House Hotel, Beijing, China; Edge Design Institute; 2002. Critical
Regionalism: abstract modernist response to local identity.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
E. Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh; Enric Miralles; 2004. Metaphoric Architecture:
imaginative use of metaphor to suggest local identity.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

F. View of Pudong, Shanghai, China; redevelopment began 1993. The universal

commercial city.

G. View of Dharavi, Mumbai, India. Asia’s largest slum. The product of rapid
urbanisation.

Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
H. View of Västra Hamnen district, Malmö, Sweden; begun 2001. Contextual
Urbanism: sustainable urban design based on the traditional urban plan.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

I. Borgo Città Nuova, Alessandria, Italy; Gabriele Tagliaventi; 1990. Traditional

Architecture: literal expression of tradition and local culture.

HOW GLOBALISATION MAKES THINGS THE SAME

The New Structure of Global Trade

The expanded free movement of capital established in the post-Cold
War world of the early 1990s opened up an increasing number of
national financial markets for international investment. To benefit
the economies of these countries, international financial transactions
needed to do more than just speculate on currency variations: there
had to be an opportunity to invest in manufacturing and service
industries. Additional finance would boost production, the standard
of living and tax revenues. To attract such investment, states had to
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

ensure that their industry and companies were structured in a

manner that would give investors confidence that their investment
was transparently managed without undue political interference and,
not only could their capital be invested, but also withdrawn. Such
transparency and capital movement would be very hard to achieve
under the old communist command economies or other coercive
governments with their opaque, state-owned, dictatorial and
bureaucratic economic management and crony monopolies and so,
with the liberalisation of financial markets, came pressure to conform
to the Washington Consensus. The Washington Consensus had ten
broad policy principles: low national debts, minimal state subsidy,
low taxes, market-based interest rates, open-market exchange rates,
an open import regime with no restrictive tariffs, an economy open
to foreign investment, none or few nationalised industries, no
competition-limiting regulation, and private property rights. It is
clear that these principles are both political and economic and, while

they had existed in the North Atlantic economies since the Second
World War, their introduction in emerging economies would shift
the balance of trade and affect the political climate throughout the
world.

****

These trading and political conditions were well established in the

United States and Western Europe. It is, therefore, to be expected
that it would be the companies from these countries that would
benefit the most from seeing their system extended. Taking
advantage of an estimated doubling of available labour as China, India
and the Soviet Union and its satellites entered the market in the early
1990s (rising to what the International Monetary Fund estimated as a
quadrupling of available labour between 1982 and 2007),1 North
Atlantic companies could expand production and lower costs
dramatically. The low wage levels of these new entrants, good
transport, the Washington-Consensus low-tariff regime and
electronic communications made transnational manufacture and
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trading an extremely attractive proposition. As the chairman of the

American Apparel Manufacturers Association said in 1995, “It
doesn’t make any difference where you are making the goods, so
long as you can get the right products at the right price at the right
time.”2 Not only could manufactured goods for the large North
Atlantic consumer economies be cheaper, but the same goods could
also be sold on a much expanded market in the emerging economies.
This was the great commercial benefit of a newly globalised world
economy.
The primary beneficiaries were the new or expanded transnational
corporations (TNCs). The United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development defines a TNC as “an enterprise that controls assets of
other entities in countries other than its home country.” TNCs had
existed since the English East India Company was founded in 1600
and they have grown steadily since then. Their increase in the New
Global Era has, however, been remarkable (chart 4). In 1980 there
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 111

were 7,000 and by 2008 this had grown more than tenfold to
79,000. In 2008 they turned over eleven per cent of global gross
domestic product (GDP) with US $13 trillion of annual sales and
employed eighty-two million people. Of the largest hundred,
seventy-two were from the United States, France, Germany, the UK
and Japan—in that order—with twenty-one of these from the
United States. In 2001 the output of the leading fifty corporations
exceeded that of the GDP of 142 member nations of the United
Nations. At the top, they include companies such as General
Electric, BP, Walmart, Volkswagen and Nestlé. Small TNCs range
from software designers to professional firms.
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Chart 4. Numbers of Transnational Corporations 1992–2008

The growth and financial power of TNCs has been accompanied

by the growth and strengthening of a parallel transnational governing
system dedicated to the promotion of global free trade. The principal
institutions are the IMF, OECD and the World Trade Organisation
(WTO). Each of these institutions were based on the United States-
dominated free trading system after the Second World War, and
each expanded or adapted to reflect the changed international
condition at the start of the New Global Era.
Joseph Stiglitz sets out the founding principles of the IMF in
1945. It was based on “the belief that there was a need for collective
action at the global level for economic stability, just as the United
Nations had been founded on the belief that there was a need for
collective action at the global level for political stability” [emphasis in
original]. It is controlled “through a complicated voting arrangement
based largely on the economic power of the countries at the end of
the Second World War. There have been some minor adjustments
since, but the major developed countries run the show, with only
one country, the United States, having effective veto.”3
The OECD began as a transatlantic organisation to administer
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American aid to Europe (the Marshall Plan) in 1948, but in 1961

became a global institution to harmonise trade between democratic
nations. Up until 2003 it had thirty-four members, but by 2007 it
had engaged with a further ten countries including Brazil, Russia,
India and China.
The WTO began life as the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT) in 1947, but in 1995 became the World Trade
Organisation. GATT originally had twenty-three member nations,
almost all outside the Soviet bloc (China also dropped out after the
communist revolution), but the WTO now has 153 member nations,
with thirty-one observer nations. The only major economy non-
member was Russia, which had been trying to join for seventeen
years (it was blocked by disputes with former Soviet member-
nations, but will enter in 2012). The environmental activist, Colin
Hines, believes that “it is not unrealistic to regard the WTO as
representing effective world government for the first time in human
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 113

history.”4 From a quite different standpoint, the economist Martin

Wolf agrees, observing that the WTO “system covers almost all
trade,” and notes that it “has increasingly come to affect what were
thought of as purely domestic regulatory decisions.”5
While the IMF, OECD and WTO are the principal controlling
institutions of the world trading system, there are now another 250
Intergovernmental Organisations (IGOs), which range from
Interpol and the International Organization for Standardization to
the International Maritime Organisation and the Organisation of
Islamic Cooperation. These organisations are managed by national
governments and control and monitor the workings of the global
political and economic system. Their decisions and actions affect us
all but, as Stiglitz points out, IGOs “have … escaped the kind of
direct accountability that we expect of public institutions in modern
democracies.”6
Alongside the state-sponsored network of global control and
regulation lie a huge number of Non-Governmental Organisations
(NGOs), sometimes known as “civil society movements” (the term
Non-Governmental Organisation was created by the United Nations
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in 1945). Many of these are local or national issue-based groups, but

since the nineteenth century it has been recognised that many
subjects for reform or advancement are international in nature. The
first International Non-Governmental Organisation (INGO) was the
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1839. Others
followed such as the International Committee of the Red Cross in
1863, Oxfam in 1942 and Greenpeace International in 1979. It is
hard to accurately trace the numbers of such organisations but there
seem to have been about two hundred up to the turn of the twentieth
century.7 The Economist newspaper puts the number in 1990 at six
thousand and estimates for the early part of this century vary
between twenty thousand and forty thousand.8 As Anthony McGrew,
a British authority on international relations, says, “In recent decades
… transnational organizations … advocacy networks … and citizens'
groups have come to play a significant role in mobilizing, organizing,
and exercising political power across national boundaries. This has
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
114 Part III

been facilitated by the speed and ease of modern global

communications and a growing awareness of common interests
between groups in different countries and regions of the world.”9
The global reach of all these supra-governmental organisations
and networks has been facilitated by major developments in
Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs)—telephone,
television, email and the internet—since the 1980s. Technological
advances in ICTs have been an essential ingredient of the New Global
Era (chart 5).
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Chart 5. Numbers of Internet Hosts 1993–2006

Manuel Castells, scholar and theorist of the rise of communications

technologies, traces their influence in the spread of TNCs:
… when business engaged in its own restructuring process, it took
advantage of the extraordinary range of technologies that were avail-
able from the new revolution, thus stepping up the process of
technological change, and hugely expanding the range of its
applications. Thus, the decision to go global in a big way … would
not have been possible without computer networking,
telecommunications, and information technology-based transportation
systems. The network enterprise became the most productive and
efficient form of doing business, replacing the Fordist organization
of industrialism … the full networking of companies, the
digitalization of manufacturing, the networked computerization of
services and office work, could only take place, from the 1980s
onwards, on the basis of the new information and communication
technologies.10

Castells identifies “a new form of social organization” created by the

“revolution in information and communication technologies … the
network society” [my emphasis]. He is quite clear that “digital
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

networks … know no boundaries in their capacity to reconfigure

themselves. So, a social structure whose infrastructure is based on
digital networks is by definition global. Thus, the network society is
a global society.”11 He also identifies a new spatial arrangement
created by the interconnection between organisations established by
ICTs as “the space of flows.” “Flows” are information exchanges and
interactions through electronic media between individuals and
organisations remote from one another. “The space of flows” is “the
material form of support of dominant processes and functions in the
informational society.” Castells identifies three layers of this space:
the exchanges—the electronic devices themselves; the nodes and
hubs; and the organization of the flows by “managerial elites.”12
The use of ICTs in IGOs has followed a parallel path to that of the
TNCs, but the more radical sector of INGOs has made the most
innovative use of communication technology. Internet connection

and networking sites can bring together interest groups from

different countries with relative ease. The social anthropologist,
Jeffrey Juris describes the impact of these new networks:
Whereas directly democratic forms of participation have historically
been tied to local contexts, new networking technologies and
practices are facilitating innovative experiments with grassroots
democracy coordinated at local, regional, and global scales. Among
the more radical global justice activists, networks represent much
more than technology and organizational form; they also provide
new cultural models for radically reconstituting politics and society
more generally. In this sense, grassroots, network-based movements
can be viewed as democratic laboratories, generating the political
norms and forms most appropriate for the information age.13

Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth calls the internet “the most
potent weapon in the toolbox of resistance. … the Net is more than
an organizing tool—it has become an organizing model, a blueprint
for decentralized but cooperative decision making. It facilitates the
process of information sharing to such a degree that many groups can
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

work in concert with one another without the need to achieve

monolithic consensus (which is often impossible, anyway, given the
nature of activist organizations).”14 The use of ICTs means that
interest, identity and conviction groups are no longer limited to
geographic proximity. Global networks can be created with ease and
their influence can range from political action to protest against the
effects of globalisation. It is an irony that the primary technological
instrument of globalisation can be used to resist the interests of the
primary drivers of globalisation.

A Transformed Political Landscape

and the Global City
The New Global Era has transformed the political landscape. In
1648, the Treaties of Westphalia defined the nation state as
politically autonomous, in control of its laws, citizens and economy,
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 117

and free to exercise military power against other nation states. The
only institutional challenge to this power was the creation of the
United Nations and, in particular, the rights given to the individual
over the state in which they resided by the Universal Declaration of
Human rights in 1948. The United Nations is, however, an
organisation of nations, and the legal powers of one major nation
over another are in practice limited. The principal challenges to the
status of the nation state came not from the planned creation of
international institutions, but from a combination of global economic
and technological developments. In the nineteenth century nation
states had expanded and consolidated to secure the advantages of
large economies and powerful military establishments; at the end of
the twentieth century, these two pillars of the state collapsed.
The advantages of the free movement of capital and the
corresponding liberalisation of trade have drawn governments into a
collective surrender of control over national economies. The
consequences are explained by Peter Willets, an expert in global
governance:
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

It is no longer possible to regard each country as having its own

separate economy. Two of the most fundamental attributes of
sovereignty, control over the currency and control over foreign
trade, have been substantially diminished … When goods move
physically across frontiers, it is usually seen as being trade between
the relevant countries, but it may also be intra-firm trade. As the
logic of intra-firm trade is quite different from intercountry trade,
governments cannot have clear expectations of the effects of their
financial and fiscal policies on TNCs.15

Nuclear proliferation and the costs of the arms race have negated
any potential benefit from warfare between economic equals. Since
the Second World War, state-sponsored combat has been largely
limited to the satellite states of the principal political blocs, or
“police” campaigns by major powers against what they claim to be
rogue or failed states. The increasing sophistication of armaments
and global specialisation in manufacture has also compromised the

autonomy of national defence industries. This is explained by David

Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt & Jonathan Perraton, in
Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture: “In order to
sustain a cost-effective military capability the national DIB [defence
industrial base] has to be progressively transnationalised, so
compromising the very notion of a national DIB and national
defence.”16 In 1992, even the “most vaunted weapons” of the
greatest industrial and military power, the United States, “literally
could not be built without commercially developed Japanese
machine tools.”17
Even control over citizens has been eroded by the formation of
transnational networks facilitated by ICTs. The political impact of
global networks is outlined by Jonathan Aronson, a specialist in
international communications:
Global networks empowered and vastly increased the numbers of
NGOs and even individuals on the international stage. NGOs now
create, track, and disseminate information and organize people and
groups sympathetic to their goals to pursue specific policy outcomes
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

in areas such as human rights advocacy, environmental protection,

and women's rights … global networks erode the monopoly of
information in the hands of governments, democratizing access to
breaking information. Firms, journalists, and NGOs often have
better information than governments … global networks provide
transparency to everybody, making it difficult for countries
unilaterally to take national policy decisions when the problems are
global.18

The nation state remains, nonetheless, the only source of democratic

legitimacy and nation states continue to affect the direction of
international affairs through IGOs but, as Held et al. point out: “the
locus of effective political power can no longer be assumed to be
national governments—effective power is shared, bartered and
struggled over by diverse forces and agencies at national, regional
and global levels. In other words, we must recognize that political
power is being repositioned, recontextualized and, to a degree,

transformed by the growing importance of other less territorially

based power systems.”19 The sociologist Daniel Bell was right when
he wrote in The Washington Post in 1988, just before the key events of
the New Global Era, that “the nation state is becoming too small for
the big problems of life and too big for the small problems of life.”20

****

Commentators such as Zygmunt Bauman see this new balance of

power as a threat to the role of the nation state as the protector of
the interests of its citizens: “For their liberty of movement and for
unconstrained freedom to pursue their ends, global finance, trade
and the information industry depend on the political fragmentation
—the morcellement—of the world scene. They have all, one may say,
developed vested interests in ‘weak states’—that is, in such states as
are weak but nevertheless remain states.”21 The legendary Mexican
revolutionary Zapatista, Subcommandante Marcos, saw it in even
more stark terms in 1997:
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In the cabaret of globalisation, the state goes through a striptease

and by the end of the performance it is left with the bare necessities
only; its powers of repression. With its material basis destroyed, its
sovereignty and independence annulled, its political class effaced,
the nation-state becomes a simple security service for the mega-
companies … The new masters of the world have no need to govern
directly. National governments are charged with the task of
administering affairs on their behalf.22

The growing financial power of the TNCs and the reduced status of
the nation state have undoubtedly altered the relationship between
the interests of the state and the interests of the business community.
As the wealth, independence and mobility of the TNCs grew, the
presence and financial activity of these companies could be
advantageous to the economies of nation states. If a country wants
TNCs to trade within their borders it has to be an attractive location.
Political scientist Colin Crouch outlines the problem in the Fabian
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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120 Part III

Society’s publication, Coping with Post Democracy: “Large corporations

have frequently outgrown the governance capacity of individual
nation states. If they do not like the regulatory or fiscal regime in one
country, they threaten to move to another, and increasingly states
compete in their willingness to offer favourable conditions as they
need the investment.”23 When TNCs assess different locations to find
the most advantageous tax regime for their activities it is called
“regulatory arbitrage.” The choice of location is, however, more than
purely economic. In 1956, in a classic paper “A Pure Theory of Local
Expenditures,” the economist and geographer Charles Tiebout,
analysed a choice of location by a theoretically fully mobile
population according to levels of taxation and the provision of public
goods. Tiebout’s paper used migration to suburban districts in the
USA as his model, and concluded that choice was as much to do with
the quality of the place as financial advantage.24 Martin Wolf explains
the implications of his conclusions for genuinely fully mobile global
corporations.
Owners of mobile factors of production would move to the
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jurisdiction that gives them the combination of taxes and services

they prefer. There is no reason to suppose that this location would
be the one with the lowest taxes. Even capital, the most mobile of
all factors of production, will flee from a jurisdiction so under-taxed
that it fails to provide decent and reliable justice. Capital will also be
attracted by a jurisdiction with a highly educated labour force or any
other complementary asset which raises its prospective return. Self-
evidently, the attraction of location-specific public goods will be still
greater for workers, who will want to live in places that are safe,
have pleasant amenities, offer good public services and enjoy high
overall incomes. The question is not where the tax is lowest, but
rather where the welfare derived from the bundle of local
amenities, income-earning opportunities and taxes is the highest.25

Some of these location-specific public goods were listed by The

Economist newspaper in 2007: “plenty of skilled people, ready access
to capital, good infrastructure … and low levels of corruption.” To

attract the combination of the local spending power of global

corporations and whatever taxation can be gleaned from their multi-
national activities, countries have to provide a beneficial financial
climate together with a living and working environment suitable for
the executives who make the choices. Trader magazine, a publication
aimed at hedge-fund managers and currency traders, ranked world
cities according to a series of criteria that included trading
infrastructure, taxation, nightlife and recreation facilities. As The
Economist said: “quality of life is important to highly paid financiers,
and successful centres … are changing constantly to keep delivering
what it takes.”26

The Universal Trading City

Electronic communication should allow a global company
headquarters to locate anywhere in a host country, but in practice a
number of factors draw them to major city centres. Some of these
are the same “agglomeration economies” that draw in the
Transnational Capitalist Class or “managerial elites” discussed above.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

To these must be added regulatory arbitrage and the provision of a

living and working environment attractive to key decision-making
executives. There can be no doubt of the value to national economies
gained from hosting global trading centres. The twenty-three largest
cities generate, on average, a GDP eighty per cent higher than the
economies of their host countries. The 380 top cities generated fifty
per cent of global GDP in 2007.27 This gives a considerably enhanced
status and political power to major cities. Castells confirms that “the
reinvention of the city-state is a salient characteristic of this new age
of globalization, as it was related to the rise of a trading,
international economy at the origin of the modern age.”28 Attracting
the Transnational Capitalist Class—and so the transnational
corporations that they command—to major cities is now an
important part of the economic strategies of nation states and city

Figure 26. View of Hong Kong.

The glass-walled office block, signature of the global trading city.

governments. This has made the design of cities into a strategic

instrument of the global economy.
For a city to function as a global centre it must have not only a
good workforce, a good transport infrastructure and a favourable
fiscal climate, it must also have the right urban ingredients. As with
the regulatory system for transnational trade, as Jan Aart Scholte tells
us, “the trimmings” will have “a decidedly Western character, with
office blocks, business suits and briefcases.”29 Jordi Borja and
Manuel Castells, in their book Local and Global: Management of Cities
in the Information Age, go into more detail: “The setting up of an
urban node for advanced services becomes a prerequisite, and it is
invariably organized around an international airport, a satellite-
telecommunications system, luxury hotels with appropriate security
systems, English-language secretarial support, financial and
consultancy firms familiar with the region, local and regional

government offices capable of providing information and infrastructure

to back up international investors and a local labour market having
personnel skilled in advanced services and technological
infrastructure.”30 The supply of the buildings that support global
business has transformed the centres of cities around the world. The
new buildings are those that service international and national
corporate users and the consumer economy that they promote: office
blocks, international hotels, airports and shopping malls.
It has been observed for some time that this kind of new building
was giving the cities that house them a uniform appearance. In 1974,
the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy complained that he found “from
Baghdad to Benghazi, look-alike blocks of dreary high-rise buildings
rose along drab, dusty boulevards.”31 Two years later, at a United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
meeting in Nairobi, in a document entitled, “Recommendations
Concerning the Safeguarding and Contemporary Role of Historic
Areas,” concern was expressed that “at a time when there is a danger
that a growing universality of building techniques … architectural
forms may create a uniform environment throughout the world.”32 It
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was partly in response to this sentiment that postmodernist

architecture in the 1970s and 1980s had taken on a specifically
historical and place-related appearance. The 1990 to 1992 recession
that heralded the start of the New Global Era had, however, created
a climate of austerity that ran against the more extravagant aspects of
Postmodernism and their association with the Reagan-Thatcher
economic boom.

Reflexive Modernism
A large portion of the architectural profession had never been happy
with the overtly historical aspects of Postmodernism. By the 1980s,
all but the oldest architects in the developed world had been trained
in architectural schools that taught that, as the British architect Amys
Connell had argued in 1934, Modernism is the “inevitable progress
of modern civilization.”33 Although many followed the postmodernist
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124 Part III

fashion of the time, excusing their turn to historical references as

ironic, highly-respected architects such as Richard Rogers or I. M.
Pei were immovable in their adherence to Modernism. Major
figures, such as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, also took
against Postmodernism, declaring in his posthumously published and
long-in-the-preparation Aesthetic Theory that architecture, “if out of
disgust with functional forms and their inherent conformism …
wanted to give rein to fantasy, it would fall immediately into
kitsch.”34 The prominent American architectural critic, Martin Filler,
summed up the feelings of many architects in 1990:
Emboldened by the laissez-faire atmosphere created by Reaganomics
and the most spectacular stock market prosperity since the
twenties—as well as a pervasive endorsement of the flagrant display
of wealth exhibited in all aspects of consumer behaviour—the major
corporate clients of the big architectural firms called for and
responded to designs in which assertive forms and showy materials
mimicked a hollow grandiosity and unbridled crassness reminiscent
of the Gilded Age.35
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With all the passion of repentant sinners, the turn against

Postmodernism was so strong amongst architects that, for the next
twenty years, any direct reference to historical architecture on a new
building, unless it was abstracted beyond immediate recognition,
would be roundly condemned.
Just at the moment when cities across the world entered into a
building boom to service and attract the geographically expanding
global corporate business sector, architecture had turned to an
aesthetic of unembellished simplicity. In the manner of all reactions,
the new direction in architecture was defined as much by what it was
as by what it sought to replace. If Postmodernism referred to pre-
modernist history, the new architecture only drew on modernist
history; if Postmodernism was eclectic, the new architecture was
simple and rational; if Postmodernism was extravagant and
exuberant, the new architecture was spare and calm. The new
direction in architecture was widely recognised and described as,
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 125

variously: Minimalist, High Modern, Soft Modern or Supermodern.

Hans Ibelings produced the most comprehensive study of this new
style in his 1998 book, Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of
Globalisation. Ibelings describes the type:

Since the early 1990s, more and more buildings have been built
worldwide whose sole involvement with their context consists of
toeing the building line. For this architecture the surroundings
constitute neither legitimation nor inspiration for these are derived
from what goes on inside the building, from the programme. This
autonomy is in many cases reinforced by the fact that the building
has an inscrutable exterior that betrays nothing of what happens
inside.
In this respect, too, supermodern architecture is essentially
different from the Postmodern variety whose practitioners always
tried to find some way of expressing the building's purpose, either
by following the conventions of building typology or by adding
symbolic pointers. In supermodern architecture this rarely if ever
happens. In many instances these buildings look as if they might
house just about anything: an office or a school, a bank or a research
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centre, a hotel or apartments, a shopping mall or an airport

terminal.36

Ibelings also observed that “the changed attitude towards Modernism.

The almost contemptuous aversion to Modernism displayed by
postmodernist and deconstructivist architects has given way to a
more nuanced view. And although this has not resulted in a genuine
revaluation of the architecture that dominated the Western world in
the 1950s and 60s, it has led to new interest in the modernist
aesthetic and to a revival of the idea that the processes of
modernisation are the driving force behind architectural and urbanist
innovation.”37
A desire to return to the old certainties of early Modernism is
confirmed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, winner of the
Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1995, who wrote in 1991: “The
most promising path open to contemporary architecture is that of

development through and beyond Modernism. This means replacing

the mechanical, lethargic, and mediocre methods to which
Modernism has succumbed with the kind of abstract, meditative
vitality that marked its beginnings.”38 Bob Allies, a respected British
architect, started his career as a postmodernist but, like many others
in the late 1980s, turned back to Modernism. Writing in 2006, Allies
now sees Postmodernism as an “aberration” and believes that “the
social, technical and aesthetic agenda of Modernism continues to
provoke and sustain architectural practice.”39 The architect Patrik
Schumaker notes the trend in 2010: “The mainstream has, in fact,
returned to a sort of pragmatic Modernism with a slightly enriched
palette; a form of eclecticism mixing and matching elements from all
Modernism’s subsidiary styles.”40
As the British architectural critic Owen Hatherley observes:
“Modernism might have resurged, but … it isn't quite the same
Modernism. This is a Modernism that is based on the distance
between itself and the everyday. While the Modern design of the
1920s … was immersed in the quotidian, their equivalents today are
the designers of corporate skyscrapers, museums and art galleries.”41
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Hatherley, a socialist, bemoans the abandonment of the left-wing

agenda in the Modernism he supports, but this train had left the
station a long time ago. Modernism had been transformed from its
reformist mid-European origins to serve corporate business in the
United States in the mid-twentieth century. What was now emerging
was the next step in the development of Modernism.
Modernist symbolism was now attached to corporate identity
and, in this form, came to represent membership of a successful
capitalist system among the new entrants to the global free market,
many of them former socialist nations. While the aesthetic
vocabulary of glass, geometric composition and lack of decoration
was inherited from the 1930s and 1960s, the world had changed.
Unlike early Modernism, which was genuinely revolutionary, or
post-Second World War Modernism, which was forging a new
orthodoxy, the Modernism of the late twentieth and early twenty-
first century had become a culturally embedded establishment in the
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 127

North Atlantic countries. It was what the sociologists Ulrich Beck,

Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash had identified in the wider modern
condition in the 1990s, a modernity that had to deal with the
achievement of its past objectives and confront the changing
circumstances that could undermine them.
Much as the liberal social cohesion sought by early modernisers
was breaking down with consumerism and individualism, so the
communitarian idealism of early modernist architects was breaking
down as architecture served speculative commercial development.
This new kind of modernity was given the name “reflexive” by Beck,
Giddens and Lash.42 This apparent revival of Modernism and, what
the critic Chris Abel called in 1986, “the crucial battle for the real
Modern Movement,”43 is the architectural manifestation of the same
phenomenon—Reflexive Modernism. In 1990, the abandonment of
the old certainties of Modernism is eloquently described by
Dominique Perrault through his Hotel Industriel in the anonymous
outskirts of Paris: “Nothing, less than nothing, no anchorage, no
hold, no hook, no soothing theories about the city with-parks-and-
gardens but a confrontation with ‘our world’, that one, the true, the
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so-called ‘hard’ world, the world people claim not to want.”44

When the economy recovered in the early 1990s, Postmodernism
had been discarded, and it was this Reflexive Modernism that was the
established architectural type of the economies that dominated the
newly liberalised global free market. When the emerging nations
sought to align themselves with the established capitalist nations, the
available symbols were the business suit, the English language and the
glass-walled office block—the established commercial type of
Reflexive Modernism.
The social idealism of early Modernism may have been fatally
compromised but its internationalism survived. The pioneering
German modernist, Erich Mendelsohn, had declared in 1919 that the
“new architecture” would be part of a new “supra-nationalism” that
“embraces national demarcations as a precondition; it is free
humanity that alone can re-establish an all-embracing culture.”45
These sentiments were repeated in 1982 by the American philosopher
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128 Part III

Figure 27. Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India; HCP Design;

2008.

International Reflexive Modernism, modernity by reference

to past modernity.
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Figure 28. Museum of Fine Arts,Leipzig; Karl Hufnagel, Peter Pütz and Michael
Rafaelian; 2004.

Supermodernism, an anonymous universal modernist style suitable

for all building types.

Marshall Berman: “Modern environments and experiences cut across

all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of
religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all
mankind.”46 A year later, the architectural critic Kenneth Frampton
repeated the belief that Modernism or “the avant-garde is inseparable
from the modernization of both society and architecture.”47 This
message was taken up by the emerging economies seeking to
modernise. The development of Pudong, the new district of
Shanghai and a city of glass skyscrapers, was described by Jiang
Zemin, Chinese President and former mayor of Shanghai, as “a
microcosm of Shanghai's modernization and the symbol of Chinese
reform and opening up”48 (figure F).

The Symbolism of the Global City

As cities around the world tried to attract the trading benefits of the
global economy, or present themselves as modern economic centres,
it would seem logical to politicians and planners to remodel them to
imitate cities that were already major business centres and home to
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transnational corporations. In the New Global Era these were almost

exclusively North Atlantic cities, Tokyo or the then British colony of
Hong Kong (handed back to China in 1997). In China, for example,
as Charlie Qiuli Xue and Yingchun Li report, “now that Beijing,
Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities are determined to become
‘international metropolises,’ they must follow the lead of existing
world cities such as London, New York and Tokyo.”49 Above all,
much as the dominant economic centre was Wall Street, the iconic
image was the cluster of skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan seen
from the Hudson River. The magazine Progressive Architecture reported
in 1995 on “a shift of historic proportions … and architecture is the
premier symbol of that transformation ... the Chinese, as well as
many other Asians, tend to want buildings as tall as possible and in an
ostentatiously Modern style as can be found.”50 Existing centres were
transformed or new business districts created with clusters of tall

Figure 29. “Where the World Comes to Bank,” Emirates Bank advertisement.
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Figure 30. View of West Bay, Doha, Qatar. The creation of an anonymous
international office environment to attract global business.

Figure 31. World Trade Center, Central Business District, Beijing. Global trading
is symbolised by the creation of World Trade Centers as an explicit reference to
downtown Manhattan.

The global financial market is represented by the universal global

business district.

buildings. If, as in the West Bay area in Doha, Qatar, there were no
takers for the new glass towers they were built anyway, as their
construction was thought to be attraction enough for incoming TNCs
(figure 30). In case the association was not sufficiently clear, groups
of glass towers were identified as “World Trade Centers” (always
spelt the American way), and these have sprung up in Mumbai,
Chennai, Delhi, Hanoi, Beijing, Guangzhou, Moscow, Sao Paulo,
Dubai and many other cities (figure 31). New World Trade Centers
are under construction in Doha and Abu Dhabi. All are members of
the World Trade Centers Association, which has the lost twin towers
of Manhattan as its logo. The powerful symbolism of World Trade
Center in New York, as the nexus of the global capitalist system, led
both to its destruction in 2001 and the undiminished desire of cities
around the world to attach themselves to its idea and imagery.

Architectural imitation did not stop at city centre clusters of high

rise buildings. In India a series of technology campuses have been
created in Chennai, Hyderabad and Thiruvananthapuram.51 The
Economist described the new “gleaming campus” of Infosys, “India’s
third-biggest information technology firm,” in Bangalore with “a golf
green and a Domino’s Pizza as the staff canteen. You might as well
be in Silicon Valley.”52 As N.R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman of
Infosys, confirms, “Right now, when you come into our campus,
you’re leaving India behind … We’re living in a make-believe
world.”53
The combination of the turn to reflexive modernist architecture
in North Atlantic countries and the adoption of North Atlantic
architectural imagery by emerging economies created a global
architectural homogeneity that seemed to satisfy the international
ambitions of the early modernist pioneers. Ibelings sees his version of
reflexive modernity, supermodernism, as “The new frame of
reference [that] will no longer be dictated by the unique, the
authentic or the specific, but by the universal.”54 Manuel Castells
believes this neutrality is the mute herald of the new age:
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The architecture that seems most charged with meaning in societies

shaped by the logic of the space of flows is what I call ‘the
architecture of nudity.’ That is, the architecture whose forms are so
neutral, so pure, so diaphanous, that they do not pretend to say
anything. And by not saying anything they confront the experience
with the solitude of the space of flows. Its message is the silence.55

The British sociologists, Gerard Delanty and Paul Jones, find that this
anonymous architecture represents the “universalistic aspirations of
the European modernity … Instead of epic grandeur and pomposity,
the new architectural discourses are of transparency, accessibility
and, probably most importantly, a reflexive attitude approach to
collective identity.”56 Greek urban theorist, Aspa Gospodini, sees this
new Modernism (which she calls by one of its common synonyms,
“innovative”) as:

simultaneously expressing the specificity of place and the links with

the world beyond … this would facilitate the process of integration
of European cities into the new (global) urban system of Europe …
innovative design schemes, by creating new urban images and new
types of public space while simultaneously offering spatial
membership to all individuals and cultures of the society, may also
generate new forms of “locality.”57

The Global Suburb

Cities do not consist entirely of city centres, new business districts or
retailing. On the contrary, housing represents by far the largest
volume of built form in any city. In Dubai, which has expanded
rapidly, specifically to attract global business, and where the
expatriates who service the economy constitute eighty-five per cent
of the population, it is not only business premises that must be built
to the standards of North Atlantic corporations: it has also been
necessary to construct an appropriate environment for the family life
of international executives (figure 32). The characteristic North
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Atlantic type, a series of low-density, gated suburbs on a North

American pattern complete with supermarkets and residents’ clubs,
have been built around the city for incoming executives with names
like “The Meadows,” “West Garden” and “Emirate Hills,” and have
been described as “the undisputed ‘Beverley Hills’ of Dubai.”
The modern suburb was a nineteenth-century British invention
adopted enthusiastically by the USA in the twentieth century. In
Britain and North America in particular, lending institutions and
home-owning consumerism promoted a market-driven suburban
type, purchased by families and with designs tailored to public taste.
The commonality of the type and the popular taste of the product led
intellectuals and architects to deride suburban development from the
early twentieth century onwards; a phenomenon recorded in detail
by John Carey in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses.58 In free
market democratic countries, however, suburbs remained very
popular, and rings of low-density private housing are now a

characteristic of all North Atlantic cities. As the urban historian

Robert Fishman observed in 1987, notwithstanding the disdain of the
architectural profession and urban elites, the suburban ideal had
“enough support from ordinary people in the real world to transform
the structure of the modern city.”59 The combination of space,
privacy and the social status of personal independence made the type
attractive, not only to itinerant North Atlantic executives, but also to
countries where economic growth created an aspiring middle class.
Suburban villa developments are now a feature of almost all major
cities. Real estate agents in Beijing record 176 villa developments
under way, “built with nature as a backdrop … most new villas are
based on a European style.”60 A development called “Grand Hills” has
“North American style villas with private gardens … in a unique
peaceful and vast living environment.” Beijing Eurovillage has
“European country style houses with inspiration [sic] of Beijing
quadrangle.” Outside Bangalore in India, VGP Garden Homes has a
series of houses with names like “Hampton,” “Wembley” and
“Glendale.” “Located in the thick of IT action,” the Concorde
Cuppertino development in Bangalore is an “ultra-modern villa
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project spread across 12 acres with 182 luxury villas.” South

American gated communities, condominio fechados in Brazil and barrios
privados in Argentina, provide secure suburban housing behind razor-
wire fencing. Outside Jakarta, the Kota Wisata development offers
housing and shopping facilities that would enable people to “go
around the world without [a] passport: Visits to beautiful Indonesia,
jewels of Paris, German masterpiece, romantic Italy, Japanese
heritage, spirit of America, splendour of China.”61 As the political
geographer Peter Taylor observes, “popular suburbia and modern
architecture have represented two very different paths to
modernity.” Unlike most architectural and urban designers, he sees
the modern suburb not as a regrettable outcome of the consumer
economy and dependence on the motor car but as “a true monument
of the modern world, the modern equivalent to the great Gothic
cathedrals of the high middle ages in feudal Europe.”62

Most suburban development is not designed by architects, or if it

is, or if the definition of “architect” is less regulated in some
countries than others, it is undertaken by architects who are far from
the reflexive modernist mainstream. In these suburbs, properties are
often sold freehold on the real estate market to individual families.
Suburbs which rent or lease individual houses also compete on the
open market for custom. The only interest for developers is to gain a
competitive edge, and building design is one part of a package that
may include security, landscaping, vetted residents, servicing and so
on. In higher-value suburbs, lots are often sold freehold and either
the developer offers a range of designs which can be “customised” or
the purchaser can engage his own architect or designer. Free from
the self-referential aesthetic politics of architects, if there is any
indication of the design inclinations of the middle classes on a global
scale, it will be found here. Some political systems exercise aesthetic
control, often administered by the architectural establishment or
their associates in the planning professions. This is common in
northern Europe, but less common elsewhere. Even in northern
Europe, the democratic system can make it hard for an aestheticized
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minority to impose their taste on an educated home-buying public,

although in more regimented societies this does happen.
The physical quality of the product will depend on its scarcity. If
the demand for private houses outstrips supply, the quality will be
lower, as purchasers concentrate more on obtaining the product than
the finer detail. The styles of individual houses are extremely varied,
but are often divided into categories by real estate agents and
developers to give purchasers a defined range of choices. The choices
will reflect the aspirations of the purchasers, if not their aesthetic
sophistication. There are a number of “contemporary” or “ultra-
modern” designs, but the predominant types have a somewhat free
interpretation of a traditional design from somewhere in world—but
not necessarily from the location of the house. There are classical
houses of an American type, pejoratively called “McMansions” by
detractors in the United States; European styles, which are often
similar to McMansions but with some specific place reference such as
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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136 Part III

Figure 32. View of Dubai suburb. Creating a North Atlantic family living
environment in the desert for global executives.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Figure 33. Poster advertising a new suburb, Kerala, India.

Figure 34. Suburban villa, Guangzhou, Canton, China. The suburban house is
often an interpretation of traditional design, frequently of a North Atlantic type.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

The North Atlantic suburban type has a worldwide appeal.

a double-pitched Mansard roof for a French style, or a stepped gable

for a Dutch style; a local traditional style will have added details such
as a locally distinctive roof design or porch. Many of the traditionally
styled houses combine different stylistic elements and modern
features. The stylistic eclecticism, if not the architectural irony, of
Postmodernism survives throughout the world in these housing
schemes and, indeed, in other buildings outside the North Atlantic
home of Modernism. It is as if Postmodernism opened up a popular
desire to combine modernity with tradition that could not be
supressed by a change of heart in the architectural establishment.
Although the designs of the houses are themselves of interest, and
it would require a survey of some depth to go beyond empirical
observation, the global spread of the suburban type is consistent. The

individual house in its individual lot, with similar houses in areas

designed to create a semi-rural environment, and often with
additional services or facilities, seems to be a universal combination.
It will have variations, such as high perimeter walls in Middle Eastern
countries or small lot size relative to house size in East Asian
countries, but the North Atlantic suburban concept has become a
very successful and widespread global type.

Deterritorialisation and the Non-Place

The almost universal combination of glass office towers in city
centres, similar apartment towers and American-style suburbs on the
periphery give a superficial impression of homogeneity to visitors
from North Atlantic countries in particular, who are often disturbed
and disappointed to find similarity where they expected to find
difference. The Australian landscape urbanist, Catherin Bull,
describes the condition as “the dominating trends towards technical
standardization, spatial homogenization and off-site decision-making
that provide the global context or 'frame', universal and modernizing.”63
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The homogenisation of cities is the subject of frequent comment.

Ibelings sees this as a manifestation of Supermodernism:
Cities and agglomerations around the world have undergone
comparable developments and assumed similar shapes. Wherever
one looks there seem to be high-rise downtowns, low-rise suburbs,
urban peripheries with motorway cultures and business parks, and
so on. And everywhere the accompanying architecture has assumed
a certain expressionlessness. Nowhere is this trend clearer than in
the Asian metropolises, in recent years the subject of numerous
reports in professional publications which describe, with a mixture
of astonishment and admiration, the feverish development activities
in cities like Seoul and Shanghai.64

The urbanist and author, John Short, refers to the phenomenon in his
1989 book, The Humane City, as the international “blandscape.”65 The

American architect and journalist, Roger Lewis, goes into detail in

The Washington Post in 2002:

The experience of strolling through malls at Canary Wharf in

London's Docklands, at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and at Manege
Square in Moscow is fundamentally the same.
The global culture of design is supported by architects who study
what other architects are creating, no matter where. With fabulous
photographs in slick magazines and professional journals, trend-
conscious designers can scan and span the globe, sharing high-style
concepts rendered in stylish materials. Glass, aluminium, stainless
steel, copper, titanium and natural stone are readily available. If
they can't be acquired locally, they can be imported.
Thus it’s not unusual for a building in New York or Shanghai to
be constructed with a sophisticated glass and metal curtain wall
made in England or Germany and granite and marble imported from
Spain or Zimbabwe. Once this would have been considered
prohibitively expensive, but today shipping materials globally has
become routine.66
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The French anthropologist Marc Augé in his important 1995 book

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity sets out his
theory that “supermodernity produces non-places” and that “a world
thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the
temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a
new object.”67 Augé sees this new uniform condition as a particular
characteristic of the modern globalized world and defines his word
for the phenomenon, the “non-place”:
… non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be
quantified—with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume
and distance—by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the
mobile cabins called “means of transport” (aircraft, trains and road
vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure
parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and
wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the

purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the

individual in contact only with another image of himself.68

Augé sees the non-place as somewhere where the transnational

“foreigner lost in a country he does not know (a ‘passing stranger’)
can feel at home … in the anonymity of motorways, service stations,
big stores or hotel chains.”69 The non-place is both the creation of a
uniformity that takes away the unique identity of cities and a special
kind of identity appropriate to organisations that belong nowhere in
particular.
The American anthropologist, Michael Kearney, in an
anthropological review of globalisation and transnationalism links the
idea of the non-place to the wider anthropological concept of
“deterritorialisation.” He uses similar language to Augé:
“Deterritoraliation has to do with the construction of ‘hyperspaces,’
i.e. environments such as airports, franchise restaurants, and
production sites that, detached from any local reference, have
monotonous universal qualities.”70 In broader anthropological usage,
deterritorialisation is “the severance of social, political, or cultural
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

practices from their native places and populations.” The term has its
origins in the description of the isolation of activities for their removal
to another context and was set out in the 1972 book, Anti-Oedipus, by
the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychotherapist Félix Guattari.71
Taken on by anthropologists, the expression has been particularised to
“a central feature of globalization,” and is described by the Spanish
social anthropologist Gil-Manuel Hernàndez as “a general cultural
condition which derives from the dissemination of global modernity,
whose existential implication affects more people than ever, deeply
transforming their everyday lives.” Hernàndez goes on to describe that
effect: “In an intensely deterritorializated context, the globalization of
everyday experiences makes it ever more difficult to maintain a stable
sense of local cultural identity, including national identity, as our daily
life entwines itself more and more with influences and experiences of
remote origin.”72

Figure 35. View of the City of London. Uniform development of city centres creates
anonymous urban space.
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Figure 36. International Terminal, Dubai airport. Airports, shopping malls and hotels
create a worldwide uniform and neutral environment, occasionally decorated with
superficial references to their location.

Modernist design and common functions create the same neutral

“non-place” around the world.

In reality, most established cities will be complex. Cities will

include non-places in their new central business districts, transport
hubs and suburbs, alongside relatively unaffected survivors of the
pre-global period. In most countries outside the North Atlantic
regions, there will be extensive slums, favelas or gandi basti,
described by the American social commentator, urban theorist and
activist, Mike Davis, as “the gritty antipodes to the generic
fantasyscapes and residential theme parks.”73 Historic areas will often
be gentrified with, as the social-anthropologist Julia Nevarez
describes them:
distinctive architectural styles in the patterns of improvement of
housing stock and standards of aesthetics. Maintenance, aesthetics,
and safety in public spaces even though customized to fit specific
locales, follow a general model whereby vernacular, spectacular,
and global brands are combined with the particularities of place in
urban landscapes. The urban development initiatives of gentrifying
areas are closely linked to general economic and cultural patterns of
globalization.74
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Augé sees even this as a manifestation of non-place, as “supermodernity

… makes the old (history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all
exoticism and all local particularity.”75
The more recent and the larger the urban expansion, the greater
will be the tendency to uniformity. Nowhere is this more apparent
than in Dubai, a city that only started on the massive development
process that created the modern city in 1990, the start of The New
Global Era. The German urbanist and architectural sociologist Harald
Bodenschatz, wrote in 2009:
Without a doubt marketing Dubai as a “Wonder of the World,” a
“luxury destination,” a “city of superlatives,” and “one of the fastest
growing cities on earth” was an immense achievement. Founded in
1997, the “Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing,” a
governmental organisation headed by the ruler of Dubai, is
responsible for city marketing. Unknown even just a few years ago,

Dubai was successfully branded into minds all over the world—with
images provided by this gigantic marketing machine.

Bodenschatz goes on to describe the urban outcome:

The important question for the identity of a real city, asking where
the city center might be, cannot be easily answered: the city hall
rises in Deira, clusters of high-rises can be found dispersed around
the city, the tallest building marks a so-called “downtown,” a new
200 hectare district, not, however, the centre of the city. The
Central Business District, the economic heart of Dubai, is located at
the northern end of the central expressway, in between the
meanwhile totally unimposing, ancient (meaning it was opened in
1979) World Trade Center, and the Financial Center, launched in
2002.76

In other words, to use Augé’s terminology, Dubai is little more than

a disconnected collection of non-places. The architect George
Katodrytis, from the American University at Sharjah, sees the city as
a phenomenon related to the wider consumer economy:
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Dubai … creates appetites rather than solves problems. It is

represented as consumable, replaceable, disposable and short-lived.
Dubai is addicted to the promise of the new: it gives rise to an
ephemeral quality, a culture of the “instantaneous.” Relying on
strong media campaigns, new “satellite cities” and mega-projects are
planned and announced almost weekly. This approach to building is
focused exclusively on marketing and selling.77

Dubai can be seen as an extreme and self-contained example of the

more widespread transformation of city centres into arenas for global
consumption. The American urban sociologist Sharon Zukin
identified the takeover of public space by commercial interests in her
1995 book, The Culture of Cities: “Defining consumption space by its
look is especially suited to transnational companies in the symbolic
economy, which try to synergize the sale of consumer products,
services, and land … The look is the experience of the place.

Controlling the vision brings market power.”78 Ronald Niezen links

the anonymity of the non-place to consumer culture:
The volume, pace, and reach of decontextualized culture is cutting
people from their familiar moorings. The relationships between
cultures and localities have become abstract, “unnatural.” People
almost everywhere are subjected to intangibles, objects and ideas
that lack a definite place or provenance. Public spaces have been
transformed to reflect or accommodate boundaryless commerce.
The shopping mall and multiplex cinema are quintessential gathering
points of global forces.79

The negative impact of global commerce on cities has not escaped

anti-globalisation protestors. Reclaim the Streets, “a direct action
network for global and local social-ecological revolution,” paints a
negative picture of the modern city:
Road schemes, business “parks,” shopping developments—all add
up to the disintegration of community and the flattening of a
locality. Everywhere becomes the same as everywhere else.
Community becomes commodity—a shopping village, sedated and
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under constant surveillance. The desire for community is then

fulfilled elsewhere, through spectacle, sold to us in simulated form.
A TV soap “street” or “square” mimicking the area that concrete and
capitalism are destroying. The real street, in this scenario, is sterile.
A place to move through not to be in. It exists only as an aid to
somewhere else—through a shop window, billboard or petrol
tank.80

Consumerism, the Globalisation of Markets

and Branding
As the anti-globalists point out, the uniformity of cities in the New
Global Era needs to be seen in the wider context of the global
expansion of consumerism and its cultural impact.
The homogenising effect of the consumer economy has been
recognised for some time. In 1848 Karl Marx wrote in the Communist

Manifesto: “National differences and antagonisms between peoples are

daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the
bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to
uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life
corresponding thereto.”81 As American products and lifestyles were
aggressively promoted in the OECD countries after the Second
World War, Marx’s predictions looked ever more accurate. In 1951,
towards the end of an illustrious career, the Spanish-American
philosopher George Santayana wrote:
The authority that controlled universal economy, if it were in
American hands, would irresistibly tend to control education and
training also. It might set up, as was done in the American zone in
Germany, a cultural department, with ideological and political
propaganda. The philanthropic passion for service would prompt
social, if not legal intervention in the traditional life of all other
nations, not only by selling there innumerable American products,
but by recommending, if not imposing, American ways of living and
thinking.82
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In an influential essay in 1965, Universal Civilization and National

Cultures, the French philosopher Paul Ricœur set out the conditions
for technical and commercial convergence:

Thus we are confronted with a de facto universality of mankind: as

soon as an invention appears in some part of the world we can be
sure it will spread everywhere. Technical revolutions mount up and
because they do, they escape cultural isolation. We can say that in
spite of delays in certain parts of the world there is a single, world-
wide technics. That is why national or nationalistic revolutions, in
making a nation approach modernization, at the same time make it
approach a certain cosmopolitanism. Even if … the scope is national
or nationalistic it is still a factor of communication to the extent that
it is a factor of industrialisation, for this makes it share in the
universal technical civilization … it can be said that throughout the
world an equally universal way of living unfolds. This way of living
is manifested by the unavoidable standardization of housing and

clothing. These phenomena derive from the fact that ways of living
are themselves rationalized by techniques which concern not only
production but also transportation, human relationships, comfort,
leisure, and news programming as well. Let us also mention the
various techniques of elementary culture or, more exactly, the
culture of consumption; there is a culture of consumption of world-
wide dimensions, displaying a way of living which has a universal
character.83

In 1983, the American economist Theodore Levitt, in an important

article in the Harvard Business Review, “The Globalization of Markets,”
not only popularized the word “globalization” in the American
business community, but warned them that, “the globalization of
markets is at hand.” He wrote:

Worldwide communications carry everywhere the constant

drumbeat of modern possibilities to lighten and enhance work, raise
living standards, divert, and entertain. The same countries that ask
the world to recognize and respect the individuality of their cultures
insist on the wholesale transfer to them of modern goods, services,
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and technologies …
In business, this trend has pushed markets toward global
commonality. Corporations sell standardized products in the same
way everywhere—autos, steel, chemicals, petroleum, cement,
agricultural commodities and equipment, industrial and commercial
construction, banking and insurance services, computers,
semiconductors, transport, electronic instruments, pharmaceuticals,
and telecommunications, to mention some of the obvious …
Nothing is exempt. The products and methods of the
industrialized world play a single tune for all the world, and all the
world eagerly dances to it.84

Levitt concludes: “In the process of world homogenization, modern

markets expand to reach cost-reducing global proportions. With
better and cheaper communication and transport, even small local
market segments hitherto protected from distant competitors now
feel the pressure of their presence. Nobody is safe from global reach
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 147

and the irresistible economies of scale.” This article, written as a

wake-up call to American corporations, paved the way for a massive
expansion of markets with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
liberalisation of the Chinese and Indian economies.
The political dominance of the United States, combined with the
experience of its corporations in the largest single national market in
the world, and its power over the free-trade economy since 1945,
gave its products a head start in expanding global economy after
1992. The spread of North Atlantic consumer products was
reinforced by developments in the communication industry and, in
particular, in the popular media—film, television and music. While
the availability of more varied consumer goods and improved trading
opportunities brought widespread benefits to individuals and nations,
the cultural impact was not always welcome.
The economists Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw summarise the
problem: “For many countries, participation in the new global
economy is very much a mixed blessing. It promotes economic
growth and brings new technologies and opportunities. But it also
challenges the values and identities of national and regional
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cultures.”85 As the anthropologist Daniel Miller says, “people are

often suspicious of culture defined as a process of consumption,
seeing it as somehow less authentic or worthy given its comparative
transience and lack of roots … [but] culture . . . has become
increasingly a process of consumption of global forms.”86
The impact of these global forms on less-wealthy societies is
starkly presented by the linguist and counter-development
campaigner Helena Norberg-Hodge, drawing on her work with the
isolated Himalayan Ladakh community.

Almost everywhere you travel today you will find multi-lane

highways, concrete cities and a cultural landscape featuring grey
business suits, fast-food chains, Hollywood films and cellular
phones. In the remotest corners of the planet, Barbie, Madonna and
the Marlboro Man are familiar icons. From Cleveland to Cairo to
Caracas, Baywatch is entertainment and CNN news … all around

the world, villages, rural communities and their cultural traditions,

are being destroyed on an unprecedented scale by the impact of
globalising market forces. Communities that have sustained
themselves for hundreds of years are simply disintegrating. The
spread of the consumer culture seems virtually unstoppable …
Today, the Western consumer conformity is descending on the
less industrialised parts of the world like an avalanche.
“Development” brings tourism, Western films and products and,
more recently, satellite television to the remotest corners of the
Earth. All provide overwhelming images of luxury and power.
Adverts and action films give the impression that everyone in the
West is rich, beautiful and brave, and leads a life filled with
excitement and glamour.
In the commercial mass culture which fuels this illusion,
advertisers make it clear that Westernized fashion accessories equal
sophistication and “cool.” In diverse “developing” nations around the
world, people are induced to meet their needs not through their
community or local economy, but by trying to “buy in” to the global
market …
For millions of young people in rural areas of the world, modern
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Western culture appears vastly superior to their own.87

It is not seen this way by the corporations that export North Atlantic
products. American culture in particular is seen by Americans
through the lens of the freedom of the individual, and freedom to
trade is frequently conflated with political and religious freedom. As
the sociologists James Davison Hunter and Joshua Yates explain:
[M]oral authority is grounded in the language of universal individual
rights and needs. Whether selling soft drinks, fast food, running
shoes, hybrid crop fertilizer, or financial investments or providing
technical assistance for Third World health clinics, environmental
protection advocacy, or biblical principles for a strong family, the
American globalizers all understand their efforts as a fulfilment of
rights and needs basic to human existence [emphasis in original].88

Human rights to individual freedom are, in this way, translated into

free choice for the consumer. The vice president for International
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 149

Public Relations at AT&T said that the outcome will be “a place of

massive consumer choice when the global capital markets make
fabulous product choices available, the accessibility of technology and
information, virtual travel, and it’s a place where the consumer as
king is extraordinary.”89 There is a similar kind of presumption in this
statement by a consultant for the huge American agricultural produce
conglomerate, Archer Daniels Midland: “One thing globalization has
done is transfer the power of governments to the global consumer. It
is the consumer who dictates what we produce, how much we
produce, and essentially what price we get paid for our efforts.”90
Global consumerism is nevertheless spectacularly successful. In the
one part of the world where political events might have turned the
population against anything that emanated from the North Atlantic
nations, and in particular the United States, in a 2002 poll eighty-
three to ninety-four per cent of the Arab respondents criticised US
policy but they stated that they love American music, movies,
clothes, democracy and freedom.91 A Filipino, interviewed in 2003,
confirms the dissociation of the product from its place of origin: “I
used to go on anti-American rallies when I was a student, but I never
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thought about the [American] brand of clothes and shoes I wore!”92 As

Davison, Young & Yates note: “The ATM, basketball, hamburger,
skateboard, cell phone, computer, computer hacker, sneakers,
baseball cap, laundromat, candy bar, microwave oven, parking
meter, camera, jukebox, the modern passenger airplane, convenience
store, greeting card, ice cream, sports drink, blue jeans, rap music,
chewing gum, credit card, skyscraper, and the like, are virtually
everywhere. Indeed, so much of what we know as globalization is, in
both source and character, undeniably American.”93
The picture of all parts of the world submerged by North Atlantic
consumer products is an over-simplification of a more complex
relationship between cultures, which are never static, and influence
from other cultures, which has always existed. Nonetheless, the
penetration of these products in a relatively short space of time does
give the widespread impression that, as Jan Aart Scholte says, “Global
products inject a touch of the familiar almost wherever on earth a
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150 Part III

person might visit.”94 A measure of the seriousness of this impression

is that, in Paris in 2001, UNESCO felt the need to publish a Universal
Declaration on Cultural Diversity which, in the institution’s typically
guarded language, both stated the problem and suggested the
solution. The Declaration considered that “the process of globalization,
facilitated by the rapid development of new information and
communication technologies, though representing a challenge for
cultural diversity, creates the conditions for renewed dialogue among
cultures and civilizations”95
The impression of global uniformity is most forcefully symbolised
by the techniques that are used to sell retail products in diverse
markets to global consumers with complex cultural preferences, and
where there is a wide range of choices, both local and international.
The most effective way to do this is to offer something more than just
prepared food, an item of clothing or a motor car. Since the parallel
development of the consumer economy, mass media and in particular
television in the North Atlantic countries in the 1950s, the old
phenomenon of trademarking has grown into the major marketing
tool of branding. As the marketing industry became more
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sophisticated, brand names became more significant until a high point

was reached in 1988 when Philip Morris purchased Kraft for six times
its book value. It was believed at the time that the high price was to
obtain the well-established Kraft brand.
The use of brands provides product differentiation, gives
confidence in consistency of quality and, if well managed, can give
the added bonus of status to the purchaser. Products are thereby
given a personality and “every element, in every advertisement, in
every advertising campaign, must develop that identity with a
cumulative repetitive force.”96 Research has indicated “that places and
countries don't matter to consumers any more. The media is the
cultural glue that binds world society together and the media is selling
brands … Brands in turn represent a cluster of values—the BMW
man, the Nike man—which define people, not places.”97 The vice
president of Nike sees the brand as a direct approach to the
consumer: “We always describe the brand as a person. So who is the
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 151

person? … what we are really trying to do is build up a personality. It

is more like building a person than building a brand.”98 With
branding, the product is directed to the consumer over the heads of
nations and individual cultures and, with the globalisation of trade,
branding takes on a new significance as more and more businesses
have to trade at a distance and consumers are offered products owned
and manufactured from multiple sources. The brand itself can no
longer be culture-specific, and marketing firms recognise that “the
laser-like clarity of a single, distinctive positioning is … the product’s
only chance of cutting through the indifference of the consumer, the
chaos of the marketplace and the clutter of the media.”99 It will
inevitably follow that the brand will have a universal, homogenising
character. However hard companies try to differentiate their product
for local markets, the mere fact that the brand is consistent and
international gives it a global character.
There is a sort of innocence in the protest of a Coca-Cola
executive: “The cultural anthropologists who would suggest that
we’re advancing one way of life over the other, I would ask them to
understand why it is that Coca-Cola would be able to broadcast an
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optimist point of view unless it exists already. Trying to change the

nature of cultures is not part of our success criteria. I don't even
understand what would be the motivation.”100 Whatever the
corporate philosophy, the combination of trading power, massive
differentiation in personal income and the fact that, as the advertising
executive turned activist Jerry Mander points out, the “globalisation
of television transmission via satellite and the ubiquitousness of
advertising enabled Western industrial corporations to spread
commodity culture and Western material values everywhere, even
to non-developed countries that had no roads,”101 [emphasis in
original] will inevitably project the values and lifestyles of the
dominant economic power. It is no accident that of the top ten global
brands in 2010, all but one (Nokia) originate from the United States;
and of the top one hundred, fifty-three originate from the United
States; and of the remainder, thirty-nine are from western Europe,

with another eight from Japan and South Korea, and one from
Mexico.102
The power of global brands is attested by research undertaken by
Douglas Holt, John Quelch and Earl Taylor: “Like entertainment,
stars, sports celebrities, and politicians, global brands have become a
lingua franca of consumers all over the world. People may love or
hate transnational companies, but they can’t ignore them. Many
consumers are awed by the political power of companies that have
sales greater than the GDPs of small nations and that have a powerful
impact on people’s lives as well as the welfare of communities,
nations and the planet itself.”103 Consumers see brands as a guarantee
of quality and many are attracted by their global reach. As Holt et al.
report a Costa Rican saying, “local brands show what we are; global
brands what we want to be.”104
We can also measure the symbolic success of branding by the
strength of feeling of those who oppose it. The vice president of
Corporate Communications at McDonald's asserts that “Over 80 per
cent of our products and packaging in France are French. We're a
French company there. We contribute an enormous amount to the
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French economy. We employ tens of thousands of French people.

We support French farmers and buy French agricultural products.”105
But however much McDonalds’ executives may protest their local
credentials, McDonalds has become a powerful symbol of, as the
former French president Jacques Chirac said, allowing “one single
power … to rule undivided over the planet's food markets.”106 José
Bové, the university-educated agricultural activist, became a national
hero when he was imprisoned for wrecking a McDonalds restaurant
in the French market town of Millau in 1999. As Holt, Quelch and
Taylor confirm: “Brands like Coca Cola, McDonalds, and Nike have
become lightning rods for anti-globalisation protestors.”107
In 2007, after an internet campaign led by the Chinese TV
personality Rui Chenggang protesting that Starbucks’ presence in
Beijing “undermined the solemnity of the Forbidden City and
trampled on Chinese culture” drew half a million signatures,
Starbucks agreed to move out. The company was offered the option
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 153

of remaining but without its brand name, but that was a step too far,
and the vice-president for Greater China Eden Woon said: “We
decided at the end that it is not our custom worldwide to have stores
that have any other name, so therefore we decided the choice would
be to leave.”108 The problem was not the brand as a brand but the
foreign provenance of the brand. China too recognises the economic
power of brands and, as President Hu Jintao said at the 17th Party
Congress of the Communist Party in 2007, “We must accelerate the
growth of Chinese multinational corporations and Chinese brand
names in the world markets.”109

Tourism Redefined and the Branding of Cities

As cities compete for global trade by providing what they see to be
the right built environment for transnational corporations and
aspiring national firms they have, as we have seen above, tended to
create places that are superficially similar. In the global marketplace
for the attraction of transnational business, cities must also look for
ways of differentiating themselves from one another.
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If a city is historic, it has an identity by which it may be already be

known or which it can develop and market. If there is a history of
artistic culture this is an additional benefit and, if there is not, it is
possible to add and promote themed museums or performance
buildings. These are well-established methods for attracting tourism,
a quintessentially global activity.
The income from tourism can be substantial. The Global Policy
Forum records international tourist arrivals increasing from 400
million per annum in 1990 to 925 million in 2008. By 1992,
according to the World Tourist Organisation, it had become the
world’s largest industry in terms of most of the standard economic
indicators, including employment, gross output and capital
investment. In 2010 the industry generated US $919 billion in
export earnings, which is six per cent of the world total. On this

basis alone, the economic benefits of having a location which will

attract tourists are worthwhile.
As the New Global Era has progressed, low-cost travel has
expanded, and formerly restrictive regimes have not only opened
their markets, but have also opened their borders to outbound travel.
Outbound tourism tends to follow other global indicators. In 2002
John Urry recorded that the forty-five most highly developed
countries in the world account for three-quarters of outbound
tourism.110 Since then, Chinese outbound tourism has grown
dramatically from 4.5 million in 1995 to more than 50 million in
2009, while the USA and Germany (the largest country for outbound
tourism) remained comparatively static in the same period at around
60 million and 80 million respectively. The nature of tourism has also
changed. In the 1940s the accepted definition of tourism excluded
any “earning activity.” By 1998 the OECD definition included
business activities as part of tourism, but excluded anything “activity
remunerated from within the place visited.” The United Nations
World Tourist Organisation (UNWTO) now defines tourism as
travel outside the traveller’s usual environment and includes “business
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or other purposes”—without qualification.

The concept of the tourist has been transformed. The philosopher
Agnes Heller calls them “united tourists,” as:
not only “tourists” are tourists. So are international businessmen,
jetting lecturers, and regular conference participants, people who
constantly move around the globe, jumping from hotel to hotel,
from business dinner to business dinner. But to be a member of the
club of the united tourists is not linked to high professionalism or a
substantial income. Moving from the countryside to the city, from
the city to the suburbs, or from the suburbs to another city,
transforms a person into a tourist in his or her home country.111

To this list could be added retirement migration, what the

gerontologist C. J. Guilleard calls “the longest holiday of the
lifetime.”112 John Urry sees these trends as part of a more general
“dissolving of the boundaries, not only between high and low
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 155

cultures, but also between different cultural forms, such as tourism,

art, education, photography, television, music, sport, shopping and
architecture.” Using the expression he coined, “the tourist gaze,”
Urry sees that tourism is “increasingly bound up with, and is partly
indistinguishable from, all sorts of other social and cultural practices.
This has the effect, as ‘tourism’ per se declines in specificity, of
universalising the tourist gaze—people are much of the time
‘tourists’ whether they like it or not.”113
As a consequence, the use of tourism for the promotion of cities
to create market differentiation has a much wider application than
just the attraction of leisured visitors, profitable though that may be.
Richard Lloyd and Terry Clarke, in their paper The City as an
Entertainment Machine, describe the new condition: “Workers in the
elite sectors of the postindustrial city make ‘quality of life’ demands,
and in their consumption practices can experience their own urban
location as if tourists, emphasizing aesthetic concerns. These practices
impact considerations about the proper nature of amenities to
provide in contemporary cities”114 [emphasis in original]. As the
sociologist Bella Dicks says in Culture on Display, “globalization has …
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heightened economic competition amongst localities, and set local

governments the task of advertising their particular qualities in order
to lure in capital investment … Cultural display has been a vital
means of manufacturing and promoting this place-identity.”115 Dicks
sets out the ingredients of “visitability”:
Places today have become exhibitions of themselves. Through heavy
investment in architecture, art, design, exhibition space,
landscaping and various kinds of redevelopment towns, cities and
countryside proclaim their possession of various cultural values—
such as unchanging nature, the historic past, the dynamic future,
multiculturalism, fun and pleasure, bohemianism, artistic creativity
or simply stylishness. These cultural values have come to be seen as
a place's identity, the possession of which is key to the important
task of attracting visitors. And this identity is expected to be easily
accessed by those visitors or, to use a currently favoured term in
urban design, to be legible. Places whose identity seems

inaccessible, confusing or contradictory do not present themselves

as destinations. They do not, in other words, seem visitable. An
identity that is not pointed to in the form of well-restored or
beautifully designed buildings, artworks, shopping plazas, streets,
walkways or gardens does not compose itself into a view nor offer
itself as an “experience.” To avoid such a fate, places should “make
the most of themselves”—rather like the well-toned body promoted
in healthy living magazines. In this way, they can find their niche in
the new cultural economy of visitability.116

The marketing of historic places to enhance “visitability” creates a

dilemma, identified by the sociologist John Allcock:
On the one hand, the touristification of localities typically calls into
question local identities, as these are drawn into global markets …
as the international corporations who manage tourism development
impose a measure of standardization upon the tourist product …
On the other hand, the specific features of local identities are among
the most important resources available in the competitive marketing
of tourism. The realization of the significance of this asset leads to a
codification of this cultural inventory, and to its self-conscious
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promotion as a marketable asset.117

In the same way as the global retail product must be uniformly

attractive but made distinctive by branding, so the physical identity
of the historic city becomes a consumer product in its own right,
tidied up to be acceptable to as many potential occupiers as possible
but distinctive enough to be more attractive than the next place.
The outcome is more often than not a kind of packaged heritage
where, as Heller observes, “there are the same hotels, the same
menus, and the same cinemas. Also there is a kind of English spoken
everywhere, yet all places also offer their ‘specialities,’ their mostly
artificially kept local traditions.”118 Cities do, however, have other
means of boosting their identity. These include special events such as
sporting occasions from football matches to the Olympics, concerts
or festivals, and international exhibitions (Expos). As Urry says, by
staging these events cities “have the power to transform themselves

Figure 37. Palace of the Arts Reina Sofia, Valencia; Santiago Calatrava; 2004.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

The architecture of cultural display.

from being mundane places ... into being these special ‘host city’
sites that come to occupy a new distinct niche within global
tourism.”119
These events need accommodation such as stadia, athlete’s
housing, exhibition halls or, for Expos, striking temporary structures
(sometimes made permanent). As with the construction of other
cultural buildings such as museums or galleries, if there are no
suitable historic facilities, the new buildings can be used to add to the
distinctiveness of the city. Dean MacCannell identifies two strategies
for the provision of
cultural productions … (1) it may add to the ballast of our modern
civilization by sanctifying an original as being a model worthy of

copy or an important milestone in our development, or (2) it may

establish a new direction, break new ground, or otherwise
contribute to the progress of modernity by presenting new
combinations of cultural elements and working out the logic of their
relationship.120

Figure 38. Beijing National Stadium (Bird’s Nest); Herzog & de Meuron with Ai
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Weiwei; 2008.

International events as architectural display.

The architecture of culture and events attract international tourism

and promote cities on the global stage. This second option would
have wider beneficial effects, according to Aspa Gospodini (in a
European context): “The impact of innovative design of space on the
development prospects of cities, and smaller peripheral cities in
particular, is related to their potential to be placed on the new urban
map of Europe as places attractive to new enterprises, residents and
especially to urban tourists.”121 This sentiment has led to the one of
the most distinctive products of the New Global Era, the iconic
building as a city brand.

The Birth of the Iconic Building

and the Bilbao Effect
Cities have long been represented by distinctive buildings. In the
ancient world, Ephesus was notable for the Temple of Artemis, and
Alexandria for its lighthouse or pharos. In the medieval period,
churches and their towers or steeples gave cities their distinct
identities. More recently, the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State
building became symbols of Paris and New York City respectively.
The first attempt to create a new symbol for a modern city was the
Sydney Opera House. The design was won at competition in 1957 by
Jørn Utzon after a controversial selection process. It did not open
until 1973, ten years late and fourteen times over budget, following
major constructional and structural problems. In the creation of a
modern iconic building, however, this was to become a familiar
pattern and, indeed, all of this was put to one side when Utzon was
awarded the top architectural award, the Pritzker Prize, in 2003.
The citation for the prize said, “There is no doubt that the Sydney
Opera House is his masterpiece. It is one of the great iconic buildings
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of the 20th century, an image of great beauty that has become known
throughout the world—a symbol for not only a city, but a whole
country and continent.”
The Sydney Opera House had the characteristics that were
necessary for a city icon, distinctiveness and an instantly recognisable
form. The word “icon,” originating in the Greek Orthodox religious
images venerated as “windows into heaven,” had come to mean any
“important or enduring symbol.” There have been a number of more
detailed definitions of the building-as-icon as the idea spread in the
1990s. An eleven point series of defining characteristics were
proposed in by the critic Aaron Betsky in the catalogue of an
exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art in
1996, Icons as Magnets of Meaning, which included “wow’ syndrome”
and “enigmatic character … exerting a hypnotic quality in their sense
of otherness.”122 Charles Jencks followed a similar line saying that,
while they must of course be distinctive and recognisable, they will
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160 Part III

also be enigmatic or “a giant iconostasis asking to be decoded,”123 as

well as a metaphor—presumably an as-yet-uncoded metaphor. The
British cultural commentator Stephen Bayley takes a different and
more straightforward view, and recognises the critical point that an
architectural icon will fulfil “the demands of powerful branding—
instant recognition, zero ambiguity.”124 Bayley’s definition accurately
identifies the relationship between the attempt to create an icon and
branding, two clearly related phenomena. Jencks’ and Betsky’s
meanings do not contradict this: the idea that this is something that is
an enigma or needs to be de-coded is the typical concern of historians
or professional commentators. While the whole phenomenon has
been a great opportunity for commentators and analysts, city icons
are not made for them, they are made to deliver a clear and simple
message: “This city is important, know it.”
While the Sydney Opera House set the standard, the fashion for
city branding through the commissioning of special buildings is a
distinctive feature of the New Global Era. Just prior to the new era
in 1982, the French President, Francois Mitterand, anxious both to
leave a legacy in the particular manner of French politicians and to
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boost the image of Paris, launched the Grands Projets, commissioning

international architects to design high-profile buildings. These began
to come to completion at the end of the 1980s. At this time, the
Guggenheim Museum in the north-Spanish city of Bilbao, the
definitive building of the emerging New Global Era, was conceived
(figure C), and all subsequent attempts to boost the reputation and
incomes of cities through the imagery of architecture would refer to
this project. As the Californian architect Frank Gehry confirmed, the
brief for the building was itself to be “an equivalent to the Sydney
Opera House.”125
The story begins in New York in 1988 when the Guggenheim
Museum appointed a dynamic new curator, Thomas Krens. The
famous Frank Lloyd Wright museum building was in need of repair,
there was insufficient space to display its collection and it was short
of funds. Krens sold three important works for US $47 million,
raised another US $54 million by selling public bonds and announced
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 161

his intention to expand the museum as an international brand. There

was already a branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Peggy
Guggenheim’s former home in Venice, and Krens began negotiations
with Venice and Salzburg for new buildings. The former Director of
the National Centre for Exhibitions for the Spanish Ministry of
Culture, Carmen Gimenez was, however, employed in 1989 as a
curator by the Guggenheim in New York and started negotiations in
1991 with the Basque government in Bilbao.
Bilbao is the capital of the Basque region, an ethnically and
linguistically distinct area on the Spanish Atlantic coast that spreads
into southern France, and has had a strong and, in its extreme form,
terrorist, separatist movement since the nineteenth century. It was a
major industrial port but suffered significant decline and urban decay
in the twentieth century. The democratisation of Spain in 1975 led to
a significant degree of financial autonomy for the Basques and, when
Spain joined the European Union in 1986, the deprivation and
poverty of the region attracted grant aid. In 1991 the Strategic Plan
for the Revitalisation of Metropolitan Bilbao was adopted and in
1992 the public society, Bilbao Ria 2000 was created. That year
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Bilbao Ria 2000 engaged the well-known Argentine-American

architect Cesar Pelli to master plan the derelict port area. The city’s
infrastructure and the condition of historic buildings were upgraded,
and a series of famous international architects were commissioned
for new projects in the city: Santiago Calatrava for a footbridge,
Norman Foster for a series of new subway stations, and Stirling and
Wilford for a transport interchange.
An important museum on the regenerated port area would act as
a centrepiece for the regenerated city and the financial independence
of the region allowed it to negotiate directly with Thomas Krens.
This led to an immediate pledge of US $20 million for the
Guggenheim name and expertise, plus US $100 million for the
building, plus sums for running costs and the collection. Part of the
deal by Krens was that an internationally-renowned architect would
design the building and he engaged Frank Gehry to help to select the

site. In the three-firm competition that followed the selection, Gehry

was the winner.
Frank Gehry is a Canadian-born architect who moved to
California for his professional education and stayed there for the rest
of his career. He started on his own in 1962, but early projects were
unremarkable. His own house, an apparently disordered assembly of
found elements on an existing bungalow started in 1978, gave him a
reputation (that he denied) as a follower of the philosophy of
deconstruction (discussed earlier). A number of higher profile
buildings in California followed, including an aquarium and gallery,
all with what was becoming a trademark randomness in the exterior
design. By 1991, buildings like the Chiat/Day Building (which
included the extraordinary Claes Oldenburg giant binoculars at the
entrance) gave him a reputation beyond the USA. He had, however,
only completed one building outside the USA, a small gallery to
exhibit furniture at the Vitra furniture company in Weil am Rhein,
Germany. By 1991, he was an architect who might have been
internationally known by critics and academics, but he could not yet
be called an international architect.
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His career was transformed by his selection for the Bilbao

Guggenheim Museum and, indeed, the role of new architecture as a
branding device for cities was transformed when the building was
completed in 1997. The extraordinary abstract sculptural form of
curved intersecting planes of titanium sheets on a promontory in the
Nervion River was a huge success. The building was much more the
exhibit than its rather mediocre contents, and became so famous that
it was better known than the city it was intended to promote. In
1998 it was estimated that the museum generated an additional €150
million GDP and €27 million tax revenue for the city, figures that
have held up or improved in the subsequent decade.126 While the
total disconnection of the building form from its internal function ran
against established modernist thinking and made many architects very
uneasy, its avant garde credentials were clear. Ken Shuttleworth,
leader of Norman Foster’s architectural team which built London’s
iconic “Gherkin,” or 30 St. Mary Axe, confirmed this in 2009: “The
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 163

Guggenheim Bilbao has led to a time of exploration and the pursuit

of a new expressive language, which is free from the shackles of the
past … it is the single most influential building of the last 20
years.”127
The Guggenheim project reflects with remarkable clarity some of
the primary forces of the time: the aggressive promotion of an
American brand abroad; the disengagement of local city-based
economies from national economies (albeit in this case with an
unusual political background); the significance of the new tourist
economy; the use of culture for the branding of the city; and the
global engagement of other players from the established free-market
economies—the other architects engaged by the city or participating
in the competition were from the USA, Austria, Spain, Britain and
Japan. This resonance with the political and economic direction of
the New Global Era not only contributed to its success it also
ensured that there would be numerous attempts to re-create what
was now known as the “Bilbao Effect” worldwide, including the
character of the architecture.
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****

Other cities sought the benefits of the Bilbao Effect. As Sharon Zukin
says in her 1995 book The Culture of Cities: “City boosters increasingly
compete for tourist dollars and financial investments by bolstering the
city’s image as a centre of cultural innovation, including restaurants,
avant garde performances, and architectural design.”128 The iconic or
avant garde building was seen as a major component in the promotion
of cities. As Beriatos & Gospodini claim: “Irrespective of the particular
functions and activities accommodated in space, it is avant-garde design
of both buildings and open spaces that can make urban space
morphology in itself and of itself a sightseeing, a tourist resource.”129 A
report in the magazine Building Design in 2003 summed it up: “Cities
are competing against each other for icons and are using international
architects to drum up that ‘something different.’ In Chongqing ... city
authorities are racing to create the necessary public buildings. Rather
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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164 Part III

in the manner of a shopping spree, they say they want 10 and have
decided half should go to foreign architects.”130
Cities all over the world have commissioned extraordinary buildings.
In 1993, in the burgeoning Chinese city of Guangzhou, the mayor Lin
Shusen planned a new opera house in the Central Business District that
would, as Jiang Xu and Anthony G.O. Yeh say, “be a new expressive
icon that integrates with urban strategy to create new cultural
significance to the city.”131 This was designed by Zaha Hadid and
completed in 2011 (figure 39). In Baku in Azerbaijan, the Korean firm
Heerim have designed a crescent-shaped hotel that is, as the architects
claim, “set to become the symbol of Azerbaijan, and also an icon to help
people the world over think of the country as the gateway between the
past and the present, and between the East and the West.”132 In Abu
Dhabi, the government are assembling a collection of iconic buildings.
On September 29, 2011 the Kaleej Times reported that the thirty-five-
storey Capital Gate Hotel, described by the state-owned developer as
“an icon for Abu Dhabi,” had entered the Guinness Book of Records as
the “furthest leaning manmade tower”133 (figure 40).
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Figure 39. Opera House, Guangzhou, China; Zaha Hadid; 2011. A cultural
building by a star architect to enhance the cultural credentials of a fast-growing
Chinese city.
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 165

Figure 40 (left). Capital Gate Hotel, Abu Dhabi; RMJM; 2011. Hotel and office
block, certified as the world’s furthest leaning man-made tower.
Figure 41 (right). Burj Khalifa, Dubai; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; 2010. Iconic
status by height. The world’s tallest building – for now.
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Iconic buildings: promotional architecture for global city status.

The global search for status through the construction of

architectural icons has drawn in some surprising participants. Paris, a
city which not only includes one of the world’s best-known icons,
the Eiffel Tower, but is itself an icon of European civilization,
launched a new plan for Grand Paris in 2009. President Nicholas
Sarkozy announced that, with this plan Paris would “rival London,
New York, Tokyo or Shanghai” and be a “global city, open and
dynamic, attractive, a creator of wealth and jobs.” Regulations that
have protected Paris against intrusion from tall buildings would be
waived, “provided they are beautiful.” The head of La Defense
development, Philippe Chaix, said, “Greater Paris will be
revolutionary. It will change our image on the world stage.” 134 At the
other end of the scale the phenomenon descends to a level beyond

parody. In 2004 the declining English industrial town of

Middlesbrough commissioned a British second-tier star architect,
Will Alsop, to master plan a new development in a redundant dock
area called Middlehaven. The mayor sent out a press release that
said, “Gateshead [a nearby English town] may boast the glittering
Sage; Sydney the spectacular Opera House, but we will offer up a
whole field of dreams … why shouldn’t Middlesbrough be up there
with the likes of Boston or Bilbao? … Why shouldn’t we be the ones
to lead the way into the future?”135

Iconic Architecture: Practice and Theory

The established and simplest way of making an impact with buildings
is simply to rely on height. As architecture critic and author Ada
Louise Huxtable says of the tall building: “For better or for worse, it
is the measure, parameter, or apotheosis of our consumer and
corporate culture … It romanticizes power and the urban
condition.”136 The new appeal of tall buildings as global symbols was
idiosyncratically summarised by the Australian developer Bruno
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Grollo when he proposed a tower for Melbourne in 1994 which, at

678 metres, would have been the highest in the world at that time. It
was never built. Grollo declared that “it would be a golden building
for a golden city for the golden times to come … it has to put the
city on the world map.” The tower would have “to do something for
Melbourne that did what the pyramids did for Egypt, or the
Colosseum did for Rome, or the Opera House and Harbour Bridge
did for Sydney.”137
Branding by height had the additional advantage of an association
with the acknowledged financial capital of the world, downtown
Manhattan. The city of Beijing had set a target of 300 towers in its
central business district. There are over 230 in the Pudong district of
Shanghai, and new towers continue to be constructed. Downtown
Manhattan has 289 towers. The iconic effect of groups of towers,
even when some of those in the group are themselves considered to
be icons, is of less significance than simply being the biggest. This is,
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 167

however, an unavoidably expensive and often short-lived ambition.

The twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, designed by
Cesar Pelli, were commissioned in 1991 as a symbol of the “Tiger
Economy” of Malaysia, and completed seven years later. They
remained the tallest buildings in the world until the Taipei 101
tower, in Taipei, Taiwan, designed by the Taiwanese architect C.Y.
Li, was completed in 2004. This record was finally overtaken when
the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, designed by the American architects
SOM, was completed in 2010 (figure 41).
The impact of the unusual form of the Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao, however, set a standard for designs that should not
necessarily be large (although they often are) but be distinctive by
being different. Rem Koolhaas described the pressures of these
demands in 2002: “It is really unbelievable what the market demands
[from architecture] now. It demands recognition, it demands
difference and it demands iconographic qualities.”138 The differences
were not to be an expression of differences in the location of the
buildings, the icons were not for local consumption, and the
established character of the place was not of any consequence. As
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Hans Ibelings points out: “Modern architects have always regarded it

as more important that their work should be in keeping with the age
than in harmony with the surroundings.”139 Clients seeking iconic
buildings felt much the same. Xie and Liu report that in the
competition for Tomorrow Square in Shanghai, it was the Chinese
jury members that preferred something “abstract modern” rather
than anything with specific references to Chinese architecture.140 Pio
Baldi, President of the MAXXI Foundation that commissioned Zaha
Hadid for the MAXXI Gallery in Rome, said of the new building: “It
doesn’t seem to be in Rome, it seems to be in another part of the
world, New York, London. This is very positive; Rome needed a
building like this.” 141

****

In the 1970s and 80s a number of established architects, besides

Frank Gehry, had developed a style that answered this demand. Pre-
eminent amongst these was Peter Eisenman, with a design technique
that involved the explicit introduction of apparently non-functional
contradictions in the plan, complicating the design. In Austria, Wolf
Prix, who founded Coop Himmelblau, engaged in a similar but more
randomised process. Other architects such as Steven Holl and
Richard Meier from the USA, and Toyo Ito from Japan, had
developed other less extreme versions of deliberate but expressive
complication of building exteriors.
A second generation of architects was also waiting in the wings. In
1989 Daniel Libeskind won the competition for the new Jewish
Museum in Berlin, but work was delayed by political controversy
until 1992. This complex and deliberately disturbing design gave
Libeskind, who had been teaching and writing up that point, the
opportunity to build, and brought him into prominence. In 1991 the
Vitra company in Germany, who had also commissioned Frank
Gehry for his first foreign building, engaged the Iranian-born British
architect, Zaha Hadid, to design a new fire station. Hadid had also
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been teaching and exhibiting up to that point, and this was her first
building. It was designed as a dramatic series of intersecting volumes
with angular sculptural detail that had little to do with practical
functional requirements. In 1994 she won a major competition for a
new opera house in Cardiff in Wales, to be funded by the British
National Lottery. Her design, presented in a series of paintings, was
also sculptural and dramatic, and its cost and difficulty of
construction became a political debate. It was cancelled, but the
controversy and the support given to her by the British architectural
establishment enhanced her reputation as an avant garde architect. In
1988, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas won his first major
commission, the Nederlands Dans Theater. It was an original and
diverse assembly of volumes and materials combined with a wilfully
abstract arrangement of cladding. Koolhaas had made his reputation
with the publication of a theoretical work on architecture and
urbanism, Delirious New York, published in 1978.142
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 169

By 1990 Koolhaas was the oldest of this group at forty-six:

Libeskind was forty-four, and Hadid forty. Each had spent their early
careers teaching, writing and exhibiting, but by the 1990s their ideas
and radical forms had developed free from the pragmatic limitations
of everyday practice. The buildings were conceived as sculptural
form first and buildings second which, when combined with extreme
geometrical complexity, made them hard to build, difficult to budget
and frequently more expensive than their original cost estimates.
Nonetheless, the demand for the product, the natural limitation on
the numbers of producers and the deep pockets of many of the
purchasers, made what would have been a business disaster in any
other branch of the profession, irrelevant. Zaha Hadid’s partner,
Patrik Schumacher, explains their unique position which led to stellar
success, large practices and huge profits in the following two
decades:
The avant-garde segment has quite a bit more space to manoeuvre
than the mainstream commercial segment. This is because our work
is considered to be a kind of multiplier. Economically our buildings
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operate as investments into a marketing agenda—city branding, for

instance—with a value that might at times considerably exceed the
budget allocated to the project itself. Although we have budgets to
work within, our projects are usually not measured in terms of
industry standards of cost-effectiveness. They are paid for by funds
that have been extracted from the cycle of profit-driven
investment—either as public tax money or as sponsorship money
administered by a cultural institution's board of trustees. Obviously
such funds too are indirectly contributing to an overall business
rationale. But as designers we can enjoy and utilize the relative
distance from concerns of immediate profitability to further our
experimental agenda. We understand that this position is peculiar to
a rarefied segment of the profession.143

****

The experimental character of these buildings demands a considerable

degree of artistry and sophisticated three-dimensional conceptual
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170 Part III

thought. The subsequent construction information, not undertaken

by the designer, is difficult to process. Frank Gehry designs with
three-dimensional modelling in increasing levels of complexity.
Peter Eisenman uses complex three-dimensional mathematics, maps
of the site and preserved accidents to create spaces that respond to a
series of apparently contradictory influences on the design. Zaha
Hadid continues to develop designs through sketches, as her partner
Patrik Schumacher explains: “She also sketches abstractly, irrespective
of projects … We can begin to map or match abstract stimulations
across a number of projects—through sketches, interesting
organisation, interesting formal possibilities.”144 Daniel Libeskind
works with models and drawings. By the time the real boom in
demand for iconic buildings was in full flow, when the success of the
Bilbao Guggenheim was clear for all to see, advances in computer
modelling had made the post-conceptual design process very much
easier to manage.
The development of three-dimensional digital modelling with
Computer Aided Design (CAD) had reached a level of development
in the 1990s that facilitated the presentation and construction of
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these unusual designs. In 1985 MiniCad, the first specialist

architectural program with three-dimensional modelling, was
launched by the German software designers Nemetschek AG for use
with the Macintosh platform. In 1989 Pro/Engineer launched a
three-dimensional modelling system which could be manipulated
into different forms while maintaining fixed dimensional criteria, or
parameters. This was combined with operator-friendly features such
as drop-down menus and icons to make it available to a wider range
of users. At about the same time the French company Dassault
Systèmes re-wrote its three-dimensional modelling CATIA programs
for the widely-used UNIX operating system. Dassault Systèmes was a
subsidiary of the French aircraft manufacturer Avions Marcel
Dassault, which had developed CATIA in the 1970s for the design
and manufacture of the Mirage fighter jet, leading to its adoption in
the automotive, shipbuilding and other industries. The use of the
programs was limited in the early 1990s, but soon after Windows 95
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 171

was released, Microstation, an established interactive graphics design

system, was applied to its operating system. In 1998 a group from
ProEngineer developed the Revit program, which offered the first
parametric building modeller specifically for the building design and
construction industry. The following year a more sophisticated
version of MiniCad was developed under the brand name
Vectorworks. In the same year Dassault Systèmes took over Matra
Datavision and its CASCADE system for modelling, visualization and
computer-aided manufacture (CAM).145
Architects did not at first use these programs directly for design
purposes, but came into contact with them through their
engagement of specialists in the production of computer generated
imagery (CGI) and the engineers responsible for executing their
complex designs. In the late 1980s the photorealism of CGI became
an important marketing tool for architects, and by the mid-1990s
clients were demanding sophisticated visualisations for the rapid
presentation of design options for major projects.146 Engineers had
been using computing since Ove Arup and Partners pioneered the
digital calculation of complex forms in the early 1960s for the Sydney
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Opera House. It was not until the late 1990s, and the development
of appropriate user interfaces, that architects began to use the
technology directly, often less for the design than to document and
detail the complex forms that had been designed with physical
models and drawings. Foster+Partners were early users of
Microstation for the calculation of complex geometries. Frank Gehry
used the CATIA system and in 2002 created a stand-alone business,
Gehry Technologies, to develop and market a specialist architectural
version of CATIA. Zaha Hadid also uses CATIA and her partner,
Patrik Schumaker has developed a comprehensive architectural
theory around the use of parametric geometry (see below). Daniel
Libeskind uses Vectorworks.

****

The publicity given to major iconic projects had created a demand

for unusual buildings that could not be met by the naturally limited
supply of by-now famous established practitioners. Commercial
architects stepped in to fill the demand. With younger architects
fully conversant with CAD and CAM, commercial practices could
conceptualise and model forms of a similar complexity to those of
the leading iconic architects. Parallel advances in product manufacture
made the use of small-unit variations to create dramatic exterior
effects on large-scale buildings much more affordable. The
opportunity was not only created by technological advances, it was
part of the underlying culture. As Charles Jencks points out, “We
live in a permissive, radical egalitarian era when any building type
can be an icon.”147 As the type proliferated, it was inevitable that the
quality would decline. As James Madge complained in an article
posthumously published in 2007:
When 3D visualisation software enables students of architecture,
unaware of the sophisticated concepts deployed by serious workers
in this field, to present the images of hitherto unimagined shapes
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whose confidently rendered surfaces belie the absence of any

knowledge of, or interest in what lies behind, the notion of
architecture as nothing more than the invention of new shapes
neither needs nor deserves any further encouragement.148

By the start of the new millennium, the architectural icon was a

recognised and established phenomenon. In 2005 three books on the
subject were published almost simultaneously: The Last Icons:
Architecture Beyond Modernism by Miles Glendenning; Iconic Buildings:
The Power of the Enigma by Charles Jencks; and Edifice Complex: How the
Rich and Powerful Shape the World, by Dejan Sudjic. To these can be
added Great New Buildings of the World by Ana G. CaŸizares, published
in the same year, and which largely illustrates iconic buildings.
Numerous city redevelopments or large planning projects now
included a building or buildings of an unusual shape or with novel
features. Architects working on often quite mundane developments
were now asked to include “iconic designs” to brand the project.
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 173

With large buildings in particular, almost any form seemed possible

and the diversity of shapes and structures became almost a riot. Many
architects found this stylistic free-for-all disturbing. The ideological
anchor of Modernism, with its legacy of social responsibility and a
logical response to function and form derived from the nature of
building materials, was conspicuously absent. The prominent British
architect, Graham Morrison, spoke for many in the profession when
he attacked iconic buildings in The Guardian newspaper in 2004:
“Each image has to be more extraordinary and shocking in order to
eclipse the last. Each new design has to be instantly memorable—
more iconic. This one-upmanship was, and is, a fatuous and self-
indulgent game.”149
Even for their followers, the new star practitioners at times
justified their work with barely comprehensible statements inherited
from the obscure philosophical legacy of Deconstruction. When
Libeskind describes the Jewish Museum as “not a collage or a
collision or a simple dialectic, but a new type of organization which
is organized around a center which is not, around what is not
visible,”150 or Rem Koolhaas says that “at first sight, the activities
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

amassed in the structure of Bigness demand to interact, but Bigness

keeps them apart,”151 they may be profound, but they are not offering
enough clarity or cohesion to provide any basis for a coherent
philosophy around which architects could assemble.
Patrik Schumacher, who studied philosophy as well as architecture,
has presented a unified philosophy for these buildings based on the
opportunities presented by the computer aided design process.
Schumacher has called his theory “parametricism”—a word, borrowed
from mathematics, for a computing algorithm that maintains
consistent relationships between elements as a computer model is
manipulated:
There is a global convergence in recent avant-garde architecture that
justifies its designation as a new style: parametricism. It is a style
rooted in digital animation techniques, its latest refinements based
on advanced parametric design systems and scripting methods.

Developed over the past 15 years and now claiming hegemony

within avant-garde architecture practice, it succeeds Modernism as
the next long wave of systematic innovation. Parametricism finally
brings to an end the transitional phase of uncertainty engendered by
the crisis of Modernism and marked by a series of relatively short-
lived architectural episodes that included Postmodernism,
Deconstructivism and Minimalism. So pervasive is the application of
its techniques that parametricism is now evidenced at all scales from
architecture to interior design to large urban design. Indeed, the
larger the project, the more pronounced is parametricism's superior
capacity to articulate programmatic complexity.152

The formal outcome of Parametric theory is made clear: “Instead of

classical and modern reliance on rigid geometrical figures—rectangles,
cubes, cylinders, pyramids and spheres—the new primitives of
parametricism are animate geometrical entities—splines, nurbs and
subdivs. These are fundamental geometrical building blocks for
dynamical systems like ‘hair’, ‘cloth’, ‘blobs’ and ‘metaballs’ that
react to ‘attractors’ and can made to resonate with other via scripts.”
It is put forward as a proper response to contemporary social and
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economic forces: “Parametricism aims to organize and articulate the

increasing diversity and complexity of social institutions and the life
processes within the most advanced centre of post-Fordist network
society.”153
These theories are directed solely to architects and critics and
would mean little to anyone outside the profession. Behind the
designs of many of iconic buildings there are ideas that are much
more intelligible for commissioning clients or committees. The
association of a building with some other image, a metaphor, can be a
source of inspiration and it can also be an effective way to describe an
otherwise difficult and apparently abstract design.
The work of Gehry, being hard to interpret, has often been given
nicknames such as the “Fred and Ginger” building in Prague (a
reference to the appearance of two dancing figures called after Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers), and his up-and-coming UTS building in
Sydney, Australia, has already been named the “big paper bag.”
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 175

Gehry has said, however, that “I probably do use that metaphor in

my work—though not consciously,” 154 and does not always take
kindly to the jokes—“there’s always some smartarse.”155
Others of his generation are more literal and open minded.
Steven Holl’s 1988 Martha’s Vinyard House was “derived
conceptually from a whale’s skeleton.”156 The later generation seems
more open to the idea of metaphor. Zaha Hadid’s buildings are
inspired by, variously: a coral reef, for an art museum in Cagliari in
Italy; waves, for the MAXXI building in Rome; and, for the Regium
Museum in Reggio Calabria, also in Italy, either a ship or a starfish
(the ship was reported to the journalist Hugh Pearman,157 the starfish
is on Hadid’s website). Daniel Libeskind will often claim a direct
analogy, such as a broken sphere for his Manchester Imperial War
Museum North (figure 42) or the concrete walls at his New York
Ground Zero design as a metaphor for “democracy unbowed by
terrorism,” but often his accounts of his inspiration are famously
obscure. He describes the thinking behind his unbuilt extension to
the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: “This emblem of a
heterogeneous and open system of organization for the artefacts and
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exhibitions provides a diversity of experiences woven into a net of

similarities and differences—an aggregate of traces about unexpected
topics still to be explored.”158
Claims for inspiration in metaphor have become both more literal
and more commonplace. Modernism had from its foundation relied
on a metaphorical relationship with industrial products that
symbolised modernity. Le Corbusier used the ocean liner in the
1930s, and Kasimir Malevich the aeroplane. Later there were more
literal metaphors: Eero Saarinen used wings in flight at the TWA
Flight Center at JFK Airport in New York, and Jørn Utzon used sails
as his inspiration for Sydney Opera House. These were metaphors of
the architect’s choice as a source of inspiration and, for modernists,
would be rarely if ever taken from previous buildings—this would
be traditional or, after the 1980s, postmodern. In the North Atlantic
countries, where Modernism originated, the use of metaphor may
have been of interest but was not a major factor in the acceptance of
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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176 Part III

a design. Where Modernism was not an established type, however,

the Modernism of the building was not justification enough in itself;
something else was needed to persuade the client or client group that
the design had some relevance. In this new market, the metaphor
became not just a means of selling the design but a branding tool for
the client.
Outside the North Atlantic countries, these metaphors become
more and more literal. When the French architect Jean Nouvel was
commissioned to design the new National Museum in Qatar, he was
asked to use the desert rose (a geological formation) as a source for
his design.159 Nouvel now describes his building as a “bladelike petal
of the desert rose.”160 The design for the Arabian Performance Venue
on a man-made island by the international architects Aedas is
surrounded by a series of “petals or leaves” housing apartments and
hotel accommodation.161 The Danish architect Henning Larson’s
design for the Batumi Aquarium in Georgia is a very literal “iconic
rock formation” washed up on the lake shore.162 The Dutch architects
MVRDV’s winning design for a lakeside apartment development in
Albania is distinctive because, “clad in local stones the buildings turn
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

into a series of rocks, the Tirana Rocks.”163 The British architects

RMJM’s winning design for the Russian Gazprom tower in St
Petersburg is designed as giant gas flame, loosely based on the
company’s logo (figure 43). The Flame Towers in Baku, Azerbaijan,
a mixed development of three flame shaped towers of thirty-nine
storeys designed by the London office of the American architects
HOK are described by a director of the firm: “Azerbaijan’s long
history of fire worship provided the inspiration for HOK’s iconic
design.”164
As the designs move from metaphor to representation, clients can
capitalise directly on their image for branding. The visual concept of
the Bird’s Nest Stadium for the Beijing Olympics was under the
control of the Chinese organisers (figure 38), not the architect.
Jacques Herzog of the architects Herzog de Meuron complained that,
“Before we had even finished the building, it had become a global
icon … It has been used and misused in commercials, on TV… in
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 177

many ways that we cannot control any more and we have no hold
on.”165 Even the pioneer of High-Tech architecture and its claim to
functionalism, Norman Foster, has been drawn into the world of the
metaphor. His Beijing Airport is described on Foster+Partners’
website as a “dragon-like form.” The metaphor was suggested by his
clients during the design process, and China’s CCTV network
enthusiastically took up the idea: “The Dragon’s head, body and tail
are the main buildings of the terminal,” while “the ball that the
Dragon is playing with is the distributing centre, including parking
areas and subway terminal.”166 Now, without prompting,
Foster+Partners’ CITIC Headquarters tower in the Chinese city of
Hangzhou is presented as a design that “draws inspiration from the
shape of the ancient ‘dou’ or ‘ding’ vessel, a traditional symbol of
wealth, dignity and stability.”167 (figure 44).

Star Architects
The most distinctive architectural development of the New Global
Era has been the institutionalisation and eventual corruption of the
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

idea of the iconic building based on unique and unusual designs,

following in the footsteps of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The
idea has been firmly linked to the concept of the star architect—the
“starchitect”—as the designer. Indeed, in the English-language Beijing
Today in 2010 the two ideas were conflated when Frank Gehry was
described as “a genius and an architectural icon.”168 As the global
status of the architect could be as important as the status of the
building, the iconic design could be less radical. Architects who had
become established internationally in the 1980s such as Norman
Foster, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Tadao Ando, could build
much more conventional buildings primarily made iconic by the fame
of the architect.

Figure 42. Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, England; Daniel Libeskind;
2002. A design based on shards of a shattered globe to represent the destruction of
war.
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Figure 43. Project for Gazprom Building, St Petersburg, Russia; RMJM; winning
competition entry 2006. Tower block as a gas flame for the world’s largest gas
company.

Figure 44. Section of CITIC HQ project, Hangzhou, China: Foster+Partners;

construction commenced 2011. Office building with an atrium shaped as ancient
Chinese porcelain jar.

Reflexive Modernism animated with the use of metaphor.

The term “starchitect,” probably of journalistic origin, describes

the small group of celebrity architects that became well known in the
New Global Era. There have always been architects famous enough
to be drawn abroad by their international reputation. The Italian
architect Sebastiano Serlio was invited to France by Francis I in the
sixteenth century, and Frank Lloyd Wright was asked to Japan to
design the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo in 1916. Since the 1990s,
however, the novelty of iconic buildings and their prominence in the
branding of cities and corporations made their architects famous, and
the press has treated them as celebrities. The definition of who is or
who is not a starchitect is variable. Newspapers occasionally publish
lists and some names appear consistently: Frank Gehry (probably the
original), Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Daniel
Libeskind will almost always appear. Peter Eisenman, Robert Stern,
Rafael Moneo, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Toyo Ito, Richard
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180 Part III

Meier, Rafael Viñoly and Jean Nouvel may also be included. Others
will depend on the opinion or nationality of whoever is preparing the
list. If it is a British commentator, it is likely that Will Alsop and
Future Systems will be included. If an American is making up the list,
David Childs and Steven Holl may appear. If the commentator is
Italian, Massimiliano Fuksas will most likely be added.
If the architects are indeed to be stars and have names known by
interested observers outside the architectural profession, or even
instantly recognised by most practicing architects, the number will
naturally be limited and will change from time to time. The only
qualification is to have built a memorable building or buildings, be
well known, and be in practice. While a recent book by the Spanish
critic Julio Fajardo Herrero, Starchitect: Visionary Architects of the
Twenty-First Century169 lists seventy-five, this personal choice is too
many to maintain star status. It is possible to use the winners of the
Pritzker Prize as a guide. Known as the Nobel Prize for architecture,
it is an award founded in 1979 in the USA for a “living architect
whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of
talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and
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significant contributions to humanity and the built environment

through the art of architecture.” The winner of the $100,000 award
is chosen by a panel of nine “experts.” Pritzker Prize winners still in
practice currently number twenty-six, but do not include accepted
stars such as Toyo Ito or Peter Eisenman.
To be a starchitect, whether voluntarily or otherwise, is to be a
global brand, and star architects are chosen to give their brand value
to projects. As the British international architect David Chipperfield
says, “It's easier to know about architects than architecture. A banker
won't know about architecture but will know that 'Zaha Hadid' or
'Rem Koolhaas' is a brand.”170 When the city state of Abu Dhabi
announced in 2007 that it was to build a new cultural district of
Saadiyat Island, it chose star architects to give the project instant
status: Norman Foster will design the National Museum, there will
be museums by Tadao Ando, Jean Nouvel and Zaha Hadid, and even
a golf course by the star course designer, Gary Player. A “Biennale
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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 181

Park” will have pavilions designed by junior entrants to the star

architect system such as the Russian designer and architect Yuri
Avvakumov and the Chinese architect Pei Zhu.
The star architect brand can be attached to their buildings to add
value. In Manhattan there is the “Nouvel Chelsea” designed by Jean
Nouvel; one block is called “New York by Gehry” (figure 45);
another “Blue by Bernard Tschumi”; and there is “Herzog & de
Meuron's 40 Bond St.” As Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture Critic
of the Wall Street Journal, said, “Now that there is celebrity in
architecture, they find they can sell more, faster, if they have a name
attached to it.”171 Global retail brands also recognise the value of
global architectural brands. Prada, a brand that trades on its
exclusivity, has launched a series of Fashion Flagship Stores in major
cities: amongst them, Koolhaas’s firm OMA has designed shops in
Beverley Hills and New York, and their stores in Tokyo are designed
by Herzog de Meuron and Toyo Ito. Rem Koolhaas also designed the
“Prada Transformer,” a rotating pavilion that first appeared in Seoul,
Korea, in 2009. In 2008 Zaha Hadid designed a mobile pavilion for
Chanel that has finally been given a permanent home in Paris. Daniel
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Libeskind has been taken on by Swarovski Crystals to design a

chandelier in a shopping mall in Berne, Switzerland. Dior’s couture
collections have been presented as “inspired by Frank Gehry,” but the
firm’s owner, Bernard Arnaud, was less fortunate when Parisian
pressure groups managed to block his proposed Gehry-designed art
gallery.
There is both irony and a hint of hypocrisy when the architects
most frequently called “starchitects” are unhappy with the description.
To be identified in this way is only a recognition of the commercial
value of a name as a brand, and it serves the architects who are so
named very well. When Zaha Hadid won a master plan competition
outside Istanbul, it was admitted that “Zaha's international standing
played a role” in the judges’ decision as it would “create high investor
interest.”172 Under these circumstances, it is disingenuous to pretend
that you are just an ordinary architect. Frank Gehry, for many the
archetypical star architect, is often vociferous about his dislike of the
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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182 Part III

expression. One example of many similar protests is in a Playboy

magazine interview: “I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that
comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It’s demeaning.
It’s derisive, and once it’s said, it sticks. I get introduced all the time,
‘Here’s starchitect Frank Gehry …’ My reaction: ‘What the fuck are
you talking about?’”173 Peter Eisenman recognises that “the media
people are the people who have changed the role of the architect,”
and that “the clients want media … they want the stars,” and he
thinks it has nothing to do with the quality of architecture.174 Rem
Koolhaas is not happy about the expression, but is more perceptive:
“I think it’s a name that is actually degrading to the vast majority of
people it is applied to. And it really is a kind of political term that for
certain clients is important because they use star architects.”175
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Figure 45. Apartment tower, 8 Spruce Street, New York: Frank Gehry; 2011.
Marketed as “New York by Gehry.”

The fame of star architects can be used to add real-estate value

to development.

Notwithstanding these protests, and by whatever name is given to

them, there is little doubt that they are indeed a discrete group.
Many of them have attended one or more of three key North Atlantic
educational institutions, either as students or teachers. The
Architectural Association in London has hosted Richard Rogers, Zaha
Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Steven Holl, Will Alsop, Daniel Libeskind
and Bernard Tschumi. The Harvard Graduate School of Design has
had Rafael Moneo, Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron as
teachers. The Yale School of Architecture has Norman Foster,
Richard Rogers and David Childs as alumuni, and Frank Gehry,
Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando,
Richard Meier, Bernard Tschumi, Cesar Pelli and Bob Stern are
present or recent faculty members. The connections go beyond
education to employment. Zaha Hadid worked for Rem Koolhaas,
and Koolhaas himself was a scholar at the New York Institute for
Architectural and Urban Studies when it was run by Peter Eisenman.
Daniel Libeskind was also briefly at the Institute for Architectural
and Urban Studies and worked for Richard Meier. The group are also
almost all from the old free-trade countries. All but three of the
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thirty-four Pritzker Prize winners come from countries inside this

area, the exceptions being Luis Barragán from Mexico, and Oscar
Niemeyer and Paulo Mendes da Rocha from Brazil. All the architects
most frequently listed as star architects come from the developed
economies. Even late entries from the emerging economies, such as
the young Chinese architect Ma Yansong, trained at Yale and had a
Royal Institute of British Architects’ International Fellowship.

Global Architects
The iconic building and the starchitect are both distinct features that
have emerged as a direct product of the New Global Era. The star
architect group are made up of a very small number of architects and
their buildings are, in any global perspective, very few. Most
architects are tied to their countries of residence and work under the
normal constraints of local clientele and limited budgets. Nonetheless,
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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184 Part III

as is evident from the international fashion for unusual buildings and

aspiration to iconic status, the work of these architects has been
highly influential. Both the architects and their work have all the
power and status of global brands. They are recognised and sought
out by cities and corporations for their brand value. They are widely
admired by their fellow professionals, even if there are dissenters,
and win national as well as international prizes. Their work is
regularly published in the national newspapers, all aspects of their
practice are news and their projects are studied in detail in
professional publications. They are seen by other architects as
creative and successful, and as high earners. Their work, their
attitude to built form, their use of digital modelling and their ideas
have had a profound influence on architecture and architects
throughout the world.

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How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 187

45. Erich Mendelsohn. “The Problem of a New Architecture.” Reprinted in

Programmes and Manifestos on 20th-Century Architecture, edited by Ulrich
Conrads. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970 (first publ. in German
1964), 55.
46.Marshall Berman. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity. New York: Verso 1983 (1982), 15.
47. Kenneth Frampton. “Towards a Critical Regionalism, Six Points for
Architecture of Renaissance.” Reprinted in The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on
Post-Modern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. New York: The New Press
1998 (Bay Press 1983), 19.
48. John Naisbitt & Doris Naisbitt. China’s Megatrends: The 8 pillars of a New
Society. London: Harper Collins, 2004, 93.
49. Charlie Qiuli Xue, Yingchun Li. “Importing American Architecture to
China: The Practice of John Portman and Associates in Shanghai.” The
Journal of Architecture 13 (3) (2008): 317.
50. Philip Langdon. “Asia bound.” Progressive Architecture, March, 1995, 44,
66.
51. Keller Easterling. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its
Masquerades. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, 14–34.
52. “A Survey of India’s Economy.” The Economist, May 31, 2003.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

53. Mark Landler. “Hi, I'm in Bangalore (but I Can't Say So).” New York
Times, March 21, 2001, 1A.
54. Ibelings, op. cit., 134.
55. Castells, 2000, op. cit., 449–50.
56. Gerard Delanty & Paul R. Jones. “European Identity and Architecture.”
European Journal of Social Theory 65 (4) (2002): 453 & 457.
57. Aspa Gospodini. “European Cities and Place-Identity.” Discussion Paper
Series 8 (2), Dept of Planning and Regional Development, Thessaly,
University of Thessaly, March 2002, 33–4.
58. John Carey. The Intellectuals and the Masses. London: Faber and Faber,
1992.
59. Peter J Taylor. Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1999, 60–61.
60. Capital Realty, Beijing.
61. Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao. “Cultural Globalisation and Localisation in
Contemporary Taiwan.” In Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the
Contemporary World, edited Peter L Berger & Samuel P Huntingdon.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 45–6.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
188 Part III

62. Taylor, op. cit., 59–60.

63. Catherin Bull, Darko Radovic & Claire Parin. “Conclusion: Urban
Design For a Cross-Cultural Future.” Cross-Cultural Urban Design, edited
by Catherin Bull et al. London: Routledge, 2007, 210.
64. Ibelings, op. cit., 67.
65. John Short. The Humane City: Cities as If People Matter. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989.
66. Roger K Lewis. “Will Forces of Globalization Overwhelm Traditional
Local Architecture.” Washington Post, November 2, 2002.
67. Marc Augé. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.
New York: Verso, 1995, 77–8.
68. Ibid., 79.
69. Ibid., 106.
70. M Kearney. “The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of
Globalisation and Transnationalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24
(1995): 553.
71. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum
International Publishing Group Ltd, 1972.
72. Gil-Manuel Hernàndez i Martí, “The Deterritorialization of Cultural
Heritage in a Globalized Modernity.” Journal of Contemporary Culture,
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Institut Ramon Llull, Barcelona, 2006.

73. Mike Davies. “Planet of Slums.” In Feelings are Always Local, edited by
Joke Brouwer et al. Amsterdam: V2 Publishing/NAi Publishers, 2004,
30.
74. Julia Nevárez, “Locating the Global in Harlem, NYC: Urban
Development Initiatives, Public Space, and Gentrification.” In On Global
Grounds: Urban Change and Globalisation, edited by Julia Nevárez &
Gabriel Moser. New York: Nova, 2009, 141.
75. Augé, op. cit., 110.
76. Harald Bodenschatz. “Dubai: Wonder of the World in Crisis.” Bauwelt
23 (2009): 17 & 23.
77. George Katodrytis. “Dubai: Tourism and the End of Public Space,”
2006. http://katodrytis.com/main/72/Gulf-first-urban-planningand-
development-conference
78. Sharon Zukin. The Cultures of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 64–5.
79. Ronald Nitzen. A World Beyond Difference: Cultural Identity in the Age of
Globalisation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, 38.
80. Klein, op. cit., 323.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 189

81. Karl Marx. Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000,
235–6.
82. George Santayana. Denominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society
and Government. New York: Augustus M Kelly, 1972, 459.
83. Paul Ricoeœur. Universal Civilization and National Cultures, History and
Truth, trans. Charles A Kelbley. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University
Press, 1965, 271–84.
84. Theodore Levitt. “The Globalization of Markets.” Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Business Review, May/June 1983, 92–102.
85. D. Yergin & J. Stanislaw. The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between
Government and the Marketplace that is Remaking the Modern World. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1998, 10.
86. Daniel Miller. “Introduction: Anthropology, Modernity and
Consumption.” In Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local,
edited by D. Miller. London: Routledge, 1995, 4, 8.
87. Helena Norberg-Hodge. “The March of the Monoculture.” The Ecologist
29, May/June, 1999, 194–6.
88. James Davison Hunter & Joshua Yates. “The World of American
Globalisers.” In Berger and Huntingdon, op. cit., 338–9.
89. Ibid., 330–1.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

90. Ibid., 345.

91. Margaret K Nydell. Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Modern Times.
London: Intercultural Press, 2006, 122.
92. Douglas B Holt, John A Quelch & Earl L Taylor. How Global Brands
Compete. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review, September 2004,
4.
93. Hunter & Yates, op. cit., 323–5.
94. Jan Aart Scholte. “Global Trade and Finance.” In Baylis & Smith, op.
cit., 607.
95. Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, UNESCO, Paris, November 2,
2001.
96. John Frain. Introduction to Marketing. Plymouth, Macdonald and Evans,
1983, 127.
97. Ann Bernstein. “Can South Africa be more than an Offshoot of the
West?” In Berger & Huntingdon, op. cit., 216.
98. Hunter & Yates, op. cit., 351.
99. Simon Anholt. Places: Identity, Image and Reputation. London: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2010.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
190 Part III

100. Hunter & Yates, op. cit., 350–1.

101. Jerry Mander. “Metatechnology, Trade, and the New World Order.”
In The Case Against Free Trade, GAT, NAFTA, and the Globalisation of
Corporate Power, edited by Ralph Nader. San Francisco and Berkeley, CA:
Earth Island Press and North Atlantic Books, 1993, 14–15.
102Inter Brand Website: www.interbrand.com (accessed November
2011).
103. Holt, Quelch & Taylor, op. cit., 2.
104. Ibid., 3.
105. Hunter and Yates, op. cit., 330.
106. “Chirac Slams US Food Domination.” BBC News, September 16,
1999.
107. Holt, Quench & Taylor, op. cit., 1.
108. “Forbidden City Starbucks Closes.” BBC News, July 14, 2007.
109. Naisbitt, op. cit., 191.
110. John Urry. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage Publications, 2002 (1990),
5.
111. Agnes Heller. A Theory of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, 189–
90.
112. Quoted in Vicente Rodriguez. “Tourism as a Recruiting Post for
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Retirement Migration.” Tourism Geographies 3 (1) (2001): 52–63.

113. Urry, op. cit., 74.
114. Richard Lloyd & Terry Clark. “The City as an Entertainment
Machine.” Annual meeting of the American Sociological Association,
Washington DC, 2000. Research Report no. 454.
115.Bella Dicks. Culture on Display: The production of Contemporary Visibility.
Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2003, 35.
116. Ibid., 1.
117. John B. Allcock. “International Law and the Former Yugoslavia.” In
Globalization and Identity, edited by Alan Carling. London: IB Tauris,
2006, 165–6.
118. Heller, op. cit., 188–9.
119. Urry, op. cit., 154.
120. Dean MacCannell. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New
York: Schocken Books, 1976, 26–7.
121. Gospodini, op. cit., 30–1.
122. Aaaron Betsky. “Icons: Magnets of Meaning,” San Francisco Museum
of Contemporary Art, 1996.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 191

123. Charles Jencks. Iconic Building: The Power of Enigma. London: Frances
Lincoln, 2005, 182.
124. In discussion with the author, December 2011.
125. Jencks, op. cit., 12.
126. Impact of the activities of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao on the
Basque regional economy in 2010, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Foundation.
127. David Taylor, “Simply the Best.” Paris, MIPIM Preview, 2010, 41.
128. Zukin, op. cit., 2.
129. Elias Beriatos & Aspa Gospodini. “‘Glocalisation’ and Urban
Landscape Transformations: Built Heritage and Innovative Design
versus non-competitive morphologies – the case of Athens 2004.”
Discussion Paper Series 9 (24), Dept of Planning and Regional
Development, Thessaly, University of Thessaly, August 2003, 552–
553.
130. Robert Booth. “Fortune Cookie.” Building Design, November 7, 2003,
10.
131. Jiang Xu & Anthony G. O. Yeh. “City Repositioning and Competitiveness
Building in Regional Development: New Development Strategies in
Guangzhou.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (2)
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

(2005).
132. Heerim website description: www.heerim.com (accessed December
2011).
133. “Capital Gate wins prestigious Cityscape Awards.” Dubai, UAE,
Khaleej Times, September 29, 2011.
134. “Greater Paris: Wider and Still Wider.” The Economist, December 5,
2009, 43–4.
135. “Brave New World.” Tees Valley Generation Press Release, Tees
Valley Unlimited Website, April 16, 2009, no longer available.
136. A. L. Huxtable. The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered. New York:
Pantheon, 1984, 11.
137. Kim Dovey. “The Global Edifice Complex: Melbourne Australia.” In
Nevárez & Moser, op. cit., 99.
138. For discussion see Reinier de Graaf & Rem Koolhaas. “€-conography.”
In Content : Triumph of Realization, edited by Rem Koolhaas & Brendan
McGetrick. Cologne, Taschen, 2004.
139. Ibelings, op. cit., 45.

140. Charlie Qiuli Xue & Yingchun Li. “Importing American architecture
to China: the practice of John Portman and Associates in Shanghai.” The
Journal of Architecture 13 (3) (2008): 328–9.
141. Culture Show, London, BBC2 TV, October 22, 2010.
142. Rem Koolhaas. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
143. Patrik Schumacher. “Ten Questions for Thinkers about the Present
and Future of Design.” Harvard Design Magazine 20, Massachusetts,
2004, 18–19.
144. Hugh Pearman. “Quick, fetch me a pencil …” RIBA Journal, March
2008, 35.
145. Personal interview with Professor Paul Richens, University of Bath
November 2011; additional information on users from PhD student
Roly Hudson of University of Bath.
146. Personal interview with John Hare, October 2011.
147. Jencks, op. cit., 40.
148. James Madge. “Type at the Origin of Architectural Form.” The Journal
of Architecture 12 (1) (2007): 25.
149. Graham Morrison. “Look at me!” The Guardian, July 12, 2004.
150. Daniel Libeskind. Munich, Radix-Matrix Prestel-Verlag, 1997, 34.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

151. Rem Koolhass. “Bigness: Or the Problem of Large.” In Rem Koolhaas &
Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL. New York: Monacelli Press, 1995, 515.
152. Patrik Schumacher. “Parametricism: A New Global Style for
Architecture and Urban Design.” Digital Cities, London, Architectural
Design, Edition 79 (4) July/August 2009, 15.
153. Schumacher 2010, op. cit., 43.
154. “How Genius Works.” The Atlantic Magazine, May 2011.
155. David Neustein. “Frank Gehry's crumpled vision for Sydney.”
Australian Design Review, December 22, 2010.
156. Joseph Masheck. “Steven Holl.” Bomb, Architecture, no. 79, spring
2002.
157. Pearman, op. cit., 35.
158. Daniel Libeskind. The Space of Encounter. London: Thames & Hudson,
2001, 157.
159. Personal Interview with the Director of the National Museum, Qatar,
2009.
160. Karen Cilento. “National Museum of Qatar / Jean Nouvel”
www.archdaily.com, March 31, 2010.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
How Globalisation Makes Things the Same 193

161. Description on Aedas’ website: www.aedas.com (accessed December

2011).
162.Description on Henning Larson’s website: www.henninglarsen.com
(accessed December 2011).
163. Description on MVRDV’s website: www.mvrdv.nl (accessed
December 2011).
164. Quotation from HOK’s website: www.hok.com (accessed December
2011).
165. Christine Murray. “Beijing’s Cuckoo’s Nest.” Architects’ Journal April
17, (2008): 50–52.
166. Quoted by Claire Wrathall. “Beijing Airport: China shows Heathrow
How it Should be Done.” Englewood Cliffs, N.J, CNBC Business, May
2008.
167. Description on Foster+Partners’ website:
www.fosterandpartners.com (accessed December 2011).
168. Han Manman. “Imagining Beyond Form—Frank Gehry Brings First
Exhibition to Beijing.” Information Office of the Beijing Municipal
Government, Beijing Today, October 22, 2010.
169. Julio Fajardo Herrero. Starchitect: Visionary Architects of the Twenty-First
Century. New York: Harper Design, 2010.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

170. Marcus, J. S. ‘Designer Cities: The Development of the Superstar

Urban Plan.” The Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2008.
171. Stephen Zacks. “Starchitect Condos—2005.” Metropolismag, March
20, 2006.
172. Marcus, op. cit.
173. “Frank Gehry: Playboy Interview.” Playboy Magazine, January 2011.
174. “Architetti Invervisti, Peter Eisenman.” Floornature, Modena, Italy,
Fiornano Modenese, 2004.
175. “Living Differently.” Anjali Rao interview with Rem Koolhaas. CNN
Talk Asia, June 24, 2009.

HOW GLOBALISATION KEEPS THINGS DIFFERENT

The Breakdown of the Nation State

and Revived Identities
The similarity and international character of consumer products, the
ubiquity of brands and the internationalisation of design have become
recognised symbols of globalisation. This is often experienced as an
unease with the power of transnational corporations and frustration
with the seeming lack of democratic accountability of global
organisations, ranging from international financial institutions to
regional political and trading collectives. While the nation state
remains the primary democratic unit on a legislative scale and in
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

inter-national affairs, as we have seen above, its traditional powers

have been eroded by the free movement of capital, the huge
destructive power of armaments, global financial regulation, supra-
national organisations, and the growth of transnational corporations.
While these high-level global phenomena sit above the
disempowered nation state, a plethora of issue-based International
Non-Governmental Organisations have come in from below. Other
seismic political events have also affected the position of the nation
state.
When the global fifty-year military stand-off of the Cold War
ended in 1989, the pressure to persuade or coerce large populations
to remain loyal to a political system or a defined territory was
relaxed. This was felt immediately with the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Known in the West by its dominant nation—Russia—the
Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics celebrated the different ethnic
and peasant cultures across its vast territory, but communism and
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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196 Part IV

state-wide institutions created a single military and political bloc.

When this union descended into financial crisis and the communist
infrastructure collapsed, internal tensions and aspirations came to the
surface and the Soviet Union rapidly broke up into its constituent
parts. A series of nations established themselves as fifteen
independent states, from the relatively small Baltic States in the west
to the vast, sparsely populated Kazakhstan in the east, to the ancient
nation of Georgia to the south.
This very conspicuous state fragmentation was only part of a
greater worldwide assertion of local identities and the decline of the
power base of the nation state.
The nation state as a monolithic institution actively promoted its
distinctive identity and demanded loyalty or, as Arjun Apppadurai
puts it, created the “spatial and social standardization that is
prerequisite for the disciplined national citizen.”1 In historical terms
this was a relatively recent phenomenon. David Held, Anthony
McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton describe the
history of modern state formation:
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

… the historical record suggests that even where a proto-sense of

the nation existed prior to the eighteenth century—for example in
France, Sweden or England—it was always but one identity or point
of allegiance. It necessarily competed with larger transnational
identities and more particularistic, local and regional identities …
Nations emerged as distinctive collective social actors only when
proto-nations were transformed by the economic, social and
political changes of the long nineteenth century.2

Zygmunt Bauman points out how the process of nation formation

affected minorities: “The establishment of any sovereign state
required as a rule the suppression of the formative ambitions of many
lesser populations—undermining or expropriating however little
they might have possessed of inchoate military capacity, economic
self-sufficiency and cultural distinctiveness.”3 This apparent unity
turned out to be fragile when the power of the state diminished.

Manuel Castells describes how the underlying tensions could lead to

fragmentation:
Once a nation became established, under the territorial control of a
given state, the sharing of history did induce social and cultural
bonds as well as economic and political interests, among its
members. Yet, the uneven representation of social interests,
cultures, and territories in the nation-state skewed national
institutions toward the interests of organizing elites and their
geometry of alliances, thus opening the way for institutional crises
when subdued identities, historically rooted or ideologically
revived, were able to mobilize for a renegotiation of the historical
national contract.4

Pressures to change this “historical national contract” had been on the

rise since the 1970s. The transnational north European Sami were
given their first ethnic parliament by Finland in 1973, and Quebec
Province was recognised as a “distinct society” within Canada in
1987. In the 1990s, however, there was a dramatic increase in the
reassertion of subdued identities.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

The collapse of the Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe had an

immediate impact. Yugoslavia violently split into its constituent parts
based on the ethnic and religious divisions that had been supressed in
the early twentieth century. Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the
Czech Republic and Slovakia. Other European nations began to
divide internally. In Spain, the Catalan Nationalist Party came to play
a major role in Spanish politics in the 1990s, and since 1991 a united
Basque nationalist movement has governed the Basque Region.
Separatist movements have become stronger. Belgium has been
threatening to divide into Flanders and Wallonia for some time, but
in 1993 Belgium became a fully federal state. The Lega Nord, seeking
to establish the new state of Padania, an independent state in
northern Italy, entered the Italian coalition government in 1994. In
the United Kingdom, following referendums in 1997, limited
legislative power was given to two constituent nations: Scotland and

Wales. The Scottish Nationalist party is in power today and still

seeks complete independence.
The violent separatism experienced by Yugoslavia was more
common outside Europe. Tamil separatists pioneered suicide
bombing in Sri Lanka. The Free Papua Movement continues to fight
for independence from Indonesia. Civil war in Sudan, and the
creation of the new nation-state of South Sudan were only resolved
by international intervention. Liberation or separatist conflict has
been one of the major sources of conflict since atomic weapons
curtailed conventional warfare between major states.
Satisfying the aspirations of minorities within nation states has
been managed more peacefully by granting powers and rights to
provinces and ethnic and indigenous groups. In 1988 the Brazilian
Constitution granted its twenty-seven States “semi-autonomous sub-
national” powers. In 1993 the European Union set up the Committee
of the Regions to provide some place for extra-national communities
in the EU’s institutional framework. Chinese decentralisation began
when Deng Xiaoping declared in 1980 that provinces should “eat in
separate kitchens rather than from a common pot,” leading to
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

province-based taxation in 1993, and provincial independence in the

management of foreign direct investment in 2009. Uganda
decentralised in 1993, in the process restoring the ancient identity of
the Kingdom of Buganda. In 1992 the 74th amendment to the Indian
Constitution gave greater powers to its twenty-five States to create
“vibrant democratic units of self-government.” In 1999 Canada
created the new territory of Nunavut with its own legislative
assembly, a two million square kilometre area with a largely Inuit
population of 30,000.
The creation of new nation states, micro-states and the increased
power of regions are only part of a rise of identity politics stimulated
by political and social changes in the New Global Era. The forging of
political identities in the old nation states was described by the
political scientist Benedict Anderson in 1983 as, “an imagined
political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and
sovereign.”5 As “imagined” national communities broke down in the
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 199

1990s, the fundamental need for identity began to be directed

elsewhere. The geographer David Hooson describes the problem:
“The urge to express one’s identity, and to have it recognised
tangibly by others, is increasingly contagious and has to be recognised
as an elemental force even in the shrunken, apparently
homogenizing, high-tech world of the end of the twentieth century.”6
In 1964 philosopher and critic Marshall McLuhan had predicted
the transfer of communal identity to an “electrically contracted”
global village.7 This was an optimistic prediction. By the mid-1980s
it was clear to many that identity could not be readily allocated to
any such large and anonymous concept. The American poet, essayist
and academic, Wendell Berry, summed it up in 1977:
There can be no such thing as a “global village.” No matter how
much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it
only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live
and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to
the world and to humanity … A culture is not a collection of relics
or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes
calamity.8
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

By the turn of the millennium, even the eminent advocate of

cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah, admitted that it “is not
that we can’t take a moral interest in strangers, but that the interest
is bound to be abstract, lacking in the warmth and power that comes
from shared identity. Humanity isn’t, in the relevant sense, an
identity at all.”9
The disorientation created by expanded global horizons and the
increasing irrelevance of nationalist mythologies have encouraged
individuals to re-examine, and if necessary redefine, their identities.
As the philosopher Simone Weil said, “To be rooted is perhaps the
most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”10
Identity politics are based on the search for what Edmund Burke
famously called the “little platoon” that we “belong to in society” that
is “the first principle (the germ as it were) of publick affections.”11 As
Zygmunt Bauman says, poetically:
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
200 Part IV

And what are the abandoned, desocialised, atomised, lonely

individuals likely to dream of, and given a chance, do? Once the big
harbours have been closed or stripped of the breakwaters that used
to make them secure, the hapless sailors will be inclined to carve
out and fence off their own small havens where they can anchor and
deposit their bereaved, and fragile, identities. No longer trusting the
public navigation network, they will jealously guard access to such
private havens against all and any intruders.12

Cultural Rights and the International Response

Localisation and the search for a particular identity that characterises
the New Global Era contradicts the modernisation theories of the
1960s—transferred to globalisation theory in the 1990s—which
envisaged the convergence of societies to a North Atlantic type as
they developed similar levels of prosperity. As Marc Augé says: “At
the very same moment when it becomes possible to think in terms of
the unity of terrestrial space, and the big multinational networks
grow strong, the clamour of particularisms rises.”13 In 2008 the
United States National Intelligence Council recognised this as a new
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

political condition: “Intrinsic to the growing complexity of the

overlapping roles of states, institutions, and nonstate actors is the
proliferation of political identities, which is leading to establishment of
new networks and rediscovered communities” [emphasis in original].14
Identity politics are as much a witness to the impact of
globalisation as the power of transnational corporations and come in
many forms.
Threats to the identity of ethnic groups, seen through the lens of
Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage as a precious survival of our
uncorrupted selves, tend to elicit particular sympathy and regret.
The assertion of ethnic identity has led the way in the growth of
identity politics. In 1994 the anthropologist J McIver Weatherford
observed:
For a long time it appeared that ethnic groups were slowly being
absorbed into the nations in which they lived. They were viewed as

holdovers from another era, and it was thought that gradually as the
people modernized, they would naturally abandon their ethnic
identity in favour of a national one … Instead, ethnic identities have
grown stronger in the modern world.15

The need to assert a particular identity, however, goes beyond

primordial ethnicity. The French sociologist Alain Touraine points
out:
… we see today that in many parts of the world, new actors, both
individual and collective, are claiming new cultural rights. They
aspire to combine their participation in the economic world with
the retention or reinterpretation of their cultural heritage and
cultural projects. The strength of these new movements re-
establishes the role of political action and endows actors with the
capacity to make choices, to feel free, and to take responsibility for
their own experience. One may, moreover, distinguish between
what is commonly called identity politics—through which
individuals and groups strive to protect social attributes, like sex,
age, craft, creed, ethnicity or religion—and the demand for cultural
rights, which is best defined as the defence of the “subject.”16
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

The demand for cultural rights may be an assertion of the individual’s

right to cultural choice or a collective assertion of social rights, but in
either case it is based on a global dynamic. As the British sociologist
Roland Robertson points out: “It is crucial to recognize that the
contemporary concern with civilizational and societal (as well as
ethnic) uniqueness—as expressed via such motifs as identity,
tradition and indigenization—largely rests on globally diffused
ideas.”17
The international spread of this concern is witnessed by a series of
reports and declarations by supra-national organisations. The first
initiatives come from International Non-Governmental Organisations.
For example, the Inuit Circumpolar Council was set up in 1977 with
the objective of, inter alia, the “preservation and evolution of Inuit
culture.”18 In 1984 the World Council of Indigenous Peoples issued
“The Declaration of Principles of Indigenous Rights” in Panama
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202 Part IV

which included the principle that, “The cultures of indigenous

peoples are part of mankind’s cultural patrimony” as part of the
“minimal rights to which indigenous Peoples are entitled.”19
By the 1990s the international community, as represented by the
United Nations, had taken up the cause.
In 1992 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the
“Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National, Ethnic,
Religious and Linguistic Minorities,” where Article I stated that:
“States shall protect the existence and the national or ethnic, cultural,
religious and linguistic identity of minorities” [my emphasis].20 In the
same year the Council of Europe issued the “European Charter for
Regional and Minority Languages” which sought “the protection of
the historical regional or minority languages of Europe, some of
which are in danger of eventual extinction,” and which contribute “to
the maintenance and development of Europe's cultural wealth and
traditions.”21 In 1994 the European Union established the Committee
of the Regions which, as part of its mission statement, seeks to
“respond to the challenges of globalisation” and “make the very most
of [Europe’s] territorial, cultural and linguistic diversity.”22
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The United Nations expanded its interest to a wider view of

cultural diversity beyond ethnicity. In the “Vienna Declaration on
Human Rights” of 1993, cultural diversity was inserted within the
now almost sacred ambit of the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights,
stating that the “international community” must bear in mind “the
significance of national and regional particularities and various
historical, cultural and religious backgrounds,” and that “persons
belonging to minorities have the right to enjoy their own culture.”23
In 1996 UNESCO issued “Our Creative Diversity. Report of the
World Commission on Culture and Development,” which warns of
the powerful “global pressures of so-called ‘global’ popular cultures”
and declares that “every community has its cultural and spiritual
affiliations reaching back symbolically to the dawn of time,” and that
“these cultural patterns play an irreplaceable role in defining
individual and group identity.”24

By the time UNESCO brought out the “Universal Declaration on

Cultural Diversity” in 2001, the international institutional response
to the culturally particular had become very clear. It stated that
“cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for
nature … it is the common heritage of humanity and should be
recognized and affirmed for the benefit of present and future
generations.”25 It went beyond necessity: “The defence of cultural
diversity is an ethical imperative.”26 The means of expression of this
cultural diversity were also to be protected and were identified: “All
persons have … the right to express themselves and to create and
disseminate their work in the language of their choice, and
particularly in their mother tongue.”27 And “heritage in all its forms
must be preserved, enhanced and handed on to future generations as
a record of human experience and aspirations.”28

Identity Politics and the Complexity

of the Global Condition
There is an irony in the implication that for cultures to be protected
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from transnational cultural contamination, they require the

recognition of an authoritative transnational organization. These
protective resolutions seem, furthermore, to be based on the
assumption that minorities under threat are territorially located and
should survive much as ancient monuments should be protected as
authentic records of past cultures.
The Italian sociologist, Raimondo Strassoldo, expands the search
for cultural security beyond surviving minority groups: “Contemporary
globalization has … often reinvigorated more localized solidarities.
When faced with a seemingly vast, intangible and uncontrollable
globality, many people have turned away from the state to their local
‘home’ in hopes of enhancing their possibilities of community and
self-determination.”29 Home is not, however, necessarily static,
singular or vulnerable. The French sociologist, Michel Wieviorka,
points out that “cultural specificities function in all sorts of spheres,
some of which are local and small scale, and others at global level,
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204 Part IV

some being totally confined within a national context, and others

extending beyond it, for example in diaspora model.”30 Furthermore,
as the anthropologist Fredrik Barth says: “People participate in
multiple, more or less discrepant, universes of discourse; they
construct different partial and simultaneous worlds in which they
move; their cultural construction of reality springs not from one
source and is not of one piece.”31 These are what Zygmunt Bauman
calls “cloakroom communities … conjured into being, if in
apparition only, by hanging up individual troubles, as theatregoers do
with their coats … patched together for the duration of the spectacle
and promptly dismantled again once the spectators collect their coats
from the hooks in the cloakroom.”32 As Bauman implies, our
relationship with our cultural identity has become increasingly
complex. This is described by the British political philosopher John
Gray:
We all of us belong to many communities, we mostly inherit diverse
ethnicities, and our world-views are fractured and provisional
whether or not we know it or admit it. We harbour a deep diversity
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of views and values … The reactionary project of rolling back this

diversity of values and world-views in the pursuit of a lost cultural
unity overlooks the character of our cultural inheritance as a
palimpsest, having ever deeper layers of complexity.33

In this complexity sit the “desocialised, atomised, lonely individuals”

Bauman identified in us all.
Ajun Appadurai discusses the new insecurity as it is experienced
by second generation migrants:
Many people suddenly find themselves to be minorities when they
didn't know they were minorities. … This is being discovered now
by younger migrants throughout the world. They are very much
part of the societies in which they live, and indeed have lost various
connections to their home societies, and often have come very far
from their own parents and grandparents. They have struggled …
but their struggles have an added burden, because they also have to
deal with a kind of outside force of image-making.34

As the political scientist W. James Booth says: “Gone are the days
when there was a seamless web of memory uniting the entirety of the
national community in a common narrative of the past.”35 The
sociologist Peter Berger sees this as a fundamental aspect of modern
society: “Modern man has suffered from a deepening condition of
homelessness … It goes without saying that this condition is
psychologically hard to bear. It has therefore engendered …
nostalgias … for a condition of ‘being at home’ in society, with
oneself and, ultimately, in the universe.”36
In order to achieve some stability of identity— to “be at home”—
in an alien or unstable condition, societies may adapt their changed
circumstances to create new hybrid cultural forms that have the
reassurance of traditions. In The Symbolic Construction of Community the
sociologist Anthony Cohen describes this process:
It has long been noticed that societies undergoing rapid, and,
therefore, de-stabilizing processes of change often generate
atavistically some apparently traditional forms, but impart to them
meaning and implication appropriate to contemporary
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circumstances. Such reactions to change may be a syncretistic

marriage of tradition and modernity in language, technology,
religion and so forth. They are also sometimes manifest as a
deliberate maintenance of the forms of customary practices in
changed circumstances which now render their earlier rationales
anachronistic. These syncretic techniques appear to be means of
rendering alien practices into a familiar and, therefore, acceptable
form. They may be regarded as vernacular translations and
modifications of extrinsic social influence.37

This established technique for the manipulation of tradition to re-

establish cultural identity took on a modern form as global media and
international communication rendered all places familiar and altered
our perception of what was local. The Cambridge sociologist John B.
Thompson outlines how we have expanded the ways we can use
tradition to create the familiarity of belonging to a place or a
community.

… with the development of the media, traditions were gradually

uprooted; the bond that tied traditions to specific locales of face-to-
face interaction was gradually weakened. In other words, traditions
were gradually and partially de-localized, as they became increasingly
dependent on mediated forms of communication for their
maintenance and transmission from one generation to the next.
The uprooting or “de-localization” of tradition had far-reaching
consequences … It enabled traditions to be detached from
particular locales and freed from the constraints imposed by oral
transmission in circumstances of face-to-face interaction. The reach
of tradition—both in space and in time—was no longer restricted
by the conditions of localized transmission. But the uprooting of
traditions from particular locales did not lead them to wither away,
nor did it destroy altogether the connection between traditions and
spatial units. On the contrary, the uprooting of traditions was the
condition for the re-embedding of traditions in new contexts and for
the re-mooring of traditions to new kinds of territorial unit that
exceeded the limits of shared locales. Traditions were de-localized
but they were not de-territorialized: they were refashioned in ways
that enabled them to be re-embedded in a multiplicity of locales and
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re-connected to territorial units that exceed the limits of face-to-

face interaction.38

Personal and Social Identity

Identity has always been an essential element in human society but,
as it becomes increasingly fragmented and contested and takes on an
enhanced political and social dimension, it is important to understand
at a fundamental level what lies behind the need for identity in social
and personal life.
Identification is fundamental to all human perception. We have to
identify phenomena in order to understand them and interact with
them. We identify things as the same and different. As humans we
give a common identity and name to groups of things we categorise
as similar, and to do so we must identify a group of things as different
from other groups of things. We can also identify social groups. Each
person seeks their identity as an individual and does so through the
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 207

social groups to which they belong. Identity is established through

sameness and difference: in the sense of sameness with groups of
people who it is assumed share this sense; in the sense of difference
from other groups. As the political scientist Jan Aart Scholte
explains, this goes to heart of self and community:
Understanding and affirming the self— both as an individual and as a
group member—is a prime motivation for, and major preoccupation
of, social interaction. People seek in social relations to explore their
class, their gender, their nationality, their race, their religious faith,
their sexuality, and other aspects of their being. Constructions of
identity moreover provide much of the basis for social bonds,
including collective solidarity against oppression. Notions of identity
underpin frameworks for community, democracy, citizenship and
resistance. In short, identity matters (a great deal).39

Group identity is a fundamental part of human behaviour. In 1970,

the psychologist Henri Tajfel40 conducted a series of experiments
which reduced the identity of a series of individuals, one to another,
to the absolute minimum by identifying only similar scores in trivial
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tasks. These individuals, knowing no more about their relationship

with the others than a correspondence of score, consistently gave
preferential treatment to those whose scores came closest to their
own. This is known as Social Identity Theory and establishes the
principle that for each of us there is an “in-group,” which we favour,
and “out-groups,” which we do not.
The social psychologist Marliynn Brewer puts this into an
evolutionary perspective:
… our ancestors chose cooperation rather than strength, and the
capacity for social learning rather than instincts. As a result humans
are characterized by obligatory interdependence … Clear group
boundaries provide a compromise between individual selfishness and
indiscriminate cooperation or altruism. In effect, defined in-groups
are bounded communities of mutual obligation and trust that delimit
the extent to which both the benefits and costs of cooperation can
be expected … If human survival depends on bounded communities

of mutual, obligatory interdependence, then humans must also have

evolved psychological characteristics that support functioning in
such a social context. The capacity for symbolic self-representation,
the need for belonging and contingent, group-based trust are all
cognitive and motivational mechanisms that support and maintain
interdependent group living. Similarly, social identity and the need
for positive distinctiveness can be viewed as psychological
mechanisms that bind individuals to groups and commit them to the
preservation of intergroup boundaries.41

From our evolutionary origins in small social groups or tribes of

about 150 (Dunbar’s number),42 joined together for mutual benefit
and survival, we have now expanded a genetic predisposition to in-
group identity into a much wider field. From an existence where
there was mutual recognition and shared activities to a modern life in
a nation state or global group, where we can share carefully
protected, created and even enforced identities with populations
numbered in the millions, we find ourselves in a much more
complex condition in which we must find our identity. In both tribes
and nation states, this complexity is managed through the use of
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symbols. In The Symbolic Construction of Community, Anthony Cohen

shows that “the consciousness of community has to be kept alive
through manipulation of its symbols. The reality and efficacy of the
community's boundary—and, therefore, of the community itself—
depends upon its symbolic construction and embellishment.”42 We
can recognise these symbols from the ceremonials of state to the use
of distinctive language and dress amongst social groups.
Much as communities do not spring from nowhere, the symbols
that define them are not spontaneous but are often traditional:
As sets of assumptions, beliefs and patterns of behaviour handed
down from the past, traditions provide some of the symbolic
materials for the formation of identity both at the individual and at
the collective level. The sense of oneself and the sense of belonging
are both shaped—to varying degrees, depending on social
context—by the values, beliefs and forms of behaviour which are
transmitted from the past. The process of identity formation can
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 209

never start from scratch; it always builds upon a pre-existing set of

symbolic materials which form the bedrock of identity.43

As they are traditions rather than history, these symbols are not
fixed. They can evolve with the community and even be invented44
but, in all cases, their effectiveness as traditional symbols requires a
convincing pedigree, real or imagined.
As the scale and variety of community expands, identity becomes
less clear cut. As social psychologist Judith Howard points out:
At earlier historical moments, identity was not so much an issue;
when societies were more stable, identity was to a great extent
assigned, rather than selected or adopted. In current times,
however, the concept of identity carries the full weight of the need
for a sense of who one is, together with an often overwhelming pace
of change in surrounding social contexts—changes in the groups and
networks in which people and their identities are embedded and in
the societal structures and practices in which those networks are
themselves embedded.45

And indeed, it is not necessary to choose any single one of these and
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for most of us “individual identification is revealed as, to a considerable

extent, a customized collage of collective identifications.”46 Salman
Rushdie can therefore ask of the modern condition: “Do cultures
actually exist as separate, pure, defensible entities? Is not melange,
adulteration, impurity, pick’n’mix at the heart of the idea of the
modern?”47
As we have seen, in the New Global Era identity can be a
problem. As Jan Aart Scholte says:
Globalization has tended to increase the sense of a fluid and
fragmented self, particularly for persons who spend large
proportions of their time in supraterritorial spaces, where multiple
identities readily converge and create “lost souls.” In more
globalized lives, identity is less easily taken for granted; self-
definitions and associated group loyalties are much more up for
grabs. Hybrid identities present significant challenges for the
construction of community. How can deep and reliable social bonds
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210 Part IV

be forged when individuals have multiple and perhaps competing

senses of self—and indeed often feel pretty unsettled in all of
them?48

If group identity is, as the evidence suggests, a fundamental human

need necessary for the proper function of family, community and
nation, this rootlessness could undermine all these essential pillars of
society. It is perhaps at this moment that the identity of place
becomes particularly significant. Manuel Castells describes how
people try to manage threats to their identity: “When the world
becomes too large to be controlled, social actors aim to shrink it back
to their size and reach. When networks dissolve time and space,
people anchor themselves in places, and recall their historic memory
… These defensive reactions become sources of meaning and
identity, constructing new cultural codes out of historical materials.”49
If society is fluid and symbolic markers of identity are ambiguous,
almost all of us have at least somewhere we call home. As
psychologist Stephanie Taylor points out: “Discussions of place and
identity, whether among academic theorists or research participants,
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almost inevitably return to the concept of home.”50 Home is a place

that is at least geographically stable; as the anthropologist Gordon
Matthews says, “one’s home is where in the world one most truly
belongs.”51 The art and cultural historian Anthony King puts the
concept on home into its physical and architectural context:
This dwelling or residence always involves different levels of choice,
in terms of location, neighbourhood, cost, size, typology, image, it
is also part of our identity—whether that identity is professional,
class, social, ethnic, cultural or, in particular places, racial. The
location and dwelling where we live is one (important) way of how
we either choose to, or are seen to, represent ourselves to others.52

Image consultant Simon Anholt describes how, as the secure

foundation of our identity of place, home is the bedrock of all other
geographic identities:

The identity and image of the places we inhabit are really a seamless
extension of the identity and image of ourselves; it is a natural
human tendency for people to identify themselves with their city,
region or country. Our sense of self isn't bounded by our own
bodies: it extends out into family, neighbourhood, district, region,
nation, continent, and ultimately to the human race.53

The tremendous significance of the places we call home makes any

challenge to the security or stability of place identity particularly
critical. The sociologist Tom Gieryn puts it most starkly: “To be
without a place of one's own—persona non locata—is to be almost
non-existent.”54

“Glocalisation” and New Trading Conditions

The protection and assertion of community or individual identity can
range from the benign preservation of threatened languages to, what
Zygmunt Bauman calls, “identification wars.” While reference to an
idealised and localised past may be a strategy for counteracting the
homogenising or threatening aspects of globalisation, the fact that it
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is set in motion by globalisation unavoidably links the two phenomena.

Bauman makes the connection: “The frantic search of identity is not a
residue of the pre-globalization times not-yet-fully-extirpated but
bound to become extinct as the globalization progresses; it is, on the
contrary, the side-effect, and by-product of the combination of
globalizing and individualizing pressures and the tensions that spawn.
The identification wars are neither contrary nor stand in the way of
the globalizing tendency: they are a legitimate offspring and natural
companion of globalization and far from arresting it, lubricate its
wheels.”55 The sociologist Mike Featherstone goes one step further to
say that “it is not helpful to regard the global and local as dichotomies
separated in space or time; it would seem that the processes of
globalization and localization are inextricably bound together.”56
Trading practices, concerned only with the most effective means
of marketing goods, provide practical evidence. Global outreach and
local marketing were combined in the portmanteau word,
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212 Part IV

“glocalisation.” The word seems to have had its origins in papers in

the Harvard Business Review by Japanese authors which used the
Japanese term dochakuka, roughly meaning “global localization,” in the
late 1980s.57 Translated to “glocalisation” by running together
globalisation and localisation, it had become, according to the Oxford
Dictionary of New Words in 1991, “one of the main marketing
buzzwords.”58 In marketing terms, it means that the globalization of a
product or service is more likely to succeed when the product or
service is adapted specifically to each country in which it is
marketed.59 More cynically, economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob
van Tulder define “glocalisation” as: “A company’s attempt to
become accepted as a ‘local citizen’ in a different trade bloc, while
transferring as little control as possible over its areas of strategic
concern”60 The word “glocal” so succinctly summarised the widely
observed combination of the global and local in the 1990s that it has
now been expanded to mean more simply: “relating to the
connections or relationships between global and local businesses,
problems, etc.”61 and has passed into more general use.
One of the most potent symbols of global homogenisation, the
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worldwide success of McDonalds, is based not just on the status of

the McDonalds’ hamburger as an American global product, but on its
approach to different local markets. In Japan, for example, a country
uniquely open to outside cultural influence and with a high-quality
indigenous culinary culture, the Japanese conglomerate Fujita Shoten
brought McDonalds to their national market with a quite different
profile to the low-cost product in the United States by targeting
middle class customers, thereby establishing a global-local position as
a locally fashionable high status foreign product.62
MTV, promoter of that most distinctly and globally influential
North Atlantic product—popular music—had to learn the hard way.
Launched by Viacom in the United States in 1981, transforming
“promotional clips” into the new creative medium of music video, it
was highly successful in its home market. In 1989 MTV successfully
exported its formula to fellow North Atlantic countries in Europe. In
1992 Viacom partnered with Satellite Television Asian Region
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 213

(STAR) TV to create MTV Asia. In India, as in other Asian countries,

STAR TV realized that its success would rely on adapting its
broadcasts to the culture of its audiences, but MTV refused to
comply and the partnership in India ended. In 1997, struggling to re-
enter the Indian market, MTV re-launched as an Indian channel,
broadcasting in Hindi and English featuring Hindi-pop music
alongside Western popular music. By 1999 its policy was to
“Indianize, humanize, and humorize” its programming.63 It has become
the most popular music channel in India and now, the lesson learnt,
the Vice-President of MTV can claim: “We're one of the very few
brands who have nailed the notion of being able to be global and local
at the same time.”64
The process of expansion through mergers and acquisitions offers
another route to local and global identity. Kodak, for example,
entered the Chinese market through the purchase of seven Chinese
film companies and, by doing so, became one of the two major film
companies in China. Its CEO could tell Chinese audiences that the
China Kodak Company aimed to become “a first-rate Chinese
company.” 65
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In 1995, Ian Angell, professor of information systems at the

London School of Economics saw this as the future:
… globalization is resulting in a trend towards localization or, as
Morita [Akio Morita, co-founder of the Sony Corporation] calls it,
“global localization.” Global companies are setting themselves up
within virtual enterprises, at the hub of loosely knit alliances of local
companies, all linked together by global networks, both electronic
and human. These companies assemble to take advantage of any
temporary business opportunity; and then separate, searching for
the next major deal. Apart from local products, local companies also
deliver local expertise and access to home markets for other
products created within the wider alliance. Companies and
countries outside such networks have no future.66

The Local and the Global in Environmentalism

The most significant global-to-local issue of the end of the twentieth,
and the start of the twenty-first century (and beyond) is widely
considered to be environmental damage caused by the use of fossil
fuels.
It has long been known that industrialisation polluted the air and
the environment. It first came to a crisis in the UK, where the
industrial revolution began. The industrialised West Midlands became
known as the “Black Country” in the nineteenth century due to
pervasive soot blackening. London became famous for its “pea-
souper” fogs, which came to a climax in 1952 when some 4,000
people died, largely from respiratory conditions. This led to the first
modern legislative air-quality controls—the British Clean Air Acts of
1956. Industrialisation was, however, linked to an increase in general
prosperity, and rapid economic expansion after the Second World
War made industrial pollution into a global problem. This first
became an international issue in the 1970s when Canada and the
Scandinavian countries protested at the wind-blown pollution from
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adjacent industrial countries that led to the destruction of woodland

from “acid rain” (although the phenomenon had been observed for a
century, the term was first coined in 1972). This led to the first
broad international agreement on pollution in 1979, the Convention
on Long-Range Trans-Boundary Air Pollution.
In 1972 the United Nations called the Conference on the Human
Environment, the first major conference on international
environmental issues. This was followed by the World Commission
on Environment and Development in 1983 (the “Brundtland
Commission”) which called for a response to growing concern “about
the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural
resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic
and social development.”67 It was followed by the publication of
“Our Common Future” in 1987, more commonly known as the
“Brundtland Report,” which includes the definition of sustainability
most commonly used to this day.68 In the following year, the United
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 215

Nations and the World Meteorological Organization founded the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produced
its first report in 1990, with a supplement for the United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development—also known as the
“Earth Summit”—held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. 172 countries
participated, 108 heads of state attended, and about 2,400
representatives of Non-Governmental Organisations were present.
This firmly institutionalised a desire to remedy environmental
deprivation, and the control of natural resources as a global objective
for nation states and, at the same time (and unusually), established
similar objectives for environmental activists. The IPCC’s reports on
the warming of the earth’s surface by the release of carbon dioxide
from the activities of industrial society, and the popularisation of the
term “greenhouse effect,” focused global environmental interest onto
climate change—although other critical issues such as water supply
remained as issues of international concern.
As The Economist reported in 2009: “Climate change is the hardest
political problem the world has ever had to deal with. … At issue is
the difficulty of allocating the cost of collective action and trusting
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other parties to bear their share of the burden. … climate change has
been a worldwide worry for only a couple of decades. Mankind has
no framework for it.”68 While most states recognise in principle their
responsibility to take action on the reduction of dependence on
fossil-fuels, the efficiency and continuing availability of these fuels,
together with a popular reluctance to accept either a lower standard
of living or, in the case of emerging economies, restraint on growth
that would keep their populations below the standards of developed
countries, often make the impact of the measures required politically
unacceptable.
China's Deputy Minister of the Environment, Pan Yue, spoke of
the environmental dangers of the Chinese economic miracle to the
German magazine der Spiegel in 2005:
This miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer
keep pace. Acid rain is falling on one third of the Chinese territory,

half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless,

while one fourth of our citizens does not have access to clean
drinking water. One third of the urban population is breathing
polluted air, and less than 20 per cent of the trash in cities is treated
and processed in an environmentally sustainable manner. Finally,
five of the ten most polluted cities worldwide are in China.69

In 2011 the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao unwittingly

expressed the dilemma of the state when he vowed “to meet the
people’s growing material and cultural needs, and make the lives of
commoners better and better,” while stating that China “absolutely
must not any longer sacrifice the environment for the sake of rapid
growth and reckless roll-outs.”70 If a government free from a short-
term electoral mandate cannot control the balance between its own
accepted need for environmental control with the economic
aspirations of its citizens, the problems for the liberal democracies
must be commensurately greater.
The inherently global nature of environmental damage and
reform is matched by the fact that it is the everyday actions of
individuals at a local scale that, in aggregate, has the most significant
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

impact on the environment. Power generation and fossil fuel

retrieval only amount to about one third of greenhouse gas
emissions. The remainder are made up of discretionary and lifestyle
activities such as transport, construction and industrial production.
The leading British environmental activist Jonathan Porritt makes the
interdependency of the global and the local—the glocal—quite
clear:

That which can be delivered locally and coordinated regionally,

should be. The sustainability benefits (as in reduction of damaging
environmental impacts) are substantial … But … [a] strictly rational,
function-based commitment to regionalism and localism does not
need to be accompanied by some automatic ideological abhorrence of
appropriate models of globalisation … the inherently global nature of
challenges such as climate change, demand an unprecedented

commitment to global institutions and processes without which no

solutions can possibly be forthcoming.71

In the search for remedies to the damaging effects of our energy-

consuming ways of life, commentators frequently make reference to
the local for inspiration or solutions. The same Gro Brundtland who
provided us with our default definition of sustainability in 1987, in
her later role as Director-General of the World Health Organization
in 1999, looks to indigenous peoples to:
teach us about the values that have permitted humankind to live on
this planet for many thousands of years without desecrating it …
Indigenous peoples thus collectively represent a corrective to the
environmental and social abuses of modernity; and indigenous
identity tells us as much about widely held concerns over the global
impact of reckless industrialization as it does about the people and
communities most directly endangered by it.72

In the same year, in a Guide to the World Trade Organisation, the

Canadian human rights lawyer, Steven Shrybman, associates
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environmental sustainability with cultural diversity: “Diversity is the

characteristic of nature, and the basis of ecological stability. Diverse
ecosystems give rise to diverse life forms and diverse cultures. The
co-evolution of culture, life forms and habitats has conserved the
biological diversity of the planet. Cultural diversity and biological
diversity therefore go hand in hand.”73
As the source of environmental reform moves from the global to
the local, the community itself becomes the object of the concept of
sustainability. Gabriel Chanan, Alison West, Charlie Garratt and
Jayne Humm define a sustainable community in Regeneration and
Sustainable Communities in 1999:
A sustainable community could be described as one in which there
exists, from a mixture of internal and external sources, a self-
renewing basis of economic viability, quality of services and social
capital sufficient to support a good quality of life for all inhabitants,
improve conditions and opportunities where they are inadequate,

face new problems creatively as they arise, and pass on to future

inhabitants the tangible and intangible assets to achieve the same or
higher standards.74

Critical Regionalism: the Modernist Response

to Localism
Reflexive Modernism, with its conscious reference to the legacy of
Modernism, lacked a ready means for expressing local identity. The
invention of the term the “International Style,” although largely
dropped by the 1960s, did nonetheless express an underlying belief
in the universal nature of technologically-driven progress and its
uniform outcomes. It was, as Alfred Barr said in 1932, a
“contemporary style, which exists throughout the world … unified
and inclusive.”75
There was, nonetheless, a strand of Modernism that was
concerned with local or regional expression. This has been carefully
recorded and classified by the husband-and-wife architectural
historians Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre.
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The tension between the universal aspirations of Modernism and

the idea of something particular to a place that would necessarily
have an historical character was recognised by one of the earliest
exponents of modernist regionalism, Lewis Mumford, the notable
historian of technology, architecture and urbanism. In 1931, writing
on regional planning, Mumford identified:
… two elements in every architecture … one of them is the local
… which adapts itself to special human capacities and
circumstances, that belongs to a particular people and a particular
soil and a particular set of economic and political institutions. Let us
call this the regional element … The other element is the universal:
this element passes over boundaries and frontiers … Without the
existence of that universal element, which usually reaches its highest
and widest expression in religion, mankind would still live only at
the brute level.76

Ten years later, he was very careful to make sure that the expression
of the local that “belongs to a particular people” had to be seen in
relation to, what he called, “The great lesson of history … that the
past cannot be recaptured except in spirit,” going on to make it quite
clear that with any expression of regionalism, “our task is not to
imitate the past, but to understand it, so that we may face the
opportunity of our own day and deal with them in an equally creative
spirit.”77
Even this explicitly modernist stipulation was not enough to
convince many of the more dogmatic internationalists. One of the
fathers of Modernism, Walter Gropius, referred to Mumford’s
regionalism in 1948 as based on “chauvinistic sentimental national
prejudice.”78 In 1959, an attempt by the British-Swedish architect
Ralph Erskine to create an architecture adapted to sub-arctic
conditions would be attacked by the British Brutalist architect, Peter
Smithson, saying: “In your work you should endeavour to be a bit
less like Walt Disney, for instance, and a bit more like Charles
Eames.”79 For modernists, there was an ever-present danger of
unwittingly interpreting local or regional features too literally. To
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avoid an accusation of sentiment or imitation, even regionalists

would have to display originality and, to the uninitiated, this could
disguise their regionalist intentions. The Turkish architectural
historian, Suha Ozkan ,wrote in 1985 that:
Compared to buildings and projects of the architectural avant-garde,
the referential tendency of some regionalist practices has given
regionalism something of a conservative reputation. Such is the
power of the new and modern culture’s drive toward it at any cost,
including the need for continuity. This often makes architects
reluctant to promote themselves as regionalists.80

In spite of professional criticism, there was a feeling amongst some

modernists, such as Ernesto Rogers and Richard Neutra, that their
architecture could and should be capable of expressing something
particular to the region in which it was built. In 1981 Tzonis &
Lefaivre, in their essay “The Grid and the Pathway,” called this
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220 Part IV

localising tendency “Critical Regionalism.” They added the word

“critical” specifically to guard against the idea of regionalism being
“transported back to its obsolete, chauvinistic outlook.”81 It was
important for them that “regionalism is seen as an engagement with
the global, universalizing world rather than by an attitude of
resistance.”82
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Figure 46. Torre Velasca, Milan; Ernesto Rogers; 1958.

International Modernism was occasionally moderated to make explicit

references to local character.

When Postmodernism and its particular use of historical elements

became fashionable in the 1980s, the use of historical elements in the
name of local identity created the kind of architecture that the
modernist regionalists had feared. Postmodernists, such as Michael
Graves, promoted a more literal interpretation of the architecture

that belonged to, what Mumford had called, “a particular people.”83

Graves wrote in 1982: “It is crucial that we re-establish the thematic
associations invented by our culture in order to fully allow the
culture of architecture to represent the mythic and ritual aspirations
of society.”84 In the following year the critic Kenneth Frampton
sought to re-claim regionalism for Modernism. He took up the
expression “Critical Regionalism” from Tzonis and Lefaivre in an
influential paper, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an
Architecture of Resistance.”85
Frampton’s paper was inspired by his reading of an essay by the
French Philosopher Paul Ricœur, “Universal Civilization and
National Cultures,” first published in English in 1965. Ricœur wrote
and was quoted by Frampton: “There is the paradox: how to become
modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old dormant
civilization and take part in universal civilization.”86 To solve this
paradox, Frampton tried to steer a middle route “which distances
itself equally from the Enlightenment myth of progress and from the
reactionary, unrealistic impulse to return to the architectonic forms
of the preindustrial past.”87 The former was, of course, conventional
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Modernism and the latter the more literally historical elements of

Postmodernism, very much to the fore at the time of writing. Over
time he would be less equitable. In later versions of his paper he
shifted in the direction of Modernism, saying: “There remains a solid
and liberating heritage lying within the complex culture that we
generally subsume under the term the Modern Movement. It is
nothing short of reactionary folly to abandon the liberative, critical,
and poetic traditions of this century on the ground of a retardaire
fashion.” He wanted to be clear that “regionalism should not be
sentimentally identified with the vernacular.”88
For Frampton:
the fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the
impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from
the peculiarities of a particular place. It is clear from the above that
Critical Regionalism depends on maintaining a high level of critical

self-consciousness. It may find its governing inspiration in such

things as the range and quality of local light, or in a tectonic derived
from a peculiar structural mode, or in the topography of a given site
[emphasis in original].89

Regionalism, in this interpretation, is to design specifically for the

location inspired by, rather than imitating, what was found in the
locality. It may only express “history in … a geological and
agricultural sense.” He believes that “‘in-laying’ the building into the
site, has many levels of significance, for it has a capacity to embody,
in built form, the prehistory of the place, its archaeological past and
its subsequent cultivation and transformation across time.” He is,
parenthetically, anxious to ensure that “the idiosyncrasies of place
find their expression without falling into sentimentality.”90
For many architects, when Modernism was re-emerging as the
dominant philosophy and Postmodernism was in decline, Frampton’s
Critical Regionalism provided a welcome counterbalance to an
emerging awareness that globalisation was delivering a disturbing
worldwide uniformity. It has become quite routine for architects to
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describe their work as locally responsive, whether or not they make

any reference to Frampton.
The Malaysian ecological architect Ken Yeang and the British
modernist Alison Brooks are quite explicit about the relationship of
their work to Critical Regionalism. Other architects, such as the
Australian Glen Murcutt and the Indian architect Raj Rewal, while
heralded by Critical Regional theorists, use the same language as
Frampton without specifically identifying themselves in the same
terms. Murcutt, influenced by Mies van der Rohe and Alar Aalto,
describes his work as:
addressing the hydrology, it’s addressing the geomorphology. It’s
addressing the typography, the wind patterns, light patterns,
altitude, latitude, the environment around you, the sun movements.
It’s addressing the summer, the winter and the seasons in between.
It’s addressing where the trees are, and where the trees are will tell
you about the water table, the soil depth, climatic conditions.91

Figure 47. Menara Mesiniaga Tower, Kuala Lumpur; Ken Yeang; 1992. The first
“bioclimatic” tower that provides regional identity by responding to regional climatic
conditions.
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Figure 48. Indian Parliament Library, New Delhi; Raj Rewal; 2003. Modernist
design that seeks to express the essence of the region while avoiding past historical
styles.

Critical Regionalism, a modernist acknowledgement of local character

that relies on a response to site-specific features while avoiding direct
references to past architecture.

Rewal says, “We have to re-invent modernity in terms of our own

traditions and cultural heritage. It is an important task to search for a
modern architectural language, which responds to our requirements,
lifestyle, climate and building materials.”92
Tzonis & Lefaivre continue to catalogue the architects and
projects that they believe conform to the principles of Critical
Regionalism.93 The list is wide and sometimes surprising. It ranges
from the Italian pioneer of High Tech architecture, Renzo Piano and
the Spanish star architect, Santiago Calatrava, to the Israeli
contextualist, Moshe Safdie, and the Texan modern traditionalist,
Leslie Elkins. Although many architects will not define themselves as
Critical Regionalists, Tzonis & Lefaivre have clearly identified an
ideological undercurrent in Modernism that, boosted by the
polemical work of Frampton, has come to prominence in the New
Global Era as architects seek to retain the formal heritage and
production of unprecedented outcomes that they inherited from
Modernism, while responding to the call for local distinctiveness.

Sustainability and Locality

Critical Regionalism gives a potential theoretical framework to the

use of the energy-saving aspects of design and the adaptation of the
building to local climatic conditions.
As international attention came to focus on the detrimental effect
of the use of fossil fuels on the environment and the likely impact on
the climate, many architects became enthusiastic promoters of
sustainable building practice. This filled the moral vacuum that had
existed in the profession since the loss of confidence in Modernism of
the 1970s and 1980s. Figures claiming that buildings consume
between thirty per cent and fifty per cent of total fossil-fuel energy in
the developed world were, and continue to be, widely quoted,94
encouraging a sense of guilt and a desire to make amends. Presented
in this form the figures misrepresent the role of new building. It is
primarily the activities that take place in the built environment that
consume this level of energy rather than the act of construction. As
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 225

much human activity takes place within buildings, the figure is hardly
surprising. Unoccupied buildings would consume very little if any
energy. Nonetheless, new construction and the performance
efficiency of buildings have their part to play in the consumption of
fossil fuels and the output of carbon dioxide.
While environmental issues had been an international concern
since the first “Earth Day” in 1970, the 1992 UN Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro put sustainability on the international political agenda.
Following the Summit, Agenda 21 was published which included the
Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. This loosely
worded portmanteau document included Principle 4: “In order to
achieve sustainable development, environmental protection shall
constitute an integral part of the development process and cannot be
considered in isolation from it.”95 Sustainable development became a
definitively global concern and subsequent research, conferences and
reports had an increasing impact on architects around the world.
A UK government agency, the Building Research Establishment
(BRE), produced the world’s first comprehensive environmental
assessment method for buildings in 1990, called the BRE
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Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM). Two years later the

Earth Summit was attended by the newly-elected president of the
American Institute of Architects (AIA), and environmental
sustainability became a mainstream mission for American architects.
The International Union of Architects and AIA conference in 1993
was themed on sustainability, and the AIA played a key role in
President Clinton’s symbolic “Greening of the White House” in the
following year. The US Green Building Council was formed and
undertook five years of research before it launched the Leadership in
Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) as a “voluntary, consensus
based, market-driven” energy efficiency rating system.
Other nations took up the cause. LEED was adopted in a number
of other countries. There are nineteen associated national Green
Building Councils applying the same system. Canada and Mexico,
two countries in NAFTA (the North American Free Trade
Agreement), have joined. Others range from India and Russia to
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226 Part IV

Brazil and Argentina and include six European countries, South

Korea and Turkey. BREEAM has been taken on in six European
countries and Israel. The BRE has signed a memorandum of
agreement with the French Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment
(CSTB) to align BREEAM standards and methodologies with the
CSTB’s Haute Qualité Environnementale (HQE) which was initiated in
1996. Australia has introduced its own system, Green Star building
rating, and New Zealand adopted the same measures with local
modifications.
In Germany, in common with many north European countries,
high insulation standards had been in place since the 1970s and are
administered through a complex series of State regulations,
Landesbauordnungen (Building Code of the States), guided by the
Federal Musterbauordnung (Model Building Code). In 1988, however,
Professor Bo Adamson from Sweden, and Wolfgang Feist of the
Institut für Wohnen und Umwelt (Institute for Housing and the
Environment, Germany) began work on a much more comprehensive
“Passivhaus” standard, funded by the German State of Hesse. The
Passivhaus-Institut was created in 1996 to promote and control
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Passivhaus standards. This sophisticated system has been widely used

for domestic buildings in German-speaking and other European
countries.
These environmental tests for new building construction were
voluntary. Their development was part of a growing concern at the
scientific information that was being released about greenhouse
gasses, pollution and climate change. By the late 1990s the
professional enthusiasm for sustainable building meant that few
architects would risk opprobrium by challenging the need to build
more sustainably, and many architects took on or proclaimed a
positive commitment to reducing greenhouse gasses.
This visionary phase of environmentalism entered a new stage
when the international political community agreed to take collective
action to address the dangers of global warming. Following the 1992
Rio Earth Summit it was agreed that the signatories of the
“Framework Convention on Climate Change” would meet at a series
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 227

of “Conferences of the Parties” to work on the implementation of the

Convention’s objectives. In 1997, at the third of these conferences in
Japan, the Kyoto Protocol was drawn up.96 The Protocol was signed
by 160 countries and, by 2011, had been joined by another 31; the
USA refused to commit. The document was to come into force in
2005 and, in order to achieve “stabilization of greenhouse gas
concentrated in the atmosphere,” required the developed-nation
signatories to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions collectively to
levels 5.2 per cent below the 1990 level—the quantity varying
considerably between nations. While there is no specific reference to
building design or construction, the Protocol includes a requirement
to “implement policies and means to promote sustainable
development,”97 and notes that “adaptation technologies and methods
for improving spatial planning would improve adaptation to climate
change.”98 From 1997—but most particularly since 2005—
environmental sustainability in building design and construction
changed from being a voluntary activity supported by enthusiasts to a
regulatory requirement.
In spite of the very public professional enthusiasm for sustainability
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in architecture and the genuine commitment of some firms that have

taken it on as a speciality, the significance of the phenomenon has not
been matched by a significant change in aesthetics. It has become
almost routine for designs to be presented as sustainable and, in
recent years in some countries, it has become an obligation.
Architects were, however, reluctant to change their aesthetic
preferences. Catherine Slessor, in her book Eco-Tech, observed that
environmental performance is “not so evident in the physical form of
architecture, but in its attendant technologies, whether in the
development of new materials and products, or in the use of
traditional materials in different ways.”99 Improved energy
conservation is often due to the engagement of talented environmental
engineers who devise complex mechanical and passive systems
without affecting the architect’s conventional design principles.

It is, for example, well established that glass-walled buildings

have poor environmental characteristics100 and are likely to be harder
to build as environmental regulations increase. Professor Steve
Rayner, researching technology and climate changes at Oxford, has
predicted that “making buildings out of glass is going to become a
historical phenomenon … big glass office buildings will become
pariah buildings.”101 The glass wall is, however, a definitive
characteristic of modernist buildings and will not be surrendered
easily. Catherine Slessor notes that “since the technical and
commercial development of large-scale glass envelopes during the
second half of the nineteenth century, the notion of transparency has
exerted a seductive hold on the architectural imagination.”102 A
director of the British architects ORMS said, in response to the
unsuitability of glass façades in 2010, “Architecture needs to be
optimistic as well as sustainable, and glass in its widest sense is one of
the most exciting materials we have.”103
A new glass-walled tall building in New York, 1 Bryant Park
Tower (figure 49), has achieved the highest level of LEED
certification by its innovative engineering rather than its architecture:
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The new building employs a system for rainwater catchment and

reuse, greywater recycling, energy efficient building systems, and
high performance glass which maximizes day-lighting and minimizes
solar heat gain and loss … the state-of-the-art, onsite 4.6-megawatt
cogeneration plant … provides a clean and efficient power source
for the building’s energy requirements, significantly reducing its
reliance on the NYC grid. The system also perfectly complements a
… cooling system that produces and stores ice during off-peak
hours, and then uses the ice phase transition to help cool the
building during peak load. Another …. innovation is the air
purification system not only is the air entering the building purified
to a high standard, but the air exhausted is also cleaned.104

Frank Gehry, who is critical of the LEED system, boasts of his use of
glass in Switzerland by relying only on local regulations: “We built it
entirely out of glass and cooled it with a geothermal system.”105

As with glass, the tall building as an expression of technological

advancement has been a definitive modernist product from its
theoretical origins. The opportunities for high-impact and iconic
status have made the form particularly attractive in the New Global
Era. Anthony Wood of The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban
Habitat (CTBUH) confirms that “the skyline is seen as an important
symbol to portray that a country has arrived on the scene and is a
First World country.” The CTBUH record that the previous decade
had been the single greatest period on tall building construction in
history, with 350 skyscrapers constructed since 2001.106 David Scott
of Arups, the international engineers and architects, reported in
2006, that it is “a very interesting, important time for tall building
design.” At first sight, these large, highly engineered, energy
dependent, air-conditioned buildings would seem to be the antithesis
of energy-saving design. For architects wishing to maintain their
sustainable stance, it is, therefore, important to reconcile these
apparently opposing positions. As David Scott goes on to claim: “new
technologies, and a greater understanding of how these buildings
perform under normal and extreme conditions, are making tall
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buildings more robust, more efficient and more sustainable.”107 If

leading architects are to compete in this market and maintain their
position on sustainability they have an urgent interest in promoting
the environmental performance of tall buildings. Norman Foster’s
1997 Commerzbank Headquarters in Frankfurt is often listed for its
use of natural light and opening windows, whereas some of these
were Frankfurt regulatory requirements.108 Foster’s 30 St Mary Axe
office building in London (figure 50) is described on his website as
“London’s first ecological tall building.” He states that “the higher the
building, the more viable it becomes … by bringing together
different functions, we can balance energy needs across these uses,
generating even greater environmental benefits.”109 Renzo Piano
defends the design of the tallest building in Europe in London, called
“The Shard of Glass”— which houses eighteen floors of luxury hotel,
twelve floors of high-value apartments, three floors of restaurants
and twenty-four floors of offices—on its small land-take by saying
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230 Part IV

that “the earth is fragile and must be defended. The first thing to
defend is land.”110 SOM describe their seventy-one storey Pearl River
Tower in Guangzhou in southern China as a design that “redefines
what is possible in sustainable design by incorporating the latest
green technology and engineering advancements.”111
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Figure 49. Bank of America Tower, 1 Bryant Park, New York; Cook + Fox
Architects; 2009. A glass tower block with highest US energy sustainability rating.

Engineering ingenuity and energy-loss measurement protocols

have enabled conventional modernist building types to claim high
levels of sustainability.

These are not universally accepted views. Sources with no vested

interest in the promotion of tall buildings have reached different
conclusions. A comparative analysis of buildings of different heights
in Melbourne in 2001 discovered that, “the two high-rise buildings
have approximately 60 per cent more energy embodied per unit
gross floor area (GFA) in their materials than the low-rise
buildings.”112 There are no universally accepted measurements for
embodied energy or longevity (the energy required to make and
bring all the parts of a building to the site and the time before the
exercise has to be repeated) and so they are often missed out of
energy-use calculations. A special report for the British Government
in 2002 concluded that: “The proposition that tall buildings are

necessary to prevent suburban sprawl is impossible to sustain. They

do not necessarily achieve higher densities than mid or low-rise
development and in some cases are a less-efficient use of space than
alternatives … Tall buildings are more often about power, prestige,
status and aesthetics than efficient development.”113
Adaptation of these and other buildings to improve environmental
performance has, nevertheless, had some impact on the way
conventional modernist elements are designed. The loose principles
of Critical Regionalism, whereby any adaptation to the conditions of
the site can be an expression of regional character, gives an
opportunity for the architect to make a more or less abstracted
gesture to the locality of the building.
To avoid the solar heat gain that affects glass-walled buildings, the
glass itself can be covered with a coating or opaque pattern, or
perforated shading screens can be placed in front of the glass. These
features give opportunities for decorative patterns that have some
local inspiration. Arata Isosaki has a geometric screen around his
Liberal Arts and Sciences Building in Doha, Qatar, as an
interpretation of Islamic tile patterns. Foreign Office Architects’
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John Lewis Store in the English city of Leicester has an abstracted

lace pattern to signify the historic lace production from the area
(figure 51). Jean Nouvel’s One New Exchange office building in
London has a pattern of applied patches, or frits, with a colour range
inspired by the surrounding buildings.
Nothing more than the response to orientation, local shading or
climate can be sufficient for the architect to claim that a new building
responds to the locality. Ken Yeang has said: “The local and climactic
response is the local identity. Every site is different and by
responding to the locality we create a natural identity.”114 Lee
Polisano, when design director of Kohn Pederson Fox, stated that
“Local form becomes local by the manifestation of local circumstances.
When the building is designed for orientation and climate, when the
front and back are in the local context, we create a new local context
into which other buildings can be built.”115 Peter Oborn, Deputy
Chairman of Aedas Europe, combines both climate and shading
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 233

screen when he describes his firm’s response to local identity. He

believes that “sustainability becomes a form of localism.”116 Aedas’s
twin towers of the Abu Dhabi Investment Council Headquarters have
sophisticated active shading screens and these “reflect the cultural
identity of the Middle East with a rationalised geometry based on
traditional screens placed around a contemporary design, which is
based on a climatic response.”117

Identity and Reflexive Modernism

Any response to what is locally distinctive must be a response to the
identity of the place. The desire to make a new building something
that adds to the identity of where it is built is an almost universal
desire for any architect who wants to create something that will be
other than invisible. This will make the new building or complex of
buildings identifiable and it may also—but not necessarily—reinforce
the identity of the place in which it is built. The identity of the
surroundings of a new building is, unless it is part of the construction
of an entirely new place, something that exists. To respond to this
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identity positively is to enter into some relationship with it. This has
become a stated intention of many architects, often reacting
consciously or unconsciously to the observation that much modern
architecture ignores, compromises or destroys the identity of
established towns and cities.
In 2002, Larry Oltmann, London design director of the American
architects SOM, declared that he is “adamant that as international
architects we should bear the responsibility for helping to preserve
cultural identities.”118 In 2007, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, the Spanish
partner of the British architects Foreign Office Architects, describes his
approach to different locations: “We territorialise ourselves, try to
become locals in each place,” and compares each project to how “a
particular grape will grow in ways that will produce different
flavours.”119 In 2009 the British international architect, David
Chipperfield, tells us that “certain contexts spark something that is
resonant.”120 In the same year, the Finnish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa
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234 Part IV

Figure 51. John Lewis Store, Leicester, England; Foreign Office Architects; 2008.
Glass-walled department store given local identity by applying a decorative screen
outside the glazing with a pattern based on the town’s historic lace industry.
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Figure 52. Apartment building, Johannisstrasse in Mitte, Berlin: J. Mayer H; 2012.

Local identity drawn from the imaginative interpretation of the architect.

Architects can include their personal interpretation of the locality

in their designs and apply it in an abstracted form.

says, “I speak for an architecture that arises from an acknowledgement

of its historical, cultural, societal and mental soil.”121
This widely expressed concern is often a direct reaction to the
potentially negative impact of large or iconic buildings. The
Malaysian-British architect C. J. Lim is “concerned about the impact
of large projects on human habitation, culture and tradition.”122 The
German architect Stefan Benisch believes that “one of the biggest
errors of international architecture is that we thought that we could
build the same thing everywhere” and tells us that, “we are now
more concerned with the cultural context, the climate, the
geography and so on.”123 It is clear that the interest of these architects
is with something beyond the powerful impact of iconic architecture
that makes it simply identifiable. The intention seems to be to go
further and address the way that the culture of people is tied to the
identity of their locality. While they may seek to preserve the cultural
identity of places, they are generally clear that they do not, in the
words of Pallasmaa, “support architectural nostalgia or
conservatism,”124 and, as Zaera-Polo has said, will “look at local
specificities in a way that is not bound by tradition.”125
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The intention behind these architectural principles is to respond

to the relationship between the identity of a locality and the way
local people identify with their surroundings in the design of new
buildings. It is also, in accordance with modernist thinking,
something more than a simple physical similarity with the existing
surroundings. This sets up a potentially complex relationship
between the way that architects interpret local identity and how the
population take their identity from their locality
In the predominant architectural culture of Reflexive Modernism
a methodology and outcome that goes beyond simple physical
similarity will be adopted. There seem to be two current techniques:
the spirit of place or “site-specific design,” and “symbolic identity” or
the architect’s personal discovery of local symbolism. The two
techniques can be used independently or in combination but the
process behind each of them is distinct.

Site-specific design is Critical Regionalism. Ken Yeang of

Llewellyn Davis Yeang calls this “systemic identity.”126 The British
Architect, Alison Brooks, described this succinctly as an abstract
reaction to “found conditions.”127
Symbolic identity is the choice of a symbolic aspect of a design
that seems to be in some way relevant to the location. This was
described by the Berlin conceptual architect, Jurgen Mayer, as
finding “certain elements that are local that we could interpret and
make into something architecturally new”128 (figure 52). The choice
of symbolism is usually personal. Brooks believes that she must
“bring her own personal obsessions” to her designs.129 Mayer says
that, while there always a client and city, “the architect has to make
the proposal.”130 Yang tells us that “the only way you can get through
the complexity of design is to be intuitive.”131 Zaera-Polo resorts to
“the sublime, a physically exciting form to project the things around
to a higher level.”132 In none of these responses is there any reference
to an attempt to analyse or discover the way the relevant community
or communities see the identity of their place. On the contrary,
Sheila O’Donnell of the Irish firm, O’Donnell and Tuomey, tells us
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that “We find that people want the details [of their town] but we
want to look at the way people did things in the past—the landscape,
the climate” [emphasis as spoken].133
The design of the Scottish Parliament building in 1998 brought
together with remarkable clarity the political, social and architectural
issues of the identity of place, architecture and community in the
New Global Era.
The Parliament building was commissioned to house the new
Scottish Parliament following the devolution of limited legislative
powers from the United Kingdom to the Scottish nation as a result of
a referendum in 1997. While a neo-classical building had been fitted
out for a Scottish parliament at the time of a previous but failed
referendum in 1979, the inaugural holder of the new position of First
Minister of Scotland and champion of devolution, Donald Dewar,
dismissed this as a “nationalist shibboleth.” A decision was made that
a modern building should be built, in the words of the Devolution
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 237

Minister Henry McLeish, as “a forward-thinking modern Parliament

for the new Millennium.” Dewar wanted the building to be “a
tangible symbol of this new democratic adventure.”134
Dewar announced a limited competition for the design of the new
building, to be placed opposite the Royal Palace of Holyrood, so that
there would be “world-class creative talent brought to bear on
developing a Parliament building that is fit for the Millennium and
beyond.”135 The competition was won by the Catalan architect, Enric
Miralles y Moya with a design that, according to Dewar, “sits in the
land because it belongs in the land.”136 Miralles’ design for the
complex of buildings did not make an assertive physical presence but
sat low within the landscape of surrounding hills. It was, nonetheless,
intended to be an icon for the newly assertive Scottish nation.
The choice of a Catalan architect had a particular, possibly
accidental, significance. Catalonia was also a nation within a state that
was actively seeking autonomy. At this time, the Catalonian capital,
Barcelona, was also the most fashionable city in Europe since its
dramatic regeneration before and after the 1992 Olympic Games
under its visionary mayor, Pasqual Maragall. (Maragall had not only
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made the city a major tourist destination, he had employed so many

star architects that in 1999 the Royal Institute of British Architects
broke a 150-year tradition when, instead of awarding its annual Gold
Medal for architecture to a famous architect, it was given to the City
of Barcelona).
Sadly, both Dewar and Miralles died two years later when the
building work had just begun. Fortunately for the project, Miralles
and his wife and architect-partner, Benedetta Tagliabue, had
completed the design before his death.
In 1999 Miralles said, “We don't want to forget that the Scottish
Parliament will be in Edinburgh, but will belong to Scotland, to the
Scottish land. The Parliament should be able to reflect the land it
represents.”137 Tagliabue tells of the architects’ search for an
appropriate symbolism for Scottish identity. She discusses the way
the building sits in the land: “We wanted something really Scottish to
be part of the building … earth is a really Scottish thing and an
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238 Part IV

amphitheatre is about parliament … it is about the movement of

earth.”138 Miralles and Tagliabue spent some time travelling around
Scotland in search of Scottish identity: “We looked at national
identity. How did we dare look at Scotland? It’s not just castles, it’s
other things, like boats constructed in towns and then going away. So
the debating chamber is this wooden thing, like a boat. It is Scottish,
so people are making decisions inside a boat.”139 There is no tradition
of Scottish identity, real or invented, that employs this symbolism. In
addition to the use of the abstracted imagery of boats under
construction, the building’s facades have an irregular pattern of a
repeated abstract shape. This is a very distinctive and regular feature,
but its meaning was not at first identified by the architects and locals
gave it their own, mildly humorous, names: anvil, hammer and
hairdryer. It has subsequently been revealed that the shape was
Miralles highly abstracted profile of Henry Raeburn’s eighteenth-
century painting, The Skating Minister.
The opening of the building was marred by a three-year
programme overrun and a massive over-spend from an original (and
quite unrealistic) budget of £50 million to a final cost of £430
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million. The building received six international architectural awards

but was voted amongst the twelve most disliked buildings in Britain
in a popular television vote in 2005.140 While for many in Scotland
the building symbolises the new independence of the nation
regardless of its appearance, the Scottish National Tourist
Organisation invites visitors to “admire the eco-design” but describes
its appearance cautiously as “arguably stylish design and controversial
architecture” (figure E).
In common with many buildings which promote the symbolic
identity of the locality or community, the Scottish Parliament has
been a largely private matter for the intuition of the architect.
Identity is expressed with abstracted or naturalistic metaphor or
analogy. In much the same way, Alejandro Zaera-Polo describes
Foreign Office Architects’ choice of abstracted lacework imagery for
the John Lewis Store in Leicester, England, as an attempt to
“synthesise identity.” These abstractions are rarely direct allusions to
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 239

past buildings. An explicit assertion of newness and originality is a

consistent concern. Sheila O’Donnell prefaced her remarks about
what people want (above) with the statement that “We want to
relate to the context but not look like buildings of the past.”141 Zaera-
Polo states that “Every building we do is not like what is already
there but the technologies and possibilities of today make a new
identity.”142 Ken Yeang believes that “avoiding pastiche” is critical and
that you must “reinterpret in a modern way.”143 Alison Brooks
believes that “the authentic is genuine and original and if you do this
anywhere in the world you will give identity.”144 Jurgen Mayer tells
us that “forward-looking innovation should be the driving force for
identity in the future.”145
Reflexive Modernism, as the inheritor of the avant-garde
principles of Modernism, maintains a suspicious distance from public
opinion. The British architect Piers Gough believes that, “great art
and architecture of the world has always been produced against the
norm and that forwarding the art of architecture is the point of
having architects,” adding that “architecture is a public art but it’s far
too important to be left to the public.”145 The leader of the British
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architectural establishment, Lord Rogers (Richard Rogers),

maintains that “architecture … has to be judged by those who are
qualified to judge it.”146 The Czech architect, Eva JiƎiēná, feels that
“it’s in the nature of people to be conservative,” and that “architects
have to fight that.”147 This makes any attempt to relate to the often
straightforward identity of communities with the physical appearance
of their surroundings difficult.
Some theorists go so far as to promote a positive disconnection
from a cultural past to allow universal modernity to become a
culturally non-specific receptacle for the identity of those who have
been in some way deterritorialised: “Avant-garde design schemes—
like built heritage in the past—may provide all culturally different
social groups and individuals with a ‘spatial membership’.”148 It is also
asserted, with some credibility, that “residents of neighbourhoods
near prominent landmarks … are more likely to have stronger
emotional bonds to where they live.”149 It is, however, questionable
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240 Part IV

that professionally discrete symbolic identity will provide ordinary

citizens with any protection from the current threat that globalisation
poses to their identity. The French urban designer and academic,
Claire Parin, explains the problem: “The mobility of people and the
communication of information seem destined to develop without
limits, it appears that in whatever cultural context, there is even
more demand for material reference points that provide continuity
with past times. This suggests that the question of retaining local
identity in a globalizing world is central to the design of local space
and place. It seems, however, to be a question that is beyond
answering effectively within the practical and symbolic value systems
that usually apply in the production of contemporary urban
projects.”150

Contextual Urbanism
Buildings individually or collectively can change the identity of a
place, but there can be no greater threat to local identity than the
loss of the place itself. Post-war reconstruction in Europe and the
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growth of the consumer economy in the USA, combined with a rapid

expansion of car ownership and a belief in the benefits of
development, all had a major impact on the North Atlantic countries
in the 1950s and 1960s. The destructive effect of development on
familiar villages, towns and cities was felt across society, and
transcended any architectural preferences.
Urban expansion and redevelopment was driven less by urban
design than the economics of demand driven by increased living
standards, the political drive for growth and housing supply, and the
technical and bureaucratic servicing of vehicular transport.
Combined with urban design theories, promulgated but untested in a
more authoritarian pre-war condition, the effect could be
devastating. While professionals could be blinded by the optimism of
their theoretical background, articulate commentators could see
what was happening and protest. It is significant that two of the most
important figures in this early identification of loss of identity of
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 241

place were journalists: the American Jane Jacobs and the Briton Ian
Nairn. Jacobs had been writing on urban issues on the editorial staff
of the Architectural Record since 1952, but gave her first lecture on the
destructive effects of urban development on community life at the
inaugural urban design conference at Harvard University in 1956.
Nairn was a travel journalist who published a special issue of the
British journal the Architectural Review in 1955 entitled “Outrage,”
which protested at the loss of identity of places under the spread of
anonymous suburban sprawl, for which he invented the name
“subtopia.1”51 Nairn published a book on his observations in 1959152
and in 1961 Jacobs published possibly the most influential book of
the twentieth century on urban design, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities,153 which linked the breakdown of social life with the
destruction of the places where people lived.
A number of other influential publications came out at about this
time. Kevin Lynch brought out The Image of the City154 in 1960, which
describes how key built elements contribute to the popular
perception of the city. In Britain, Gordon Cullen, an architect and
journalist who had been on the editorial staff of the Architectural
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Review, took up Ian Nairn’s protest and turned it into an urban design
methodology in his 1961 book Townscape.155 Townscape became an
urban design movement in its own right centred on the uniqueness
and scale of places. Christopher Alexander and Serge Chermayeff
published Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of
Humanism156 in 1963, which proposed a more human-based
organisation of public, semi-public and private space in urban
design.
By the 1980s the same economic, political and technical forces as
those of the 1960s continued to drive urban development, and the
ideas of these thinkers had only a limited impact on the urban
condition. Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander continued to
publish regularly and develop their ideas. Gordon Cullen entered
into practice in 1983 and was commissioned for urban studies of
Docklands in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Oslo. In the 1980s

the Krier brothers from Luxembourg, Rob and Léon, began to have
an impact on urban design theory and practice.
Rob Krier, the elder of the brothers by eight years, began
teaching in Stuttgart in 1973, becoming professor of architecture at
the Vienna University of Technology in 1976, and setting up his own
practice in the same year. He practiced as a sculptor, architect and
urban designer. He published his first book, Stadtraum [Urban
Space],157 in 1975. His book analyses historic cities and their spatial
arrangement, provides a critique of how Modernist planning has
ignored the lessons of history, and provides a methodology for
contextual urban design. He has continued to publish architectural
and urban theory, and has undertaken a number of urban and
architectural projects, principally in Germany and Holland.
Léon Krier went to work with the postmodernist architect James
Stirling in Britain in 1968, and remained in England for twenty years.
He left Stirling’s office after three years and taught at the
Architectural Association and the Royal College of Art in London.
He became one of a number of architects and theorists writing for
the journal Architectural Design (AD), which, under the ownership of
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Andreas Papadakis, was a major exponent of Postmodernism and

classicism in the 1980s. Leon Krier’s theories and drawings were
published in a special edition of AD in 1984.158 He regularly
contributed other articles. These theoretical works attacked
modernist planning, the domination of cars and the zoning of cities
and promoted a return to a dense, mixed-use and hierarchical
traditional historic urban structure. They were illustrated with
stylised line drawings illustrating buildings and cities, and supporting
polemical points in a cartoon style.
Léon Krier’s theories had been studied by the Miami husband-
and-wife architects, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who
in 1980 had been asked by a developer, Robert Davis, to plan an
inherited tract of land beside the sea in Florida. Advised by Krier, the
architects toured historic Florida towns and prepared a master plan
and design codes for a new holiday town, Seaside, in 1982 (figure
53). The design was based on the traditional timber-built small
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 243

towns of the region with relatively narrow streets, squares and alleys
centred on a public square, with community and civic buildings.
When the Duany and Plater-Zyberk plan was complete, Davis sold
most of the land to private buyers in individual lots with close
control over the design of individual houses set out in design codes.
The new town was quite unlike conventional speculative or
modernist planning in the area. The master plan received a series of
awards in the USA.
Seaside and Léon Krier came to the attention of the Prince of
Wales, heir to the UK throne, who had engaged advisers to prepare a
publication of his emerging architectural ideas, following a speech in
1984 when he had controversially attacked the British modernist
architectural establishment. In 1988, Charles decided to plan a
substantial new settlement outside the southern English town of
Dorchester on his privately owned land and, keen to put his ideas
into practice, brought in Léon Krier as his master planner. The plan
for the urban extension, Poundbury, was unveiled a year later and
was widely publicised. It continues to be built under Krier’s
supervision, and puts into practice the principles that Léon Krier and
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other traditionally orientated designers had been promoting for the

last decade (figures 54).
These designs and theories came forward at a critical time. In the
1980s, businesses had already identified the commercial value of
historic and traditional places. Gentrification had been a recognisable
phenomenon from the 1970s and was generally based on the
upgrading of attractive but degraded historic places. By the 1980s,
Saskia Sassen had identified that:
what is different from earlier episodes is the scale on which it has
taken … and the extent to which it has created a commercial
infrastructure that anyone can buy into, fully or in part. It has
engendered an ideology of consumption that is different from that of
the mass consumption of the middle classes in the postwar period
… Style, high prices, and an ultraurban context characterize the
new ideology and practice of consumption … it is a sort of new

mass consumption of style, more restricted than mass consumption

per se because of its cost and its emphasis on design and fashion.159

Figure 53. View of Seaside, Florida; master plan Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company;
1981 to present. A new holiday village planned in a traditional local style and
controlled by building codes that began the American New Urbanist movement.
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Figure 54. View of Centre, Poundbury, Dorset, England; master plan by Leon Krier;
ca 2000. The Prince of Wales’s extension to the English town of Dorchester is a
large-scale exemplar for contextual urbanism. Building design is controlled by codes
to produce a literal interpretation of traditional architecture from the region and
beyond.
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 245

Figure 55. View of Vauban district, Freiburg, Germany; Forum Vauban; 1999 to
present. A new district developed through individual projects with high standards of
building sustainability, and controlled by a community forum.

Contextual Urbanism, a new urban design movement based on a

response to local context, sustainability and community participation.

Gentrification now went beyond the improvement of residential

areas. As the sociologist Bella Dicks points out, “retailers,

restaurateurs, stadium managers and traditional cultural institutions
all began to realize the role that spectacular cultural display could
play in the environments they provided. Making the environment
visually varied and stimulating, with plenty of historic and cultural
references, was central to the strategy.”160 One of the pioneers was
the retail developer, the Rouse Company in the USA, that created
“festival marketplaces” in run-down city centres such as in the
Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston in the late 1970s, or the South
Street Seaport in Manhattan in the early 1980s (figure 56). These
successful enterprises opened up historic districts and combined
restored historic buildings, fashionable retailing and heritage tourism.
The expansion of tourism reinforced the significance of distinctive
local places. Julia Nevárez points out that this gave local
distinctiveness a commercial value:

The specific features of local identities are among the most

important resources available in the competitive marketing of
tourism. The realization of the significance of this asset leads to a
codification of this cultural inventory, and to its self-conscious
promotion as a marketable asset: local landscapes and cultures are
precisely what the tourists are prepared to pay to see and
experience.161
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Figure 56. South Street Seaport, Fulton Street, New York; 1983.

The gentrification of run-down historic areas creates up-market

fashionable new districts.

Bella Dicks sees this as a catalyst for a wider appreciation of local

distinctiveness: “tourism works to cement and promote the idea of
places having their `own' cultural identities. By this logic, the world
is divided into numerous ‘destinations’, all containing their own,
particular cultural life-world.”162 It is perhaps no coincidence that
Seaside, a town built for tourists, was a pioneer for contextual
urbanism.
By the 1990s, the need to re-establish local identity in towns and
cities was seen as a necessary response to the homogenising impact of
globalisation. Jordi Borja and Manuel Castells believed that “in a

world in which communication is becoming globalized, it is essential

to maintain distinct cultural identities in order to stimulate the sense
of belonging in a day-to-day manner to a specific society. As against
the hegemony of universalist values, the defence and construction of
distinctive identities on a historical and territorial basis is a basic
element of the meaning of society for individuals.”163 Saskia Sassen
saw a new emphasis on localisation in the increasing independence of
cities: “The national as container of social process and power is
cracked. This cracked casing opens up a geography of politics and
civics that links subnational spaces. Cities are foremost in this new
geography. The density of political and civic cultures in large cities
enables the localizing of global civil society in people's lives.”164 In
1992, taking advantage of the coincidence of the Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro and the Olympics in Barcelona in the same year, the
two city governments jointly issued the Rio-Barcelona Declaration
on the future of the city which, inter alia, stated: “We also favour
cultural differences, every city's own identity, and we believe that
city planning and architecture should emphasize these proper
symbols.”165
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This was the right moment for the formation of an urban design
movement that would promote the creation of distinctive places, use
the symbols of cultural difference, and draw on the existing character
of the locality. The coming together of the theories of the Krier
brothers, the work of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and
their American colleagues, and the high profile of the Prince of
Wales provided the necessary impetus. A series of interrelated
associations emerged in the 1990s and 2000s with overlapping
objectives and some shared membership.
The first organisation formed to promote contextual urbanism
was A Vision of Europe in Bologna in 1992. The name of the group
was a deliberate reference to the title of the Prince of Wales’s book,
A Vision of Britain, which had been published amidst great publicity in
1989.166 The Bologna-based group drew together international
practitioners and theorists that supported traditional principles in
both architecture and urban design at a series of international
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248 Part IV

conferences and exhibitions. The Prince of Wales sent a recorded

video of support for the first conference. The second conference in
1994 was entitled “The Sustainable City,” emphasising the significance
of urban design and its relationship to sustainability. In 1996 the
organisation brought together supporters from Europe, America and
Asia to prepare its “Charter of the City of the New Renaissance.” In
the five-point charter it “emphasises” that “it privileges … the
creation of villages, neighborhoods, cities and even metropolises,
marked by new structural and formal qualities that will make them
comparable to their historic counterparts,” and promises that “as a
result, the new urban and rural architecture will no longer be
defined by self-referential ‘innovative design,’ but by the imitation of
the constructive, organizational, and estetic [sic] archetypes that are
deeply rooted in every local culture.”167 A Vision of Europe was an
important assembly point for early practitioners of traditional and
contextual design but, while it continues to function, the wider
dissemination of its ideas has reduced its influence.
Following a meeting between a Norwegian urbanist organisation,
Byens Fornyelse, and British urbanists at the 2000 Vision of Europe
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conference, a new organisation was formed to create a network of

traditional architects and urbanists at a global level. The International
Network for Traditional Building Architecture and Urbanism
(INTBAU) was formed a year later, and has grown to include
eighteen national chapters from all five continents. Its short Charter
includes the statements: “Local, regional and national traditions
provide the opportunity for communities to retain their individuality
with the advance of globalisation. Through tradition we can preserve
our sense of identity and counteract social alienation. People must
have the freedom to maintain their traditions.”168 This small
organisation has 4,000 members worldwide and maintains its
objective of promoting traditional design by acting as a global
network connecting practitioners and supporters.
In the USA in 1991, the Local Government Commission called on
Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and five other American
urban designers who supported contextual urbanism to develop a set
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 249

of community principles for land-use planning that they could

promote with government officials. The Local Government
Commission is a private, non-profit organization from Sacramento,
California, that “provides inspiration, technical assistance, and
networking to local elected officials and other dedicated community
leaders who are working to create healthy, walkable, and resource-
efficient communities.” The principles, later called the “Ahwahnee
Principles for Resource-Efficient Communities,” largely concerned
sustainability but, in support of these objectives, included mixed use,
restricted use of the motor car, public transport and higher density
development—all the diametric opposite of the general direction of
post-war development in the USA. These included “Regional
Principles” stating that: “Materials and methods of construction
should be specific to the region, exhibiting continuity of history and
culture and compatibility with the climate to encourage the
development of local character and community identity.”169
The group that had been formed to write these principles decided
to continue their work and in 1993 created what they called the
“New Urbanist” movement. In that year they held their first congress
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and established their organisation as “The Congress for the New

Urbanism” (CNU). In 1996 they drew up their charter which opens
with the declaration that they “view that disinvestment in central
cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race
and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands
and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one
interrelated community-building challenge.”170 Much of the charter
sets down in more detail how the same broad principles that had
informed the Alwahee Principles could be enacted at differing urban
scales. These include, at metropolis, city, and town levels, that
“development and redevelopment of towns and cities should respect
historical patterns, precedents, and boundaries,”171 and at the block,
the street, and the building level, that “architecture and landscape
design should grow from local climate, topography, history, and
building practice.”172

The CNU became a highly organised and proselytising

organisation which has grown in influence, drawing in traditional
architects, environmental activists, retail and highway consultants,
and many others. Its Congress attendance, which tours different
cities in the USA annually, has grown from 100 to more than 1,000.
It has promoted a form of highly structured public participation
process, known in the USA as a “charrette” (from a last-minute
design studio in the French Beaux Arts architectural education
system used in the USA from the nineteenth century). The CNU has
also been active in developing design codes and has developed an
elementary biology-based species-distribution analogy for zoning,
which sets up a simple grading system of urban-to-rural densities
called “the transect.” CNU practitioners have been successful at
combining the status of the USA in the New Global Era with the
messianic mission of the CNU to export their services to other
countries. The Chief Executive of the Prince of Wales’s Foundation
for the Built Environment is a former Chairman of the CNU.
In 1998 the UK Government set up an “Urban Task Force” to
“identify causes of urban decline in England and recommend practical
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solutions to bring people back into our cities, towns and urban
neighbourhoods.” The task force, and the publication of its
conclusions, Towards an Urban Renaissance,173 published a year later,
was based on a remarkable assembly of different architectural and
urban design interests that could only have been brought together by
an invitation from central government. It was chaired by Richard
Rogers, the well-established modernist star architect, but also
included the then Chief Executive of the Prince of Wales’s
Foundation, environmentalists, developers and mainstream
architects. It even had a forward by Pasqual Maragall, by then the
former mayor of Barcelona. While it was a wide-reaching report and
was careful to avoid upsetting any vested interests, one of its key
themes was remarkably close to the objectives of the contextual
urbanists: “Urban neighbourhoods should be attractive places to live.
This can be achieved by improving the quality of design and
movement, creating compact developments, with a mix of uses,
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 251

better public transport and a density which support local services and
fosters a strong sense of community and public safety.”174 Within the
extensive text can also be found the statement that: “The future
development of urban neighbourhoods must … be based on an
understanding of their historic character.”175 This report enhanced the
significance of urban design in Britain and drew government policy
close to the principles of contextual urbanism. John Prescott, the
British Deputy Prime Minister, who had commissioned the report,
spoke at CNU Congresses in 2003 and 2007.
British urban design had a well-established history and an interest
in context dating back to the early twentieth century Garden City
Movement, and later the work of Gordon Cullen. Public
consultation techniques had been pioneered in the 1970s, and
contextual urbanism was well-established in practice by the 1980s. In
2006, British urbanists were brought together by the then president
of the Royal Institute of British Architects to bring urbanism closer to
the architectural profession. This led to the creation of the Academy
of Urbanism that was based on a specified number of first one
hundred, and then four hundred academicians. The purpose of the
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academy is to research and disseminate the principles of good

urbanism, and it is a broad-based organisation with academicians
from a wide range of disciplines, beyond architects and urban
designers. These range from local politicians and senior civil
servants, real estate and development, to engineering and academia.
The principles of the academy are broadly in line with other
contextual urbanist organisations, and include mixed use, reduced
reliance on motor vehicles, public engagement and density. They
also include specifically contextual principles such as, “The identity,
diversity and full potential of the community must be supported
spiritually, physically and visually,” and “The design of spaces and
buildings should be influenced by their context and seek to enhance
local character and heritage whilst simultaneously responding to
current-day needs, changes in society and cultural diversity.”176
Contextual urbanists were also individually active in continental
Europe. French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Greek and
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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252 Part IV

Belgian, as well as Italian, urban designers attended the early Vision

of Europe conferences. In 2003 a group of European urbanists
gathered in Bruges, called together by German contextual urbanists
and some Europeans who had been working with the American New
Urbanists, to establish a pan-European contextual urbanist group.
Although clearly related to the CNU (Andres Duany was present at
the key meetings), the new organisation avoided too close an
identification with the CNU, and decided not to refer to “new”
urbanism as this had become an American brand, and contextual
urbanism in Europe would relate to an urban context that was
historically commonplace, rather than new. In November that year
the group re-assembled in Stockholm and issued their Stockholm
Charter under the name of the Council for European Urbanism
(CEU). Its structure and content was similar to that of the CNU but
with greater emphasis on urban form and rural conditions. Most
particularly, the charter contains a specific section on Architecture
and Landscape Architecture that defines its contextual objectives. It
is in three parts:
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1. Individual buildings must be sensitively linked to their

surroundings. This issue transcends questions of style. Urban
architecture must respect the history and urban context of its
location, be diverse, and be receptive to the new;
2. Architecture and landscape design must grow from local climate,
topography, history and building practice and harmonize with and
enrich their context;
3. All buildings must provide their inhabitants with a clear sense of
location, weather, and time.177

In the preparation of all these documents, there was debate about

how to describe aesthetic objectives. It was clear to all contextual
urbanists that architecture had a significant part to play in the local
character of the places they wished to create, and that existing
character was, almost inevitably, largely made up of traditional
buildings. Many of the founding contextual urbanists were also

traditional architects. Either a genuinely held modernist viewpoint or

a fear of alienating the modernist majority in the design professions
made this a particularly sensitive subject. Léon Krier refused to sign
the CNU Charter because of its reticence on architectural issues.
While A Vision of Europe and INTBAU are explicit about the
relationship between context and traditional style, the insertion of
phrases such as “this issue transcends questions of style” in both the
CNU178 and CEU179 Charters “simultaneously responding to current-
day needs, changes in society,”180 in the Academy of Urbanism
Manifesto, and the phrase, “there is a need to embrace innovation” in
Towards an Urban Renaissance,181 were all inserted to try to make the
stylistic neutrality of these organisations clear.
An underlying suspicion in the architectural establishment about
contextual urbanism was exacerbated by the high-profile projects
that began to emerge in the late 1990s.
In Berlin, shortly after the unification of East and West Germany,
Hans Stimmann, the director of Berlin Senate Administration for
Urban Development, or city planner, was charged with the
reconstruction and re-unification of the most potent symbol of the
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failure of the Cold War. Stimmann ignored calls for a competition

for a radical new plan. He said that, “Berlin is a museum for every
failed city planning attempt since 1945, I wanted to go back to a city
structure that I call a European city. I wanted to make the city
readable again.” He went on to say, “I had a drawer and I opened it
up and pulled out the old city plan. I said: ‘It worked for 250 years.
Why do we need a new competition?’” This brought the plain-
speaking Stimmann into conflict with star architects drawn by the
unique status of the newly-unified city. Rem Koolhaas walked out of
an architectural jury and wrote accusing Stimmann of “a massacre of
architectural intelligence.”182 Daniel Libeskind wrote that “It was
soon evident that Stimmann was determined to keep us from
building anything in Berlin, even a phone booth.”183
While Seaside in Florida had a mixture of architectural styles, it
also had codes and a reputation that tended to favour traditional
design. When used as a location for the film, The Truman Show in
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254 Part IV

1998, as a fantasy representation of small-town America, this was

seen as prima facie evidence by modernists that the new town was
little more than an exercise in irrelevant nostalgia. The new
settlement at Poundbury, in keeping with the Prince of Wales’s
views on architecture, largely comprised versions of the local Dorset
county vernacular and high-style classical buildings. Having upset the
modernist establishment in Britain with his attack on Modernism in
1984, and in his 1989 book, Poundbury was at first treated with little
more than disdain. As it started to take shape and as contextual
urbanism started to become more acceptable, the profession’s
attitude changed. This can be summed up by the retirement essay of
the editor of the Architectural Review, Peter Davey, in 2005: “Visually,
results are laughable, though buildings are put together with more
care than suburban developments. But in planning terms, Poundbury
has much to reflect on.”184
Although much of the contradiction of everything that
characterised American post-war development in New Urbanism
was related to the restoration of community life through urban
structure, as advocated by Jane Jacobs, the call for increased density,
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mixed use and public transport was also influenced by the energy
conservation benefits of this form of urban design. As energy
sustainability entered the social and political mainstream in the
1990s, architecture and urban design followed, and contextual
urbanists found themselves at the forefront of sustainable urban
design. The New Urbanist Peter Calthorpe published The Next
American Metropolis185 in 1993 which linked the loss of community to
pollution and congestion. In the years that followed, there was an
outpouring of literature on sustainable development, not all from
authors associated with any of the contextual urban organisations.
Amongst these, the Australian environmental scientist Peter Newman
in 1996 published a paper “The Land Use-Transport Connection: An
Overview,”186 which referred to New Urbanism, and in 1998 the
American academic, urbanist and environmentalist, Stephen
Wheeler, published a paper on “Planning and Sustainable Living,”
which describes a sustainable city as compact with efficient land use,
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 255

less use of motor vehicles, better access, efficient use of resources, a

good living environment, a sustainable economy, a healthy social life
with community participation, and the preservation of local
culture.187 As the on-the-ground benefits of contextual urbanism
were revealed and the environmental benefits were recognised,
certain aspects of contextual urbanism began to be more widely
accepted.
As contextual urbanism entered the mainstream, schemes that do
not rely on or even encourage traditional architecture have become
more common. The new Västra Hamnen district in Malmö, Sweden,
(figure H) the Vauban district in Freiburg, Germany (figure 55), Java
Island in Amsterdam and the Stapleton Airport development in
Denver, Colorado all conform to the layout, density, mixed use and
transport principles of contextual urbanism, but do not exhibit an
obvious visual relationship with the architectural character of the
locality.
While contextual urbanism is a distinct response to the impetus
for localism stimulated by the homogenising effects of globalisation,
star architects and many other firms continue to design master plans
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laid out with wide streets, large single-use blocks and undesignated
urban space to give the maximum exposure to iconic, or would-be
iconic, buildings. Although these projects are based on fundamentally
different design principles, the vocabulary of contextual urbanism is
becoming universal. Foster+Partners can describe a gridded master
plan of glass-walled buildings as “a paradigm for clean, integrated and
sustainable future living and a rare opportunity to create a vibrant
mixed-use neighbourhood that builds on the unique urban tradition
of the city.”188 OMA describes a master plan for the residential
neighbourhood of Waterfront City in Dubai as “employing the
vernacular qualities of historic Arab settlements: an intricate and
varied composition of shaded buildings and alleyways where privacy
is embedded and public interaction inevitable … The dense building
clusters, irregular streets, and pedestrian paths connect a patchwork
of delights in this town, all of them walkable.”189 In spite of the
similarity of language, there would be very little relationship
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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256 Part IV

between the outcome of these plans and those envisaged in the

various charters and manifestos of contextual urbanist organisations.

Traditional Architecture
Traditional architecture, which sets out to respond literally to the
character of local or historic design, was closely associated with the
formation of contextual urbanist theories and organisations. In the
case of A Vision of Europe and INTBAU, they are conterminous.
Traditional architects, who never completely disappeared when
Modernism turned them into outcasts in the 1960s, emerged out of
obscurity with the advent of Postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s.
They survived the collapse of Postmodernism due to the personal
conviction of practitioners and continued demand for their work.
Moving from a sub-group of a widespread movement to the rump
of a despised and abandoned style in the early 1990s threatened the
professional position of the small number of surviving traditionalists.
Modernists, who saw the new traditionalists as the representative of
all that modernist pioneers had sought to overturn, and concerned at
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the boost they had been given by Postmodernism, again sought to

isolate them. Traditionalists created their own associations to protect
their interests. As we have seen, the conferences, exhibitions and
publications of A Vision of Europe acted as a meeting place for
traditionalists, and the lists of participants helped to define
traditionalism as a distinct movement. The Prince of Wales created
his own Institute of Architecture in London in 1993 and this became
a destination for traditional architects, urbanists and others that
shared the Prince’s views on architecture and the environment. In
the USA in 1991 the Institute of Classical Architecture was created in
New York, and became a vigorous organisation supported by a
number of successful classical architects practicing in the city and
elsewhere in the USA. It has maintained a sometimes uneasy
relationship with the CNU.
Traditional architecture has a natural association with
architectural heritage. The interest in heritage is not just an attempt
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 257

to re-create a fantasy past, but is a distinctive part of the modern

condition. This is witnessed by its place in the global growth-industry
of tourism. As the Peruvian-American sociologist, César Grana,
wrote in 1971: “The destruction of local traditions and the assault
upon ‘the past’ perpetuated by industrialization and world-wide
modernization seem to make large numbers of people susceptible to
an appetite for relics of pre-industrial life. This appetite is so intense
that it accounts in part for one of the major and most
characteristically modern industries: tourism.”190 Bella Dicks charts
the growth of heritage tourism:
It was in the 1980s that heritage audiences began to soar. Most
countries in the Euro-American axis witnessed a boom: heritage
visits in Europe, for example, rose 100 per cent between 1970 and
1991. Visits to heritage attractions in Britain rose from 52 million in
1977 to 68 million in 1991. And most commentators agree that the
years since the 1980s have continued to witness a remarkable
explosion of popular interest in heritage and the past.191

As the architect, academic and journalist Roger K. Lewis wrote in

the Washington Post: “Many of us love to visit character-laden cities.

… Much of what appeals to us about these places is traditional
architecture that is locally distinct. We admire historic buildings,
neighborhoods and communities shaped by site, climate, history,
native culture and locally available materials and construction
technology.”192 These “character-laden” places continue to be
preserved, improved and enhanced, not just because local people
identify with them, but also because they have a commercial value.
This is described by the social historian, John Allcock: “Specific
features of local identities are among the most important resources
available in the competitive marketing of tourism. The realization of
the significance of this asset leads to a codification of this cultural
inventory, and to its self-conscious promotion as a marketable asset:
local landscapes and cultures are precisely what the tourists are
prepared to pay to see and experience.”193 Place identity through
heritage is much more than nostalgia for a lost past (although it may
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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258 Part IV

be that): it is part of the economic and social condition of the New

Global Era.
The most easily identifiable category of heritage buildings and, for
many centuries, the chosen medium for expressing identity, ancestry
and status, is classical architecture. This was the dominant
architectural tradition of the North Atlantic countries before the
onset of Modernism, and traditional architecture is most frequently
associated with the classical tradition. The explicit architectural
vocabulary of classical design makes it recognisable to the untrained
eye, and makes an unambiguous association between new and
historic buildings. As a style that took on different forms over many
centuries, and had a wide geographic spread, it has the advantage of
being both specific and variable, giving a great deal of flexibility and
the opportunity for individual innovation and creativity while
remaining explicitly traditional.
As a dominant Western style in the colonial period of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was widely exported as an
expression of cultural dominance or just to create a familiar
environment for European colonists. Classicism also survived in
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Russia well into the 1960s, and was a feature of architecture in

countries that fell under Russian influence. As post-colonial
resentment fades into a distant memory, some colonial classical
buildings have become absorbed into the cultural identity of the
former colonies. Business and private travellers from the emerging
economies, exposed again to the North Atlantic culture of their
former colonisers, recognise the surviving classicism of European and
American cities and often seek to emulate it.
Modified versions of classical architecture or traces of classical
features frequently appear throughout the world, giving the style an
international character. These buildings, outside the North Atlantic
home of classicism, are often subject to local interpretation, or are
drawn from established regional variations where the colonial
powers had previously created a hybrid with local styles.

Figure 57. Souq Waqif, Doha, Qatar; Private Engineering Office, Mohamed Ali
Abdullah; restoration complete 2008. The restoration and creative reconstruction of
an historic district as a focus for local identity.
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Figure 58. Yu Garden Bazaar, Old City, Shanghai, China. A shopping area centred
on an historic garden made up of imaginative modern versions of historic
architecture.

Heritage buildings, real and reinvented, enhance the identity

of places for both inhabitants and visitors.
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260 Part IV

While all classical buildings are traditional, all traditional

buildings are by no means classical. Tradition is a universal social
phenomenon by which different and diverse cultures express and
identify themselves. Traditions vary considerably historically, and by
region or nation. It is possible to make an association with different
traditions or to combine traditions (indeed hybrid traditions are
historically common, but their mixed origins are often forgotten as
they become formalised). It is, therefore, possible for traditional
architects to follow specific national or local traditions or to move
between traditions, with more or less accuracy and understanding.
Many untrained designers include traditional elements freely and
decoratively in their buildings. Architects who identify themselves as
traditionalists may be self-taught but, conscious of being out of the
architectural mainstream, are generally enthusiasts with a scholarly as
well as a practical interest in their chosen field.
Traditional architects have been encouraged by the same
understanding of the crucial role of passive energy saving that has
enhanced the status of contextual urbanism. The use of local
materials, the lack of reliance on highly engineered products, and
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high thermal mass construction are all characteristic of traditional

design and provide thermal stability and low embodied energy
without the need to compromise user comforts.
The defining characteristic of traditional architecture, and the
subject of hostility for any professional trained as a modernist, is a
deliberate and unambiguous connection with past architecture. As
local identity is seen to stand in opposition to global uniformity, any
new buildings that explicitly share the identity of existing buildings
will, unavoidably, be seen as a reinforcement of the threatened
identity of a place. Mike Featherstone describes how local culture is
linked to the pre-existing identity the physical environment:
Usually, a local culture is perceived as being a particularity which is
the opposite of the global. It is often taken to refer to the culture of
a relatively small, bounded space in which the individuals who live
there engage in daily, face-to-face relationships. Here the emphasis

is upon the taken-for-granted, habitual and repetitive nature of the

everyday culture of which individuals have a practical mastery. The
common stock of knowledge at hand with respect to the group of
people who are the inhabitants and the physical environment
(organization of space, buildings, nature, etc.) is assumed to be
relatively fixed; that is, it has persisted over time and may
incorporate rituals, symbols and ceremonies that link people to a
place and a common sense of the past. This sense of belonging, the
common sedimented experiences and cultural forms which are
associated with a place, is crucial to the concept of a local culture.194

These cultural forms, be they buildings, ceremonies or relationships

are unlikely to be entirely fixed or literal representations of a
common past. Events and lifestyles will change and, while societies
may wish to maintain continuity, they will be affected by the same
outside forces that they may wish to resist. Tradition is, however,
continuity with the past and not historical repetition. As the urban
historian Christine Boyer says:
The name of a city’s streets and squares, the gaps in its very plan
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and physical form, its local monuments and celebrations, remain as

traces and ruins of their former selves. They are tokens or
hieroglyphs from the past to be literally reread, reanalyzed, and
reworked over time. Images that arise from particular historic
circumstances come to define our sense of tradition; they literally
manage our knowledge of the historic.195

To make a connection with these tokens of the past a new building

must have a sufficiently clear relationship with that past to be
recognised by those with whom the connection is important. To be
recognisable, the relationship with past buildings, while it may not be
identical, will at least be clearly expressed in decoration or form and
this relationship between the past its modern representation will be
symbolic. The sociologist Anthony Cohen describes the role of
symbolic identity in the resistance to global homogeneity:
The interrelated processes of industrialization and urbanization, the
dominance of the cash economy and mass production, the
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262 Part IV

centralization of markets, the spread of the mass media and of

centrally disseminated information, and the growth of transportation
infrastructure and increased mobility all undermine the bases of
community boundaries. Each is a multi-pronged assault on social
encapsulation, and one which results in an apparent homogenization
of social forms. Within any country, the language, family structures,
political and educational institutions, economic processes, and
religious and recreational practices of communities come to have a
certain apparent resemblance to each other. At the very least, they
may seem to resemble each other more than they do those of
communities in other countries. Such apparent similarity may well
lead people to suppose that the old community boundaries have
become somehow redundant and anachronistic. Indeed, the vested
interests of the national media, national political parties, marketing
specialists and so forth may well lead them actively to demean and
denigrate sub-national boundaries. But this homogeneity may be
merely superficial, a similarity only of surface, a veneer which masks
real and significant differences at a deeper level. Indeed, the greater
the pressure on communities to modify their structural forms to
comply more with those elsewhere, the more are they inclined to
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reassert their boundaries symbolically by imbuing these modified

forms with meaning and significance which belies their appearance.
In other words, as the structural bases of boundary become blurred,
so the symbolic bases are strengthened through “flourishes and
decorations,” “aesthetic frills” and so forth.196

It is precisely these symbolic flourishes and decorations in modern

traditional architecture that are, on the one hand, sought out by
those that wish to retain their local identity and, on the other hand,
are regarded with hostility or suspicion by the dominant modernist
architectural culture. This hostility is common, but since the 1980s is
often expressed simply by unspoken exclusion. In its raw form it can
be summarised by the comments of the British critic and convert to
Modernism, Jonathan Meades. Free to speak unconstrained by any
concern for professional etiquette, writing in The Times in 2002 he
described traditional architecture as:

make-believe of the most insipid order; it is wholeheartedly half-

hearted, no matter how convinced its begetters are of its probity.
The very idiom seems to defeat those who embrace it. … there is an
ignominious history of architects who have enfeebled themselves by
putting their imagination in abeyance while they played an ancient
game and played it weakly.197

No traditional architecture has been comprehensively tolerated in

schools of architecture in the North Atlantic countries for half a
century, with the exception of very few schools in the USA. As
emerging economies fell in the line with the North Atlantic system in
the early 1990s, any residual traditional architectural education that
had survived in the communist countries was quickly abandoned. As
a consequence, traditional architects are very few in number, and are
often deliberately excluded from major architectural projects when
there is any professional involvement in the appointment process, or
by commercial clients who will select according to experience and
professional reputation. The services of traditional architects do,
however, remain in demand in the housing market where
individuals can build according to their personal inclination or
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

where houses are sold speculatively to buyers who can select

according to preference.
Notwithstanding professional misgivings, traditional architecture is
only the most fundamental representative of a widespread assertion of
individual or community identity and defence of local character that
has taken on a new urgency as it is threatened by the uniformity of
global culture. As we have seen, this social and political phenomenon
is as much a part of globalisation as consumerism and has many
manifestations, from identity politics to targeted local marketing. In
mainstream architecture it is represented by various forms of
abstraction, that may or may not be recognised by those whose
identity it is intended to protect, and it has become a significant new
direction in urban design. It is at its most literal in traditional
architecture.

Figure 59. Rue de Laeken, Brussels;

G. Tagliaventi & Ass., Atelier 55, S.
Assassin, B. Dumons, P. Gisclard, N.
Prat, J.P. Garric, V. Negre, J.
Cenicacelaya, I. Saloña, L.
O’Connor, J. Robins, J. Altuna,
M.L. Petit, coordinating architect
Atelier Atlante; completed 1995.
Modernist buildings in an historic
city centre replaced with traditional
architecture designed by a group of
architects.
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Figure 60. New House, Cooperstown, New York State; Fairfax and Sammons; 2009.
Traditional architecture is well established as the architecture of choice for privately
commissioned houses and houses for sale.

Figure 61. Shriram Junior High School, Mawana, Uttar Pradesh, India; Deependra
Prashad; 2008. Traditional architecture applies to all places and cultures.

Traditional design: the literal representation of local identity or a

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17. Roland Robertson. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture.
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18. Inuit Circumpolar Council, Charter, Nuuk, 1980, Preamble.
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Indigenous Rights, Panama, 1984, Principles 4 and 19. The WCIP was
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disbanded in 1996 “due to internal conflict.”

20. General Assembly of the United Nations, 47/135, Declaration on the
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21. Council of Europe, European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages.
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22. European Union, Committee of the Regions, Mission Statement.
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23. United Nations General Assembly, World Conference on Human
Rights, Vienna Declaration on Human Rights. Vienna, 14–25 June 1993,
Paragraphs 5 and 19.
24. UNESCO, Our Creative Diversity: Report of the World Commission on Culture
and Development. Paris July 1996, 15 and 21.
25. UNESCO, Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Paris, November
2, 2001, Article 1.
26. Ibid., Article 4.
27. Ibid., Article 5.
28. Ibid., Article 7.
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29. Raimondo Strassoldo. “Globalisation and Localism: Theoretical

Reflections and Some Evidence.” In Globalisation and Territorial Identities,
edited by Z. Mlinar. Aldershot: Avebury, 1992.
30. Michel Wieviorka. “Some Coming Duties of Sociology.” In Eliezer
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31. Fredrik Barth. “The Analysis of Culture in Complex Societies.” Ethnos,
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32. Bauman 2004, op. cit., 30–31.
33. John Gray. Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the
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34. Interview with Arjun Appadura, “Minorities and the Production of
Daily Peace.” In Feelings are Always Local, edited by Joke Brouwer et al.
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35. W James Booth. “Communities of Memory: On Identity, Memory and
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36. P Berger, B Berger & H Kellner. The Homeless Mind: Modernisation and
Consciousness. New York: Vintage Books, 1974, 82.
37. Anthony P Cohen. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London:
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38. John B Thompson. “Tradition and Self in a Mediated World.” In
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Detraditionalisation Paul Heelas, Scott Lash & Paul Morris. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1996, 99.
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40. H. Tajfel. Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination. New York: Scientific
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41. M. Brewer. “Subordinate Goals Versus Superordinate Identity as Bases
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42. Cohen 1985, op. cit., 118.
43. Thompson, op. cit., 91–3.
44. E. Hobsbawm & T. R. Grainger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:
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45. J. A. Howard. “Social Psychology of Identities.” Annual Review of
Sociology 26 (2000): 367–8.
46. R. Jenkins. Social Identity. London: Routledge , 2004, 142.
47. Salman Rushdie. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta, 1991, 394.

48. J. A. Scholte. Globalisation: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 253.
49. Manuel Castells. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
2000, 69–70.
50. S. Taylor. Narratives of Identity and Place. London: Routledge , 2010,
43–4.
51. G. Matthews. Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the
Cultural Supermarket. London: Routledge, 2000, 192.
52. Anthony D. King. Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture Urbanism Identity.
London: Routledge, 2004, 129.
53. S. Anholt. Places: Identity, Image and Reputation. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010, 157.
54. T. F. Gieryn, “A Space for Place in Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology
26 (2000): 463–96.
55. Mike Featherstone. “Postnational Flows, Identity Formation and
Cultural Space.” In Ben-Rafael, op. cit., 482.
56. Mike Featherstone. Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and
Identity. London: Sage, 1995, 103.
57. “Dochakuka” originally meant adapting farming technique to one’s own
local condition in Japanese. Claimed as a source for “glocalization” by
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Roland Robertson from issues of the Harvard Business Review in the

late 1980s, the term appeared in the financial press in Jeremy Main,
“How to go Global and Why,” New York, Fortune, August 28, 1989,
76.
58. Roland Robertson. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture.
London: Sage, 1992, 173–4.
59. Glocalization: Research Study and Policy Recommendations. Rome: Glocal
Forum, 2003, 11.
60. W. Ruigrok & R. van Tulder. The Logic of International Restructuring.
London: Routledge, 1995, 188.
61. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, London, Longmanpearson.
62. Tamotsu Aoki. “Aspects of Globalisation in Contemporary Japan.” In
Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, edited by
Peter L Berger & Samuel P Huntingdon. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002, 70–71.
63. Anshu Chatterjee. “Globalisation, Identity, and Television Networks:
Community Mediation and Global Responses in Multicultural India.” In
The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Manuel
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How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 269

Castells. Cheltenham UK and Northampton MA: Edward Elgar

Publishing, 2004, 415.
64. James Davison Hunter & Joshua Yates. “The World of American
Globalisers,” in Berger & Huntingdom, op. cit., 342.
65. Yunxiang Yan. “State Power and the Cultural Transition in China.” In
Berger & Huntingdom, op. cit., 35.
66. Ian Angell. “The Information Revolution and the Death of the Nation
State.” Political Notes No 114. London: Libertarian Alliance, 1995, 1–2.
67. United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 38/161. “Process of
preparation of the Environmental Perspective to the Year 2000 and
Beyond,” established Bruntland Commission.
68. The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our
Common Future, Oxford University, 1987.
69. “The Chinese Miracle Will End Soon,” Spiegel Online, July 3, 2005.
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70. “China Lowers Growth Rate Target in Sustainability Drive.” BBC News,
February 27, 2011.
71. Jonathan Porritt. Globalism and Regionalism. London: Black Dog
Publishing, 2008, 58.
72. World Health Organisation, International Consultation on the Health of
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Indigenous Peoples. Geneva: November 23, 1999.

73. S.Shrybman. A Citizen's Guide to the World Trade Organisation. :Center for
Policy Alternatives, 1999, 43.
74. G Chanan et al. Regeneration and Sustainable Communities. London:
Community Development Foundation, 1999, 16.
75. Alfred H Barr. Preface, Henry-Russell Hitchcock & Philip Johnson. The
International Style. New York: Norton, (1932) 1995, 35.
76. Lewis Mumford. The South in Architecture: The Dancy Lectures Alabama
College. 1941, 18.
77. Ibid., 15–16.
78. Liane Lefaivre. “Critical Regionalism, a Facet of Modern Architecture
since 1945.” In Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized
World, edited by Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis. Munich, Prestel,
2003, 26.
79. Ibid., 44.
80. Vincent Canizaro. “Introduction.” In Architectural Regionalism: Collected
Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity and Tradition, edited by Vincent
Canizaro. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007, 24.
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270 Part IV

81. Alexander Tzonis. “Introducing an Architecture of the Present. Critical

Regionalism and the Design of Identity.” In Lefaivre & Tzonis, op. cit.,
10.
82. Lefaivre, op. cit., 34.
83. Mumford, op. cit., 18.
84. Karen Vogel Wheeler, Peter Arnell & Ted Bickford, eds. Michael
Graves: Building and Projects, 1966–1981. New York: Rizzoli, 1982.
85. First published in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture, edited
by Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press 1983. This influential essay was
reprinted and revised in 1987 as Ten Points on an Architecture of
Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic and in 1992 as Critical Regionalism:
Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity.
86. Paul Ricoeur. “Universal Civilization and National Cultures.” In History
and Truth, trans. Charles A Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, (1961) 1968, 277.
87. Kenneth Frampton. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an
Architecture of Resistance.” Foster op. cit.
88. Kenneth Frampton. “Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A
Provisional Polemic,” In Center 3: New Regionalism. : Center for
American Architecture and Design, 1987, 20–7.
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89. Frampton 1983, op. cit., 23.

90. Idem. 28–29.
91. John Engelen. “Glenn Murcutt—The Pritzker Prize winning ‘Tin
Man’.” DeDeCe Blog, Australia, January 11, 2011.
http://www.dedeceblog.com/2011/01/11/glenn-murcutt-the-tin-
man (accessed January 2012).
92. http://delhi-architecture.weebly.com/architecture-and-identity.html
(accessed January 2012).
93. Lefaivre & Tzonis, op. cit.
94. US Department of Energy Review, 2006. UK Green Building Council,
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen and others.
95. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for
Sustainable Development, Agenda 21. Rio de Janeiro: 1992, Principle 4.
96. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Kyoto
Protocol. Kyoto, Japan: December 11, 1997.
97. Ibid, Article 2a.
98. Ibid, Article 10bi.

99. Catherine Slessor. Eco-Tech: Sustainable Architecture and High Technology.

London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, 19.
100. Adam Architecture with Atelier 10. A Study of the Energy Performance of
Two Buildings with Lightweight and Heavyweight Facades. Winchester:
Adam Architecture, April 2008.
101. “Glass buildings are set to become ‘pariahs’.” Building Design, March 5,
2010, 1.
102. Slessor, op. cit., 10.
103. Letters Page, Architects’ Journal, July 15, 2010.
104. Diane Pham & Jill Fehrenbacher, “1 Bryant Park Tower Gets LEED
Platinum Certification!” http://inhabitat.com/photos-worlds-greenest-
skyscraper-nycs-one-bryant-park, August 19, 2010.
105. Blair Kamin. “Gehry's 8 Spruce Street isn't Pursuing LEED
Certification; Gang's Aqua is.” Chicago Tribune, February 15, 2011.
106. Mark Lamster. “Castles in the Air.” Scientific American, September
2011, 63 and 64.
107. Elif Sungur. “David Scott of Arup to Chair Council on Tall Buildings.”
Dexigner, January 20, 2006. http://www.dexigner.com/news/6676
108. Faber Maunsell. Tall Buildings and Sustainability. Corporation of
London, 2002.
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109. Mark Lamster, op. cit., 69.

110. Dominic Bradbury. “The Only Way is Up.” Daily Telegraph Magazine,
November 12, 2011, 56.
111. SOM website, www.som.com (accessed January 2012).
112. G. J. Treloar, R. Fay, B. Ilozor & P.E.D. Love. “An Analysis of the
Embodied Energy of Office Buildings by Height.” Facilities Year 19 (5/6)
(2001): 204.
113.Tall buildings: Report and Proceedings of the House of Commons Transport,
Local Government and the Regions Committee. Sixteenth report of Session,
2001–02. London, UK Stationery Office, September 4, 2002, HC 482-I.
114. Notes by author from RIBA Conference, “Identity,” Barcelona,
October 25–26, 2008.
115. Notes by author from World Architecture Festival Conference,
Barcelona, October 23–24, 2008.
116. Author’s interview with Peter Oborn, November 6, 2010.
117. Notes by author taken at Royal Institute of British Architects Seminar,
Shrinking World, London, September 22, 2011.
118. L. Oltmanns. Interview in A + U. Tokyo 11 (386) (2002): 32.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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272 Part IV

119. Introduction to Foreign Office Architects’ Lecture at the Pratt Institute,

November 12, 2007.
http://www.core.form-ula.com/2007/11/12/alejandro-zaera-polo-
lecture-november-12-at-6pm
120. “David Chipperfield in Conversation with Jonathan Sergison.”
Architects’ Journal, October 29, 2009, 50.
121. Juhani Pallasmaa. “As Architecture Veers Towards Aesthetics, it Risks
Losing a Sense of Meaning and Compassion.” Architects Journal,
November 19, 2009, 16.
122. Notes taken by author at World Architecture Festival, Barcelona,
October 23–24, 2008.
123. Ibid.
124. Pallasmaa, op. cit.
125. Notes by author from RIBA Conference, “Identity,” Barcelona,
October 25–26, 2008.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid.
128. Ibid.
129. Ibid.
130. Ibid.
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131. Ibid.
132. Pratt Institute, op. cit.
133. Notes taken by author at World Architecture Festival, Barcelona,
October 23–24, 2008.
134. “Building for the future.” BBC News, April 7, 1999.
135. Building the Scottish Parliament, The Holyrood Project, Standard Note:
SN/PC3357, London, House of Commons, January 12, 2005.
136. Ibid.
137. “Scottish Parliament—Concept.” Barcelona, EMBT Architects,
December 22, 2006.
138. Notes by author from RIBA Conference, ‘Identity’, Barcelona,
October 25–26, 2008.
139. Ibid.
140. Poll conducted by Channel 4 Television, UK, for “Demolition”
programme, December 15, 2005.
142. Notes by author from RIBA Conference, “Identity,” Barcelona,
October 25–26, 2008.
143. Ibid.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 273

144. Ibid.
145. Piers Gough. “Should Architects try Harder to Please the Public?”
Building Design, February 19, 2010.
146. Will Hurst. “Cuts Spell Disaster for Design, Rogers Warns.” Building
Design, October 29, 2010.
147. Alan Berman. “Why do Architects Love Stirling’s Buildings, While
the Public and Users Hate Them?” Architects Journal August 8, 2010.
148. Aspa Gospodini. “European Cities and Place-Identity.” Discussion Paper
Series, 8 (2). Dept of Planning and Regional Development, University of
Thessaly, Volos, March 2002, 29–30.
149. Gieryn, op. cit., 481.
150. Claire Parin, C. “Reconceptualising the City. Introduction: New Way
to Read Difference.” In Cross-Cultural Urban Design, edited by C. Bull et
al. London: Routledge, 2007, 15–16.
151. Ian Nairn, ed. “Outrage, Special Number.” The Architectural Review 117
(702) (1955).
152. Ian Nairn. Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and Countryside.
London: Architectural Press, 1959.
153. Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York:
Random House, 1993 (1961).
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

154. Kevin Lynch. The Image of the City. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960.
155. Gordon Cullen. Townscape. London: The Architectural Press, 1961.
156. Christopher Alexander & Serge Chermayeff. Community and Privacy:
Toward a New Architecture of Humanism. New York: Doubleday, 1963.
157. Rob Krier. Stadtraum in Theorie und Praxis. An Beispielen der Innenstadt
Stuttgarts, Solingen, Umbau-Verlag, 1975. First published in English in
1979 as Urban Space.
158. Demetri Porphyios, guest editor. Leon Krier: Houses Palaces Cities,
London, Architectural Design, Academy Editions 54 (7/8) (1984).
159. Charles Jencks. Iconic Building: The Power of Enigma. London: Frances
Lincoln, 2005, 323.
160. Bella Dicks. Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visibility.
Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003, 70.
161. John B. Allcock. “International Law and the Former Yugoslavia.” In
Globalization and Identity, edited by Alan Carling. London: IB Tauris,
165–6.
162. King, op. cit., 27–8.

163. Jordi Borja & Manuel Castells. Local and Global, Management of Cities in
the Information Age. London: Earthscan, 1997, 3–4.
164. Martin Wolf. Why Globalization Works. Newhaven: Yale UP, 2005,
193–4.
165. Borja & Castells, op. cit. Rio-Barcelona Declaration, Point 4, 227–30.
166. The Prince of Wales. A Vision of Britain. London: Doubleday, 1989.
167. A Vision of Europe, Charter of the City of the New Renaissance, 1996.
www.avoe.org/charter.html (accessed January 2012).
168. International Network for Traditional Building Architecture and
Urbanism, Charter, 2001, www.intbau.org (accessed January 2012).
169. Peter Calthorpe, Michael Corbett, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Moule,
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Stefanos Polyzoides. Ahwahnee Principles for
Resource-Efficient Communities, Sacramento CAL, Local Government
Commission, 1991.
170. The Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism,
ratified 1996, www.cnu.org/charter (accessed January 2012).
171. Ibid. The Region: Metropolis, City, and Town, paragraph 6.
172. Ibid. The Block, the Street, and the Building, paragraph 24.
173. Towards an Urban Renaissance, London, Her Majesty’s Stationary
Office, distributed by E and FN Spon, 1999.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

174. Ibid., Executive Summary, 5.

175. Towards an Urban Renaissance, op. cit., 42.
176. Academy of Urbanism, Manifesto, 2006, Principles 3 and 11.
www.academyofurbanism.org.uk/images/aou_manifesto (accessed
January 2012).
177. Council for European Urbanism, Charter of Stockholm, 6th November
2003. www.ceunet.org/charter.html (accessed January 2012).
178. The Congress for the New Urbanism, op. cit., paragraph 20.
179. Council for European Urbanism, op. cit. paragraph VI.31.
180. Academy of Urbanism, op. cit., Principle 11.
181. Towards an Urban Renaissance, op. cit., Achieving Design
Excellence, 41.
182. Andreas Tzortzis, “The Planner Who Saved Berlin—Or Did He Fail?”
New York, International Herald Tribune, September 29, 2006, 22.
183. Nathaniel Popper. “Master Architect Reclaims His Status as an
Underdog.” Jewish Daily, October 8, 2004.
184. Peter Davey. “The Death of High Modernism.” The Architectural
Review, March 2005, 51.
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
How Globalisation Keeps Things Different 275

185. Peter Calthorpe. The Next American Metropolis. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1993.
186. Peter Newman. “The Land Use-Transport Connection: An
Overview.” Land Use Policy 13 (1) (1996): 1–22.
187. Stephen Wheeler. Planning Sustainable and Livable Cities. London:
Routledge, 1998.
188. Foster + Partners website, www.fosterandpartners.com (accessed
January 2012).
189. OMA website, www.oma.eu (accessed January 2012).
190. César Grana. Fact and Symbol. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1971, 98.
191. Dicks, op. cit., 120.
192. Roger K Lewis. “Will Forces of Globalization Overwhelm Traditional
Local Architecture.” Washington Post, November 2, 2002.
193. John B. Allcock. “International Law and the Former Yugoslavia.” In
Carling op. cit., 165–6.
194. Mike Featherstone, 1995, op. cit., 92.
195. M. Christine Boyer. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery
and Architectural Entertainments. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996, 72.
196. Cohen, 1985, op. cit., 44.
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

197. Jonathan Meades. “We Don’t Write Music Like Haydn, or Paint Like
Gainsborough—So Why all These Dismal Pastiches of Georgian
Architecture.” The Times, May 11, 2002, 24.

THE END OF THE ERA, WHAT NOW?

The Present and the Future

The New Global Era may have ended in 2008 (or it may just be
entering into a new stage) but, one way or the other, it is certain that
events since that date and that continue at the time of writing will
permanently transform the global social, political and economic
condition. Writing in mid-2012, we do not know the outcome of the
major events that are unfolding with alarming speed. Predictions
under these circumstances are perilous; the only thing we can know
about the future is that it is unknown. Events such as the “Arab
Spring,” that is transforming the south-Mediterranean Arab nations,
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

began in Tunisia in December 2010 and took the world by surprise.

It has not yet played out, and other major uncertainties stalk the
world stage, in particular the transformation of the common
European currency and its political ramifications. As with all such
series of events, the impact is widely felt and, before any kind of
normality returns, they may yet de-stabilise other nations or create
economic conditions that have not yet been anticipated.
In all this, architects and urban designers are passive observers.
Projects are being completed that were conceived before 2008 and in
due course, when economies recover, those who commission
buildings will be responding to new and as yet unknown conditions.
Architects and urban designers will also unavoidably respond to these
conditions but, in the short to medium term, will most likely do so
in accordance with ideas formed in the previous decades.
It is, however, the fundamental premise of this book that if we
are to understand architecture and urban design we must first look at
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
278 Conclusion

the social, political and economic conditions that will inevitably drive
them. As architecture and urban design are slow to change, to see if
there is anything in the current condition that is likely to influence
the future direction of architecture, we should look at what is
happening in the wider theatre of events. The chances of
misinterpretation are high and, if this book is ever republished, this
chapter will have to be re-written.
As some of the changes that are taking place will probably alter
the geographic balance of power, new cultural conditions will
emerge from outside the previously dominant North Atlantic
nations. As culture always follows power, albeit in a variable time
frame, it would also be valuable to look at the ways that cultures deal
with imported influence and turn it around to something of their
own—the process called indigenisation.

The 2008 Bank Crash and End of North Atlantic

the global financial system. Underlying problems were built in by the

free-market fundamentalism that had driven the 1980s boom. At that
time, the liberalisation of financial markets led to a combination of
previously separated retail, broking and insurance banking.
Combined funds released larger sums for trading, and made possible
complex investments that brought together retail loans and debt-
default insurance. This fuelled a financial trading culture which, as
the legendary sign above the trading floor in the (now defunct) New
York investment bank Bear Stearns said, was based only on the
principle of “let’s make nothing but money.” Added to this, the entry
of new emerging economies into the financial markets at the start of
the New Global Era in the early 1990s increased available capital and
trading opportunities.
Free global trade gave improved access to the consumer markets
of the North Atlantic countries and Japan. The low labour costs of
the new entrants created opportunities for economic expansion
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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The End of the Era, What Now? 279

based on manufacture, services or raw materials for export. The

income raised by these exports created large cash surpluses held in
US dollars. These capital reserves needed to make a return while
protecting the funds against potential political instability at home,
and they were used for income-generating loans. The most willing
borrowers were the developed economies, which could fund their
political and consumer demands with cheap money. Their
consumers, in turn, would support the export markets of the same
emerging economies that had lent them the money in the first place.
This set up an economic Faustian pact between lending-exporters
and borrowing-importers. As the emerging economies grew for the
next fifteen years they pumped more capital and goods into the
indebted countries leading to the impression that the old cyclical
seven-year economic pattern had ended. The prosperity of the New
Global Era was put down to the permanent benefits of globalisation
and called by economists “The Great Moderation.”
Economic growth and easy borrowing encouraged investors to
take advantage of the profits available from a rising property market,
setting in train a boom in real-estate prices. In the United States this
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

was exacerbated by a political objective to open up home loans to

lower income families. The rush to sell mortgages launched large
numbers of unsecured loans onto the market which were then put
together with other investments and debt-default insurance to
create, what bankers’ statisticians believed, were risk-free
investment packages. The political advantage of increasing public
services and state employment and the low cost of borrowing also
encouraged countries to increase their national debt from an average
of two hundred per cent in 1995 to three hundred per cent in 20081
(chart 6).

Chart 6. National Debt as a Percentage of GDP 2006–2011

By 2007, however, the tide turned and the economic benefits of

government loans began to slow down as borrowing was used to inflate
the unproductive public sector, and the cost of each dollar borrowed
started to depress rather than stimulate growth.2 In the same year
defaults in low-value unsecured mortgages led to a collapse in the
United States housing market. This revealed the fragility of the
mortgage-based investment packages, by now traded around the

international money markets. There was a dramatic collapse of

confidence leading to a run on banks. The banks could not repay their
capital depositors as their funds had been used for loans which, secured
by insurance guarantees, had been rolled over into further loans and
then insured and used again, often many times over. The global banking
system crashed on September 15, 2008 when America’s fourth-largest
investment bank, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy.
The crash, often called the “sub-prime credit crunch” after the failed
sub-prime mortgages that had set off the collapse of confidence, affected
the entire global economy. It was at its worst in the North Atlantic
countries which experienced the most severe depression for seventy-five
years. In the fourth quarter the value of all the goods and services (Gross
Domestic Product or GDP) fell by 1.6 per cent in the United States and
1.4 per cent in the European Union countries (chart 7).
When the world’s twenty leading nations gathered in London in
April 2009 at the Group of 20 (G20) summit to see how to resolve
the growing global financial crisis, a fundamental change in the
balance of world power was revealed. As Robert Hormats, Vice-
Chairman of the bankers Goldman Sachs said: “It’s the passing of an
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

era, the US is becoming less dominant while other nations are

gaining influence.”3 Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz said
“This is … a reversal of the ideology of the 1990s, and at a very
official level, a rejection of the ideas pushed by the U.S. and others.”4
The economist Anatole Kaletsky believes that we are entering new
financial era as significant as the Reagan/Thatcher revolution of the
80s and has named it “Capitalism 4” in his 2011 book, Capitalism 4.0:
The Birth of New Economy.5
Variations in the impact of the crisis had shown the strength of the
Indian and Chinese economies—while experiencing a small
downturn, both had avoided recession. The fast-growing Indian
economy was driven more by internal growth than exports. China
had amassed US $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves and was
going to be the largest potential lender to the International Monetary
Fund, which would be the instrument for the rescue of failing
economies.
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282 Conclusion
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Chart 7. Comparative Real National Growth Rate GDP 2006–2010

The state-owned paper, the China Daily, made it clear that “the
country will have a bigger say in the global financial system.”6 The
governor of the People’s Bank of China had little sympathy for the
North Atlantic laissez-faire system that had led to the crisis, saying
that the Chinese financial system had, “prompt decisive and effective
policy measures demonstrating its superior system,” and suggested a
new international reserve currency, managed by the International
Monetary Fund, to replace the US dollar.7

The new reserve currency was not adopted but China and the
United States were major contributors to a huge allocation of US
$1.1 trillion as, in the words of the G20 Final Communique,
“support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world economy.”
This would be “a global plan for recovery on an unprecedented scale”
as it was recognised that “We face the greatest challenge to the world
economy in modern times … A global crisis requires a global
solution.”8 Even this sum was not enough to save the weaker
European economies which, two years later, were unable to service
their grossly inflated national debt, setting in train a political crisis in
the European Union. At the next G20 summit in Cannes in
November 2011 the possible collapse of the Euro threatened to drive
the world economy into a second recession. The United States was
preoccupied with its own political deadlock over national debt and
was only able to comment from the sidelines. China, by now with a
US $3.2 trillion foreign currency reserve, took centre stage but was
not prepared to bail out the faltering Euro. The Xinhua News
Agency, an informal mouthpiece for the government, declared on
October 30 that “China can neither take the role of saviour to the
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Europeans, nor provide a ‘cure’ for the European malaise.”9

These events signalled the beginning of the end of American
dominance of the world economy, cemented at the Bretton Woods
Agreement in 1944, taking its North Atlantic allies down with it.
Although China, as the dominant member of the group of emerging
economies has not supplanted the USA as the primary world power,
and the US dollar remains the world reserve currency, 2008 clearly
marks the end of an era.

Power Moves East

The status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency is not
secure. A reserve currency is only one which is chosen for
international trade based on the security of its issuing nation,
according to the size of its economy and foreign assets and, since the

collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, the US dollar has

no formal position. China is now the second largest world economy
and holds the largest reserve of foreign assets. The IMF predict that
the Chinese economy will overtake the United States economy in
five years.1 The Chinese yuan is constrained by exchange controls,
but liberalisation has begun. Residents can export capital to fund
enterprises such as the takeover of foreign companies. Although it
has been much more difficult for foreigners to buy goods with the
yuan, in the last few years companies such as McDonalds and
Caterpillar have issued yuan bonds, and the Chinese government has
sold twenty billion yuan of government debt. If the yuan becomes
the reserve currency, or even an equal reserve currency, it will enjoy
what Valery Giscard d’Estaing called in 1965 the “exorbitant
privilege” (once only vested in the US dollar) of the ability to print
money to balance trade deficits and freedom from the uncertainties
of exchange rate fluctuations.
Commercial expansion in foreign economies has expanded
Chinese influence abroad. Four of the world’s ten largest banks are
now Chinese, up from none in 2004. A non-judgemental foreign
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policy has eased Chinese trade in Africa, and it is the continent’s

largest trading partner—often using infrastructure works to gain
political influence—and buys more than a third of Africa’s oil. It is
now the largest trading partner for Australia, India and Brazil. In
2010 Chinese buyers were responsible for one tenth of all global
deals, including high-profile company purchases such as Volvo cars,
the Australian food group Manassen, and a thirty-five year lease of
the Greek port of Piraeus. Chinese firms are stalking the world
markets for take-over opportunities.
As major Chinese companies are often state owned—eighty per
cent of the stock market listed firms are state controlled—this
aggressive expansion has led to some nervousness abroad. The US
government blocked a bid from a Chinese telecommunications firm
to invest in a new national wireless network and the Icelandic
government prevented a Chinese company from purchasing 300
square kilometres of land. Security concerns behind these
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The End of the Era, What Now? 285

interventions have not been reassured by a more assertive foreign

policy, a quadrupling of military spending since 2000 and regular
reports of Chinese originated cyber attacks on North Atlantic
defence networks. As the American political scientist David
Shambaugh wrote in the Washington Quarterly, “2009–2010 will be
remembered as the years in which China became difficult for the
world to deal with.”11
The longer-term view is mixed. As the world economy slows
down, export income is diminishing and Chinese policy is for the
stimulation of home demand for its own products. While its GDP is
seventy per cent of the United States and growing, its GDP per
capita is only sixteen per cent of the United States. There is room for
a continued increase in personal prosperity (the unspoken post-
Tiananmen Square stability pact), which, with the growth of the
largest middle class in the world, is creating a vibrant consumer
market. Increased wealth has, however, raised expectations, while
labour is starting to cost more, and an increase in strikes is an
indication that workers are demanding higher standards. As the up-
and-coming generation becomes accustomed to, rather than grateful
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for, improved living standards, demands for more political freedom

may occur. Add to this the longer term impact of the one-child
policy—a peak in population by 2023, double the numbers of over-
sixties by 2030 and a decline in the working-age population—and
the expansion and competitiveness of China is likely to decline. The
political consequences of this are unknown.
Coming up behind China, but with quite different social, political
and economic conditions, is India. Although India’s GDP is less than
half that of China, when the developmental stages are compared it is
on the same upward trajectory and its rate of growth is expected to
outgrow that of China in the next three years.12 India’s economy is
predicted to be the third-largest in the world by 2030. As the
world’s largest democracy, India’s dramatic expansion can be dated
to the government’s liberalisation of the economy as one of the key
events in origins of the New Global Era but otherwise, unlike China,
business is not state controlled. A complex governmental and federal
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286 Conclusion

political system has hampered any improvement in the country’s

poor infrastructure, and the corporate regulatory system is shaky and
often corrupt. With a long uninterrupted history of private
enterprise, however, it supports leading global industries such as the
IT service provider Infosys and the world’s largest aluminium mills.
Its huge family-run conglomerates and entrepreneurs have been
embedded in the world business community for decades, and it has
the benefit of a globally dispersed community of non-resident Indians
(NRIs) dating from both the British Empire and more recent
migration, principally to the United States. Indian companies have
widespread international interests that include the world’s largest
steel firm, a car industry that owns two iconic British brands (Jaguar
and Land Rover), a major brewing conglomerate, and one of Africa’s
expanding mobile phone companies. With a fast-expanding middle
class, the working-age population is set to increase by 126 million in
the next ten years (far ahead of any of its economic competitors), and
with a relatively low level of GDP per capita, there are considerable
opportunities for growth. Without any signs of geo-political
ambitions beyond border disputes and a political system capable of
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absorbing change, there seems to be little reason to doubt the future

global role of India.
While China is now firmly established as a global power and India
is catching up fast, other countries have high growth rates. Brazil has
a growing consumer economy and workforce and abundant raw
materials. In 2009, growth in the Indonesian economy led the
American investment bank Morgan Stanley to suggest adding the
country to a list of the four major developing economies summarised
by the acronym BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China—invented by
Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs in 2001), to form a new acronym,
BRICIs. It is noticeable, however, in all current assessments of the
future of the world economy that the North Atlantic countries that
had dominated the global economy for at least two centuries and the
New Global Era for fifteen years are shown in relative decline. The
twenty major nations at the London G20 summit in 2009 made it
clear that: “The only sure foundation for sustainable globalisation and
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The End of the Era, What Now? 287

rising prosperity for all is an open world economy based on market

principles, effective regulation, and strong global institutions.”13 A
globalized world economy is unlikely to be dismantled but the
historic North Atlantic domination of that economic and political
system began to fade in that same year and this will have profound
social and cultural consequences (chart 8).
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Chart 8. Comparative Projected National GDP to 2050

Changing Global Priorities

As the nation state world political structure is based on the
nineteenth century European system, and was institutionalised by the
creation of the United Nations; as the global financial system was

established on a North Atlantic model with the establishment of the

World Bank and the International Monetary Fund after the Second
World War; and as the global regulatory system was based on Anglo-
Saxon legal principles (British lawyers have privileged access to
international practice), if there is a next global era it will for some
time have a superficial resemblance to the declining New Global Era.
They may be hard to detect, but changes of some sort will occur.
Rapidly ageing European nations not only face economic
challenges in supporting their dependent pensioners, but extensions
to the working age and employment protection disadvantage younger
workers entering the workplace. This will benefit the more open and
youthful emerging economies as talented individuals will, as they
have always done, travel to the places where their abilities find the
most receptive outlets. This will not only boost the knowledge
economies of the destination countries directly but will stimulate
local talent.
To gain the high levels of education required for emerging-
economy entrepreneurs, scientists and business executives, English-
speaking further (and even secondary) educational institutions are in
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high demand. Some of these universities have taken the logical step
and created outposts to where there is unsatisfied supply. Middle
Eastern states have brought in American Universities to create what
is called in Doha, Qatar, “Education City,” where there are branches
of six American universities, as well as one from France and one
from Britain. In 2008 there were seven outposts of American
universities in China. In a drive to expand further education in India
the Foreign Educational Institution Bill was introduced in 2010 to
facilitate and control the entry of foreign universities. A leading
British independent school, Wellington College, is building an
architectural and institutional replica institution in Tianjin, near
Beijing. While North Atlantic educational exports may seem to
represent a straightforward cultural export, with their idiosyncrasies
preserved as curiosities, by locating the institutions outside their
country of origin they will not only have to adapt to local conditions
but will stimulate national universities to raise their standards.
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The End of the Era, What Now? 289

As corporations and industries are taken over, and as local service

or supply industries trade with these organisations, commercial
transactions have to adapt to the business culture of the new owners.
With the growth of the power and influence of emerging-economy
businesses the need to adapt to the host country will diminish, and
new business practices will become more widely accepted. The
importance of family and personal connections is already opening up
trading opportunities to non-resident Indians with their country of
origin, which is denied to foreigners. Chinese professionals are being
given employment opportunities in North Atlantic practices and
companies to facilitate trade communication with China. Business
travel and hospitality, up to now dominated by the needs of the
North Atlantic executive, is adapting to the demands of Chinese
travellers. By 2011 China had twice as many internet users as the
USA, and to gain from global developments in internet use it may be
more profitable to accommodate to the Chinese than the American
market.
The internet, as the primary global communication medium, can
be seen as a key indicator of current trends. It remains in principle
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the open worldwide system envisaged by its free society, largely

American, pioneers, represented by Wired magazine, launched in
1993. The free movement of communication was not, however,
conducive to the social and political controls of the Chinese state
and, at the same time as encouraging the commercial benefits of
internet use, filtering software was developed and national controls
were introduced. These are now employed by up to fifteen
countries. Middle Eastern countries filter content for religious as
well as political control, and even liberal democracies are policing
internet use for pornography, crime or potential antisocial
behaviour. The Domain Name System, designed in the Latin
alphabet, is breaking up as more Chinese, Cyrillic and Arabic users
come on line and wish to communicate in their own script (much
more readily facilitated digitally than with movable typeface). The
growth of internet users towards saturation level in some developed
countries has enabled networking sites to establish numerous discrete
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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290 Conclusion

social, religious, interest and political networks, reinforcing the

collective identities of the participants, often at an international
level. On the other hand, the IP number address system is now used
to restrict cross-border access to protect commercial interests,
leading to a growth of closed or semi-open user platforms. Data
analysis, developed to target advertising, is leading to the increased
personalisation of user sites. The social and political internet analyst
Evgeny Morozov predicts that “instead of the internet, we may well
start talking of a billion ‘internets’.”14
This spread of global systems from the universal to the particular
is mirrored in the dichotomy of homogenisation and localisation,
discussed at length in Parts III and IV. As internet development
indicates, however, while the universal nature of global
communication remains fundamental, there remain opportunities for
an enhanced expression of regional, national, local and even personal
identity.
The 2008 crash had the immediate effect of raising the need for
even more universal political control of the global economy. A key
part of the 2009 G20 Communique was the need “to build a
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stronger, more globally consistent, supervisory and regulatory

framework.” At the same time, memories of the Great Depression
and the role of American protectionism have subsequently led all
economists to understand that, as the Communique says, “to
promote global trade and investment” it was necessary to “reject
protectionism.”15 This recognises the tendency that, as voting is local
and finance is global, the popular response to economic hardship will
often be to protect national economies from international
contamination. On September 6, 2011, Dilma Rousseff, president of
Brazil, provided a textbook statement promoting this phenomenon:
“In the case of the current international crisis our principal weapon is
to expand and defend our internal market.”16 There is further
evidence from the USA (historically prone to isolationism) in the
Senate’s Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act of 2011 which
proposed that the United States could judge a currency to be
“fundamentally misaligned” and take restrictive action on its imports.
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The End of the Era, What Now? 291

The target was clearly China. As the Swiss currency has been driven
up in value by the failures in the surrounding Euro, Switzerland is
seeking measures to protect the Swiss franc from free-market
pressures.17
While these measures may be moderated by finance ministers
who understand the dire consequences of trade wars, the popular
mood may find its outlet elsewhere. Much as localisation has become
the other side of cultural homogenisation, increased uniformity in
the management of the global economy combined with an enhanced
feeling of helplessness, particularly in the North Atlantic countries as
their self-confidence declines, is likely to stimulate an enhanced
desire for the security of local identity.
Evidence is to be found at a national level.
China shows signs of moving from its 2008 Olympic slogan “one
world, one dream” to a more inward looking cultural outlook. It
pressured its allies to boycott the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize when the
rest of that “one world” chose a Chinese human rights lawyer for an
award. But in a significant break from the Communist Party’s
ambivalent attitude to Confucius, and for the first time since the
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revolution, Beijing held large scale celebrations in 2011 to honour his

2,561st birthday to celebrate, as the official website china.org
declared, “the great Chinese scholar and social philosopher, whose
thoughts and teachings have profoundly influenced Chinese, Korean,
Vietnamese, and Japanese thoughts and life.”18
The apparently spontaneous emergence of the populist and
politically fundamentalist right-wing Tea Party movement in the
USA has been largely inward looking. While it is less a political
movement than a party and has no clear manifesto, let alone a
articulated foreign policy, its supporters are, according to Walter
Russell Mead in the New York Times, “united in their dislike for
liberal internationalism—the attempt to conduct international
relations through multilateral institutions under an ever-tightening
web of international laws and treaties.”19 Even a Republican Party
presidential contender was criticised for speaking French.20

In Europe, where the European Union is a microcosm of the

stresses of globalisation, the threatened collapse of the Euro presents
such an economic catastrophe that most countries in the Union have
accepted a major surrender of economic sovereignty. This must be
contrasted with the growth of anti-internationalist movements. In
Holland the anti-immigration Freedom Party won fifteen per cent of
the national vote and has entered the ruling coalition. A similar
Danish People’s Party has been part of a minority government since
2001. In Finland, the anti-European Union True Finns party came
third in the 2011 election and combines left wing economic policy
with cultural activities which, as it states in their election manifesto,
“promote the Finnish identity.” In Scotland the left wing Scottish
Nationalist Party is more international in outlook, but has come to
power on a wave of nationalism that is likely to win the country
some level of independence from the United Kingdom.
At a more local level there are similar small-scale indicators. In
Britain the homogenisation of accent that was anticipated from
exposure to national media has been arrested as regional accents are
consolidating. The forensic linguist Dominic Watt sees this as a sign
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that “people want to protect their identity,” and although people

dress the same and have the same interests and their cities look the
same, “what still makes these places separate and distinct is the
dialect and accent.”21 In Italy, a number of cities have taken steps to
ban foreign food outlets in order to, as the mayor of Forte de Marmo
said, following a unanimous vote in the town council, “protect the
genius loci, what’s typical of the real place.”22 In 2009, the German
foreign minister, concerned that global English was corrupting
German, launched the campaign to protect the German language,
“Deutsch: sprache der ideen” [German, the language of ideas].23 Mark
Malloch Brown, former director of the United Nations Development
Programme, sums up the continuing attraction of localisation:
“Today the power over economic management, security and
countless other areas has been swallowed up … Meanwhile, valuing
what is local—be it indigenous cultural events, local organic food or

a shared communal history—fits in with our growing instincts as

citizens and consumers.”24
These social, political and economic forces will have an impact on
architecture and urban design. An increase in demand for overtly
local or traditional design would be expected, but the small size of
this sector, the continuing hostility of the profession and the fact it
has an established market would make it hard to assess. Some new
conditions are, however, evident now: a crisis in city expansion in
the developing world and a reassessment of iconic architecture.

Urban Crisis in the Emerging Economies

The most organised urban design theory at the end of the twentieth
century, the various versions of contextual urbanism, was born out
of dissatisfaction with the post Second World War North Atlantic
urban condition. In its most influential form, New Urbanism, it has
taken this version of American culture around the world. The urban
condition in the world is, however, changing at a pace that will
outstrip these small-scale developments and methodologies.
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The McKinsey Global Institute, in its recent publication, Urban

World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities, describes the emerging
urban condition:
Economic power is shifting eastwards. Today, 22 of the 25 largest
cities ranked by GDP are developed economies, but this situation
will change radically in the next 15 years with the rise of Asian
cities, particularly those in China. By 2025, nine of the world’s top
25 cities ranked by GDP will be located in Asia, up from two in
2007, according to our analysis. During this period, our research
suggests that three cities in North America and four in Western
Europe will drop off this ranking.25

The current condition is reported in the Knight Frank and Citi

Private Bank World Cities Survey of 2009, directed to the real estate
market. Based on a combined measure of economic activity, political
power, knowledge and influence, and quality of life, the top ten

world cities have been put in descending order, all but two in North
America and Europe26 (chart 9). The McKinsey analysis of the
projected top ten by GDP has some similarities, but three Chinese
cities come into the listing. When cities are ranked by projected
GDP growth, however, the picture is transformed and moves
entirely to China (chart 10). When the ranking is set by the
anticipated increase in middle-class wealth, a measure of success
beyond size, (calibrated by the numbers of families with an annual
income about US $20,000 a year on present day prices), a more
subtle but similar picture emerges with five Chinese cities, two
Indian cities, one South American city, and one surprise entry in the
Middle East. The only city in the old developed world—albeit in
Asia—is Tokyo (chart 11).
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Chart 9. World Cities Survey 2009

Chart 10. Projected Top Ten Cities by 2025

Chart 11. Projected Top Ten Cities for Middle Class Growth by 2025

While the headline megacities tell one story, at another level a

recent report by the Boston Consulting Group estimates that by
2030 there will more than 1,000 cities in emerging markets with
populations over half a million.27 According to the United Nations,
by 2050 the world population is expected to be more than nine
billion, with the urban population exceeding six billion. In other
words, two in three people born in the next thirty years will live in
cities. This indicates a critical human situation far beyond a simple
increase in wealth.
In 2012 it was reported that the urban population of China now
exceeds its rural population. This has put additional pressure on an
already rapid programme of city expansion.28 Other countries face
similar pressures but lack organisation and forward planning. Doug
Saunders, author of the 2010 prize-winning analysis of cities in
emerging economies, Arrival City, describes the new conditions
created by this massive shift to urban living:
We are at a halfway point in the history’s largest population shift, as
Asian, Middle Eastern and South American countries move from
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rural, subsistence-based economies to more sustainable nations

based on commercial farming and large urban populations. As a
result of this shift, which is creating five million new city dwellers in
the developing world each month, there are now thousands of
transitional urban neighbourhoods, which have one foot in the
originating village and one in the established city’s economy. These
“arrival cities” … are driven by the ambitions of their rural-born
founders.29

What Saunders calls optimistically “arrival cities” are the slums,

shanty-towns, gandi basti [dirty localities] or jhopadpattis [strip of
huts] and favelas. Robert Neuwrith lived in squatter communities
around the world while researching his influential 2004 book, Shadow
Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World.30 He says that one in
seven of the global population now lives in shanty towns, and these
dense settlements are all in the emerging economies. They are the
only place that poor internal migrants can find to live, are almost

always illegal, on expropriated land, and without any of the normal

urban services—piped water, sewage disposal or electricity. Fearful
that the illegal status of these settlements will become permanent if
city administrations recognise them, they are sometimes forcibly
cleared (usually returning on the same site or elsewhere almost
immediately) or simply ignored. New Delhi bulldozed its Yamana
Pushta slums in 2004, but declared the displaced inhabitants ineligible
for re-housing: within a month its residents started re-building in the
same area.31 Nairobi’s shanty town of Kibera, home to about one
fifth of its population, is shown as a forest on official maps.
The inhabitants of these slums are forced by deprivation to create
their own economies—the size of their populations and the
enterprise of their traders have created a significant economy beyond
regulation and taxation. It is estimated by the OECD that 1.8 billion
people—or sixty per cent of the world’s working population—will
earn their living in this “informal economy.”32 According to a Harvard
Business School study, Mumbai’s famous slum, Dharavi, has an
established textile industry selling to the global market through
approximately five thousand informal businesses and earning US
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$600 million a year.33 The growing mobile phone industry in Nigeria

makes most of its income through street vendors selling phone-
recharge cards from casual stalls under umbrellas—“umbrella
people.” Akinwale Goodluck, corporate services executive for MTN,
Africa’s leading telecommunications provider, says: “The umbrella
market is a very, very important market now. No serious operator
can afford to ignore the umbrella people.”34
Squatter communities and informal street markets have
developed their own institutional structures. Mumbai slum dwellers
run shared savings schemes. In favelas there are mutual construction
societies or muritores. In Kenya women from shanty towns pool their
money to pay one another the accumulated sum once a week as a
business development fund. Robert Neuwrith believes that “these
massive do-it-yourself street markets and self-built neighbourhoods
are a vision of the urban future.”35

Community life in these settlements is often not so benign.

Ignored by the authorities, and outside the rule of law, slums can fall
under the control of criminal gangs. The Jardim Angela favela in São
Paolo, with an estimated population of a quarter of a million,
formerly had a murder rate of 123 per 10,000—a violent-death rate
higher than most war zones—and was run by rival drugs gangs. In
order to bring this centre of criminal activity under control, the city
authorities changed their attitude and identified them as “transitional
neighbourhoods whose move from rural poverty into urban societies
had been blocked” by their exclusion from civil life. Starting with the
provision of a day and evening school, and a community-based police
force, public transport was provided to employment areas and the
land, originally expropriated illegally, was given to the slum
dwellers. Between one fifth and one third of the inhabitants became
home owners and, confident in the security of ownership, replaced
their makeshift shacks with brick and stucco dwellings. Between
1999 and 2005 the murder rate fell by about seventy-three per
cent.36 As Jardim Angela entered into the civil society of São Paulo it
retained in permanent form the urban structure of its illegal favela.
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The scale and pace of city expansion in the emerging economies,

from the forests of tower blocks of the new Chinese cities to the
jhopadpattis of India, is creating new urban conditions faster than any
theory can catch up with events. As North Atlantic contextual
urbanists export their consultation procedures and create small-scale
master plans, new urban contexts are being created either by fast-
moving state-sponsored expansion or large-scale illegal expropriation.
Contextual urbanists are practicing in deprived areas such as the
West Indies and are promoting their services in the huge
evolutionary test bed of the emerging Eastern economies, but their
work, commendable though it may be, will be never be more than a
boutique activity in an emerging urban condition of superstore
dimensions.
The speculative fiction author William Gibson describes a
diverging urban world where he sees that the North Atlantic
countries:
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The End of the Era, What Now? 299

run the risk of Disneylanding themselves, of building themselves too

permanently into a given day’s vision of what they should be. …
Meanwhile, though, some of the world’s largest human settlements
are now … places that have by-passed the ways in which Europeans
and North-Americans have assumed cities necessarily need to grow:
Rio, Mumbai, Nairobi, Istanbul, Mexico City … vast squatter
conurbs, semi-neo-Medieval in their structure and conditions. The
future will emerge from such cities as surely as it will emerge from
the Disneylanded capitals of an Old World that now includes North
America.37
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Figure 62. Favela, Caxias do Sul, Brazil.

Slums, the fastest growing urban type.

Iconic Architecture Reassessed

As the North Atlantic countries struggle to reduce their national debt
and service their interest, taxation is increased, state expenditure
reduced, banks become risk-averse and consumers cut back on
expenditure. In a time of austerity, it becomes not just hard to justify
expensive and ostentatious construction projects, but they also
become unfashionable. An obvious target for accusations of profligacy
is the iconic building phenomenon that symbolised the confidence of

the Great Moderation. The idea that an iconic building would deliver
unique benefits to the economy as well as the status of its
commissioning city only dates back to the completion of the
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 1997 and so, at the time of the
crash, the phenomenon had only been in full flow for eleven years.
As a major building can readily take up to ten years from inception to
completion, many buildings were only just completed at the time the
economic tide turned. A number of buildings that were commissioned
in the first flush of enthusiasm for the Bilbao effect are now being
assessed in a less sympathetic environment. Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI in
Rome, for example, won in competition in 1999, but only opened at
the end of 2009. Peter Eisenman’s City of Culture of Galicia Archive
and Library in Santiago di Compostela in Spain, which also won in
competition in 1999, is still under construction. A plan for an iconic
waterfront building in the northern English port of Liverpool was
first put forward in 2001 but, after controversy and the scrapping of
a winning design, a new Museum of Liverpool was commissioned
from the Danish architects 3XN and completed in 2011 (figure 64).
All these buildings have been the subject of controversy. Hadid’s
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MAXXI was delayed by funding problems and cost €150 million. It

has had relatively low visitor numbers of between 250–500,000 and
led the editor of one professional journal to declare: “I can’t think
that I have ever encountered an art gallery that addresses its nominal
function with such seeming cynicism.”38 Eisenman’s City of Culture
of Galicia has escalated in cost from €108 million to €400 million. It
has been described by a member of the original selection jury as “an
expensive mistake. Probably one of the largest in the history of
architecture.”39 The original architects of the Museum of Liverpool,
3XN, were sacked from the project “over cost-control issues” and
the £72 million design was modified to control expenditure (figure
63). Another architectural critic thought it rare for “a ‘flagship
building’ to be so spectacularly botched, so comprehensively fouled
up and so completely at odds with its context as the Museum of
Liverpool.”40

Perhaps the most iconic of the icons, and the most tortured
design process, has been Ground Zero in Manhattan, New York
City, rebuilding on the site of the Twin Towers terrorist attack, the
most psychologically damaging event in the United States since its
Civil War. After two architectural competitions and the emotive
participation of the public, Daniel Libeskind won from a field of
stellar competitors with a spiralling asymmetric design with gardens
in the sky to be called the “Freedom Tower”—1776 feet high to
represent the foundation year of the United States. Little remains of
this design as the leaseholder of the site quickly sidelined Libeskind,
bringing in a more commercial architect for a more commercial
scheme, while keeping a nominal role for the competition winner
(figure 64). Now a conventional tapering tower in reflecting glass has
been prosaically renamed “1 WTC.” The New York Port Authority,
in the meantime, embarked on another iconic project on the site, a
new transport hub by the Spanish star architect Santiago Calatrava.
The cost of the spectacular bird-like design has gone from US $2.2
billion in 2003 to US $3.44 billion in 2011,41 leading the Port
Authority to raise its road tolls amidst public protest.42
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Spiralling costs have become a feature of iconic buildings: their

deliberately complex forms are hard to construct and, as the designs
set out to be unprecedented, comparative costing is impossible, and
budgets are often coloured by enthusiasm and optimism. At the same
time, the well-recorded benefits to the economy of the City of
Bilbao have proved to be hard to reproduce. A number of projects
have failed to live up to expectations.
Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project for the City of Seattle
never reached its anticipated visitor numbers, curators left, staff
were cut, and part of it was let to a science-fiction museum.43 The
Bellvue Art Museum in Washington was designed by Steven Holl to
be a “bold glass, aluminium and textured concrete structure …
crafted to support the Museum’s mission of providing opportunities
not just to see art, but to explore and make it as well.”44 The museum
failed after three years and had to be shut down, “foiled by a
combination of a tough economy, white-elephant architecture and a
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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302 Conclusion

failure to find an audience”45 (it was later re-opened after a major

fundraising campaign). In Britain, the architect Will Alsop was
appointed in the late 1990s to design an ambitious arts building in the
declining British industrial town of West Bromwich. It was called,
ambitiously, “The Public,” and the culture minister at the time said:
“It chimes exactly with the way the arts in the twenty-first century
are going. It will act as a trailblazer for regeneration in the area and
will place West Bromwich at the forefront of this country's brilliant
cultural scene.”46 The project was funded by central and local
government, but nonetheless went bankrupt in 2006 and was
rescued by more state funds to reach a final total of £65 million.
After it opened in 2010 sections had to be sublet for commercial use,
and it still survives only with the contribution of public funds and
may close in 2012.47
Although projects such as Herzog and de Meuron’s fifty-storey
Triangle Tower in Paris are still coming forward, others such as
Santiago Calatrava’s residential tower in New York and Kohn
Pedersen Fox’s Pinnacle Tower in London have been delayed or
cancelled. In North Atlantic countries the days of iconic buildings are
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probably over. Image consultants, such as Simon Anholt, will advise

cities that want to commission “big, glamorous buildings” that, “if it’s
done for its own sake and there’s no long-term strategy behind it, it
will add nothing to the city’s overall image at all.”48 Observers of the
Bilbao effect tended to concentrate on the dramatic building without
noticing that the infrastructure and historic fabric of the city were a
part of the wider economic strategy.
For all the failures, there have been successes. The thriving “7 Star”
Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai (figure 65), by the less-well-known
architect Tom Wright of the professional conglomerate WS Atkins, is
still a more powerful image of the Gulf State than its featureless
world’s-tallest-building. 30 Mary Axe in London or “The Gherkin” by
Norman Foster is a prime business address and has been adopted as
one of the silhouette images of the city. The architectural profession
still admire their star architects—Zaha Hadid was given the Royal
Institute of British Architects’ highest award two years running.
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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The End of the Era, What Now? 303

Figure 63. Museum of Liverpool, Liverpool, England; 3XN; 2011. A design chosen
to be an icon for the City of Liverpool compromised by political, financial and
managerial problems.
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Figure 64. (left) 1WTC, New York; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; completion
programmed 2013. Daniel Libeskind’s competition-winning icon replaced with a
commercial glass-walled office block.
Figure 65. (right) Burj al Arab, Dubai; Tom Wright, WS Atkins; 1999. Some
buildings designed to be iconic have become iconic.

Iconic architecture is being reassessed as the financial record

and commercial success of buildings are being revealed.
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304 Conclusion

The record of overspending and failure is, however, now so much

a part of the story of iconic buildings that it would be politically very
unlikely for any city or government in the North Atlantic economies
to embark on such a project in the near future. As the critic Hugh
Pearman said of a recently completed building by Zaha Hadid in
Glasgow, Scotland, a “pre-crash cultural building on the Clyde, first
designed in 2004, does have the whiff of another era about it.”49 Even
star architects are starting to tire of the culture. At the end of 2011
Rem Koolhaas said: “We have become a little bit worried about the
constant pressure to outperform and to outrage and make more and
more exceptional buildings.”50
The picture is different outside the indebted nations. Regional
political events can, nonetheless, have an effect. The colony of iconic
buildings by star architects planned on the Saadiyat Island in Abu
Dhabi has been continually delayed leading to rumours of fall-out
from the Arab Spring.51 In the emerging economies, where the
political situation is stable, however, the debt crisis has only been an
economic rebound from the reduced consumption of the developed
nations. Here there are no financial or moral pressures to abstain
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from seeking status with high-value buildings by star architects. As

Zaha Hadid said, when confronted with the impact of the financial
crisis in 2009, “I think that it’s too simplistic to say that there’ll be no
more exuberant architecture.”52 It may be that the development of
iconic architecture will transfer to the emerging economies and
change them in a way quite different from their origins in the North
Atlantic countries.
Modernist artistic culture, which lies at the heart of iconic
architecture, has been successfully promoted by North Atlantic
countries as a part of what was presented as a modern economic
system. Modernism is now traditional in Europe and the Americas,
but it has been exported to countries outside its place of origin. As a
recently introduced foreign style it is not so deeply engrained in the
emerging economies. Much as the economic system is now being
remodelled rather than recast by the newly dominant countries, so
North Atlantic Modernism and iconic architecture are likely to be
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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The End of the Era, What Now? 305

modified to suit newly confident cultures. This process is called

“indigenization,” and is a well-known phenomenon that has existed
from the earliest of times when different cultures came into contact
with one another.

Indigenization and Hybridized Returns

As the physical symbols of North Atlantic culture have spread around
the world, travellers find the familiar and assume that superficial
similarity delivers similarities of culture. They might be reassured by
the familiarity, or dismayed by the loss. Local people seeing the
physical symbols of their identity transformed may feel that
something precious has gone or might be excited by the novelty. But
while each observer will see the same physical objects, they will be
doing so from a different cultural perspective. Loss of a symbol of
identity to a traveller is not at all the same as a sense of loss to a
member of the community to which the symbol belongs. The
sociologist Anthony Cohen explains the persistence of culture that
survives the physical similarity of objects:
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… we should not be deceived by their apparent similarities into

supposing that they are actually alike, nor even that they are
becoming less different. The residents of Wandsworth, Winnipeg
and the Western Isles may all spend much time watching the
television—indeed, watching the same television programmes—
may use the same terminology to address their parents, may affiliate
to the same religious denominations, may observe the same calendar
and the same life-cycle ceremonies, and may apparently be
dominated by the same economic imperatives. But none of these
apparent convergences of life-style entitles us to suppose that the
cultural boundaries which separate them are now redundant and
anachronistic.53

Imperialists, be they territorial or cultural, have for centuries

believed that the imposition or acceptance of their institutions or the
physical appearance they have brought to subject people has

delivered some part of their home culture for the benefit of its
recipients.
The urban historian Jyoti Hosagrahar describes how this affected
British colonial attitudes to India: “First, it was assumed that
environments shaped societies and people and that people who lived
in similar environments shared a similar culture. Second, architecture
derived from ‘scientific reason’ and the principles of ‘rational design’
must be universally valid regardless of culture and politics.”54
Colonialism seen as a form of cultural superimposition—through
introduction or infiltration—is called “diffusionism.” The geographer
James Blaut explains: “Diffusionism at a world scale usually considers
Europe or the west to be the permanent centre of invention and
innovation.” After the Second World War, there was “the creation
and scientific validation of a modern form of the diffusionist model, a
body of ideas that had to persuade the now-sovereign Third World
states that economic and social advancement consisted of acquiring
so-called modernizing traits from the developed capitalist countries.”
Cultural diffusionism assumes that the greater efficiency or
rationality of North Atlantic traits will lead to the displacement of
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less progressive traits in emerging economies.55 Such a view seems to

be supported by the global adoption of the free-market, consumerism
and North Atlantic products. This is, however, as Arjun Appadurai
explains, an illusion:
At the level of popular culture, what might at first sight appear to be
processes of homogenization in fact display hybrid characteristics.
No cultural message, no aesthetic artefact, no symbol passes through
time and space into a cultural vacuum. The cultural context of
production and transmission must always in the end encounter an
already existing frame of reference in the eyes of the consumer or
receiver. The latter involves a process of great complexity—simple
notions of homogenization, ideological hegemony or imperialism
fail to register properly the nature of these encounters and the
interplay, interaction and cultural creativity they produce.56

The diffusionist model survives in some North Atlantic attitudes to

emerging economies. Nonetheless, as Blaut says, although “diffusionism
makes it appear to be so,” the “spatial inequality” at its foundation “is
not something normal, natural, inevitable, and moral.”57
The great French historian, Fernand Braudel, put this complex
relationship between cultures, or civilizations, into a wider perspective
in 1963 in his important book A History of Civilizations:

By accepting it, the world is not taking on Western civilization lock,

stock and barrel: far from it. The history of civilizations, in fact, is
the history of continual mutual borrowings over many centuries,
despite which each civilization has kept its own original character. It
must be admitted, however, that now is the first time when one
decisive aspect of a particular civilization has been adopted willingly
by all the civilizations in the world, and the first time when the
speed of modern communications has so much assisted its rapid and
effective distribution. That simply means that what we call
“industrial civilization” is in the process of joining the collective
civilization of the world …
Still, even supposing that all the world's civilizations sooner or
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later adopt similar technology, and thereby partly similar ways of

life, we shall nevertheless for a long time yet face what are really
very different civilizations. For a long time yet, the word civilization
will continue to be used in both singular and plural.58

This mutual borrowing of culture is a consistent and widely observed

phenomenon. It has always been a characteristic of language. English
in particular has, and continues to be, a receptor of multiple
influences and in its modified form in India and the Caribbean has
taken on recognisable but distinct variants. This adaptive process has
been described by a number of sociologists. Peter Burns refers to this
as “acculturation,” and defines it as “the process by which a
borrowing of one or some elements of culture takes place as a result
of a contact of any duration between two different societies.”59 Mike
Featherstone discusses how, “hybridization and creolization emerge
in which the meanings of externally originating goods, information

and images are reworked, syncretized and blended with existing

cultural traditions and forms of life.”60 Appadurai identifies this as
“indigenization,” in terms that are most appropriate for the condition
under discussion here: “at least as rapidly as forces from various
metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become
indigenized in one or another way: this is true of music and housing
styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and
constitutions.”61
The art and cultural historian Anthony King describes the different
processes behind indigenization:

When ideas, objects, institutions, images, practices, performances are

transplanted to other places, other cultures, they both bear the
marks of history as well as undergo a process of cultural translation
and hybridization. This tends to happen in any or all of three ways.
Most simply, for material phenomena, they generally change
their form, their social use, or function. Second, even though
arriving in similar forms (whether material technology or images)
they are invested with different cultural, social or ideological
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meanings. And finally, the different meanings with which material

objects, ideas or images are invested, themselves depend on the
highly varied local social, physical, spatial and also historical
environments into which they are introduced and the equally varied
local conditions under which they develop [emphasis in original].62

Japan has been particularly notable for the cultural translation of

North Atlantic ideas and institutions since the forced opening of its
ports by American warships in 1853. In the nineteenth century,
Japan turned itself into a hybrid of national, European and American
political and military institutions. Today, long after their abandonment
in Germany, Japanese schoolboys wear a version of a nineteenth-
century Prussian military school uniform, and schoolgirls wear a
version of British sailors’ neckwear popular at British private schools
in the early twentieth century.
African Indigenous Churches, also called African Initiated Churches
and African Independent Churches but all sharing the same acronym,
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The End of the Era, What Now? 309

AIC, are a fusion of Protestantism and African traditional religion.

AICs are one of the more rapidly growing Christian groups and have
spread beyond Africa with emigrant communities.
The adaptation of foreign cuisine is common: Chow mein is a
Chinese dish created for the American palate; Chinese food is
popular in India but has been adapted to suit Indian preferences;
Chicken Tikka Masala is an Indian recipe invented for British tastes
and, after a survey claimed it was the most popular menu choice in
Britain, the British Foreign Secretary called it “a true British national
dish.”63
Indigenization can be more than the adaptation of foreign
influence, synthesized forms can become independent phenomena
adopted by the synthesizing community as part of their identity. This
is described by Anthony Cohen:
… alien forms were not merely imported across cultural
boundaries. In the act of importation, they were transformed by
syncretism—by a process in which new and old were synthesized
into an idiom more consonant with indigenous culture. But as
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anthropologists themselves began to recognize the multivocality of

symbolism, and the problematic relationship between form and
meaning, they also made it apparent that the transformation went
beyond a mere marriage of idioms. Communities might import
structural forms across their boundaries but, having done so, they
often infuse them with their own meanings and use them to serve
their own symbolic purposes … different societies, and different
communities within the same society, may manifest apparently
similar forms—whether these be in religion, kinship, work,
politics, economy, recreation or whatever—but this is not to
suggest that they have become culturally homogeneous. For these
forms become new vehicles for the expression of indigenous
meanings. Of particular interest to us is the irony that they may well
become media for the reassertion and symbolic expression of the
community's boundaries.64

Figure 66. Rajbari, North Calcutta, India; mid-nineteenth century.

Figure 67. Lakeside villa, Huangzhou, China; early twentieth century.

Historic indigenized European classical architecture in East Asia

The architectural commentator Chris Abel, in detecting a change

in attitude in Malaysia towards colonial attempts to adapt Malaysian
architecture, sees “a new willingness to regard these buildings, for all
their quirks, as belonging to the national heritage … owed to a
growing sense of regional self-confidence, as well as the capacity of
building forms to take on new meanings.”65 He records a similar
condition in Singapore: “Never a Chinese city in the sense that a city
on mainland China could be so described, but developed in the typical
dualistic pattern of a colonial city, with a European half and a 'native'
half; the latter—already virtually a separate Chinatown—populated
by overseas Chinese who migrated to the Malay Peninsula to seek
fortune in Stamford Raffles' new trading post.” In the post-colonial
period it is now “viewed by proud Singaporeans as an Asian city, not
so much because it looks like one, but because it was created by
Asians, as opposed to the historic rumps which were originally built,
or otherwise controlled, by their erstwhile colonial rulers.”66
Most discussion of this hybridization or indigenization is based on
the principle that a dominant or desirable import is indigenized by
one culture from another as a one-way process. Bhangra pop music
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offers a different global model. A synthesis of traditional Punjabi

music and western popular music, bhangra pop was created by
British bands from Punjabi immigrant communities and became
popular in their countries of origin. This has now become a global
musical phenomenon, and has been influenced by hip hop and other
popular music genres. It is an example of foreign hybridization
returning to affect the place of origin. In the history of cultural
exchange and indigenization there are other examples of sequential
outward and returning cultural phenomena or “hybridized returns.”
The Jewish diaspora established by far the largest community in
Central and Eastern Europe, the Ashkenazi. At some time in the
fourteenth century, a coming of age ceremony for boys, the Bar
Mitzvah, was developed in this community. This was a largely small-
scale family affair.67 During the nineteenth century, improved travel,
open immigration, and continued persecution and social exclusion in
Europe brought large numbers of Jews to the Americas, particularly
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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312 Conclusion

the United States. Between 1840 and 1900 the Jewish population in
the Americas had increased tenfold to five and a half million.68 In the
USA in the twentieth century, the Bar Mitzvah became an
extravagant ceremony and in 1922 the first public Bat Mitzvah, a
similar coming-of-age ceremony for girls, was held in New York.
While orthodox groups did not accept that females could lead
communal religious services, the lavish American celebration of the
Bar Mitzah and the Bat Mitzvah spread back to Jewish communities
in Europe and the newly established state of Israel.
The celebration of Halloween, the eve of All Saints’ Day (or All
Hallows), was part of the ritual calendar in Catholic Europe. As it
was popularly believed that this was the last day the souls of the dead
could avenge the living, there was a tradition of dressing in disguise.
In the early seventeenth century, Protestant reformers in England
discouraged the practice as being Roman Catholic, and a different
ceremony involving the ritual burning of Guy Fawkes, a Catholic
insurrectionist, took its place, which continues to this day.
Halloween survived in Ireland, as a predominantly Catholic country,
and in Scotland where the Calvinist church took a more tolerant
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position. Irish and Scottish immigrants to the United States took

their celebration of Halloween with them, including established
traditions such as lighting candles in hollowed out turnips, ducking
for apples and “guising”—where disguised children went from door
to door to perform some congenial task and receive small gifts. In the
United States at some time in the early twentieth century guising
became “trick or treat” and the turnip was replaced with the
pumpkin. A commercialised version of the American Halloween was
reintroduced to England in the 1980s and is now treated as an
indigenous ceremony.
Hybridised returns are also found in ancient and recent
architectural history. Classical architecture originated in Greece and
was based on the two tribal architectural types or Orders: Doric for
the Dorians and Ionic for the Ionians. As Roman power eclipsed
Greek power in the Mediterranean, the status of Greek culture led
to its appropriation by the Roman elite. The Romans adapted a
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Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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The End of the Era, What Now? 313

minority variant of the Ionic Order by adding a more elaborate

capital and created an independent architectural Order, the
Corinthian. By the second century BCE Roman power had extended
into the east Mediterranean. As part of an alliance with the Seleucids
(the remnant of Alexander’s Empire), the future king Antiochus IV
was taken as an honoured hostage to Rome. Infused with Roman
culture and careful of Roman power, in 175 BCE a year after his
ascendancy to the throne, he began to complete the construction of a
long-planned and colossal Temple of Olympian Zeus in the centre of
Athens. He engaged a Roman architect, Decimus Cossutius, and the
architecture was changed to the Corinthian Order. In 146 BCE
Rome finally absorbed Greece into its Empire and the Corinthian
Order (including the final completion of the Temple of Olympian
Zeus) permanently joined the two Greek Orders in their place of
origin (figure 68).
Modernist architecture had its origins in predominantly left-wing
social reformers and visionaries in central Europe. As right-wing
regimes in Europe outlawed their politics and banned their work,
major exponents fled to the United States. Although the early
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European modernists had been admired by some architects in the

United States, their ideas for social reform were not thought to be
appropriate for America. Modernism was successfully developed to
suit the commercial market in the United States. It was returned in
this form to Europe after the Second World War, alongside
American political and economic ascendancy. The tension between
surviving ambitions for social reform and commercial success still
affect modernist thinking in Europe.

Figure 68. Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens; Decimus Cossutius; begun 175 BCE.
Greek classical architecture was adopted by Rome, where a new type or Order was
invented and taken back to Greece.
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Figure 69. Telefunken-Hochhaus, Berlin; Paul Schwebes and Hans Schoszberger;

1960. Modernism lost its socialist ideals when its German founders fled to the USA,
adapted to capitalism and reintroduced modernism to Germany after the Second
World War.

Hybridised returns, architecture exported from its place of origin

and re-imported in a modified form.

The Next Modernism?

As power moves to the east it is inevitable that culture will, at some
time and in some way, follow. The economic and political power of
the North Atlantic countries has been an instrument in the export of
their culture, and with it their dominant architectural type. As North
Atlantic power under the umbrella of the United States is, at the very
least, diminished, what has been exported will come under new
influences. China in particular has had a policy both of engaging
leading foreign architects and also maintaining economic and political
independence. If there is to be any new global cultural influence we
may look to China to find the first signs.
The creator of post-Mao China, Deng Xiaoping, on his tour of the
south in 1992 shortly after his retirement said “We should be bolder
than before in conducting reform and opening to the outside and
have the courage to experiment.”69 The Harvard social anthropologist,
Yunxiang Yan puts this into a wider perspective:

… the localization of foreign culture and the indigenous approach

toward imported culture are key to understanding the current

process of cultural globalization in China, as the majority of Chinese
have taken an active and positive approach toward the imported
foreign culture. This is officially reflected in the 1990s slogan,
Zhongguo zouxiang shijie, shijie zouxiang Zhongguo (China to the
world, and the world to China), which contains a twofold message.
At one level, the emphasis is on the two-way, equivalent process in
which China is actively reaching out to the world while the world is
reaching out to China. At a deeper level, the slogan indicates
movement toward a foreign culture, as revealed in the verb
zouxiang, which means “walking/marching toward.”
At the societal level, many intellectuals, business elites, and
professionals have positively appropriated cultural values and
cultural products from the West, as described above. For them,
ownership of Western culture is neither immutable nor
nontransferable; on the contrary, they feel a sense of entitlement in

claiming the localized foreign culture as their own, or as part of the

emerging global culture in which they too play a role.70

Chinese appropriation of western or North Atlantic culture has

included high-profile architectural projects. At first, in the 1980s and
1990s there were concerns that the pace and style of development
would affect Chinese identity. In Beijing development was controlled
by the “Capital Planning Guidance Committee” which was to “defend
the old capital’s traditional flavour.” The result was a series of temple
pavilions on top of otherwise standard modernist buildings. In the
1980s and early 1990s, however, expatriate Chinese architects from
the USA, such as I. M. Pei and Clement Chen, along with a number
of other American and European architects, were responsible for an
increasing number of new buildings.71 These buildings convinced the
authorities that there were distinct advantages in commissioning
high-profile foreign architects for major projects. Beijing and
Shanghai set the pace. Xuefie Ren describes the motives:
Face-lifting urban mega projects of all types have mushroomed in
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Beijing and Shanghai … Museums, opera houses, national libraries,

and new business districts are proposed and constructed at blistering
speeds. The central and municipal governments intend to use these
flagship projects to create a symbolic global city image and promote
Beijing and Shanghai for investment and tourism in the international
marketplace. In order to achieve this goal, it is considered necessary
to make these mega projects look modern, high-tech, futuristic and
non-Chinese, so that they can demonstrate the country’s
urbanization and modernization progress and impress investors.
Therefore, many of these “Grand Projects” have been commissioned
to [sic] famous international architects.72

This was not without opposition in China but by the early twenty-
first century, most of what the Chinese call “mega-structures,” with
“huge scale, high cost, far-reaching influence and unique image,”
have been designed by foreign architects and Chinese-foreign joint
ventures. Charlie Qiuli Xue et al. put this into its cultural context.

“Although these mega structures arrived in China with the rapid

development of the economy, they stem from the interaction of
globalisation and local awareness.”73 Or as Xuefei Ren puts it:
“Chinese architecture is caught between … global aspirations and the
search for their own original design language.”74
While China became a major source of high profile work for
North Atlantic architects, it was inevitable that Chinese architects
would begin to adopt a similar and competitive profile. Architects
such as Ma Qingyun, Yung Ho Chang, Pu Miao, Zhang Lei and Ma
Yansong have all become well-known, and have all attended
American or European universities for part of their professional
education. Zhang Lei, who trained in Switzerland, says that he “feels
his architecture is neither Chinese nor foreign.”75 Ma Yansong, who
worked with Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, has named his firm
MAD, a witty name that only works in English. The influence of
these architects is now spreading outside China. In Britain, the
American-trained Shanghai architects Neri and Hu have won a major
competition in London amid claims that they undercut the winners
on design.76 The tide of North Atlantic supremacy in Chinese
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

architectural commissions seems to be turning. Lance Taylor of the

quantity surveyors Rider Levett Bucknall, which employs 1,250 staff
in nineteen Chinese offices, has issued a warning to foreign architects
that home-grown design capability might be “a bigger threat to
[foreign] architecture that a slow-down in the Chinese market.”77
There has been a thoroughgoing export of North Atlantic
Modernism to China, from the employment of North Atlantic
architects to the North Atlantic education of Chinese architects. As
the economy enters a new stage, it may be that Chinese architecture
will also enter a new period. What form this will take we cannot be
sure, and the results of this process may be hard to detect. As the
cultural analyst Maureen Turim explains: “We know culture is being
produced for global consumption, but we don't know what the
world makes of what it receives and we cannot assume inherent
meanings, whatever we might take those to mean. Culture is marked
by a kind of polyvalence of meaning, a kind of multiplicity that is
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
318 Conclusion

highly contextual and even internally confused. Knowing the site and
means of production and the manner of distribution will not
necessarily reveal how the texts of culture are consumed.”78
We can at least be sure that, as with all cultural phenomena,
nothing will stand still. If Chinese political influence increases, if
Chinese investment becomes more significant in the North Atlantic
economies and if Chinese architects start to take a more dominant
role in the development of Modernism, it is likely that Modernism
will develop another hybridised return—this time to the North
Atlantic economies from whence it came. It may already have started
to do so.

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61. Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation.

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77. Merlin Fulcher. “Property Wobble in China Spooks Architects.”

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the World System, edited by Anthony D King. Basingstoke: Palgrave,
1991, 146.

Aalto, Alvar, 47, 222 Amnesty International, 71

Abel, Chris, 127, 311 Amsterdam, 255
Abbey Holford Rowe, 94 Anderson, Benedict, 198
Abu Dhabi, 97, 131, 164, 180, 233, Ando, Tadao, 125
304 Angell, Ian, 103, 213
Academy of Urbanism, 251, 253 Anholt, Simon, 210, 302
Acheson, Dean, 35 Antiochus IV, 313
Acid Rain, 214–215 Apollo XI Moon Landing, 59
Adamson, Bo, 226 Appadurai, Arjun, 81, 196, 204,
Adorno, Theodor, 124 306, 308
AECOM, 93, 96–97 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 199
Aedas, 93–97, 176, 232–233 Arab Spring, 1, 277, 304
Afghanistan, 67–68 Arabic, 289
African Indigenous Churches, 308– Arabian Performance Venue, 176
309 Aramaic, 9
Albania, 176 Archer Daniels Midland, 149
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Albert, Prince of Belgium, 52 Archigram, 47, 55

Albrow, Martin, 81, 82 Architectural Association, 183, 242
Alexander, Christopher, 241 Architectural Design, 242
Alexandria, 159 Argentina, 134, 226
Allcock, John, 156, 257 Arnaud, Bernard, 181
Allies, Bob, 126 Aronson, Jonathan, 118
Alsop, Will, 166, 180, 302 Art Deco, 23
American Anthropological Arts and Crafts movement, 17, 22,
Association, 31 27
American Apparel Manufacturers Arups, 229
Association, 110 Ashkenazi, 311
American Arts and Crafts, 18 AT&T, 61, 149
American Declaration of Atlantic Charter, 30
Independence, 11 Augé, Marc, 139–140, 200
American Express, 59 Australia, 10, 14, 16, 93, 174, 226,
American Institute of Architects 284
(AIA), 225 Austria, 61, 163, 168
American International Group Avvakumov, Yuri, 181
(AIG), 87 Azerbaijan, 164, 176

Berlin
Baader-Meinhof Gang, 50 Berlin Wall, 44, 68, 75, 87–88
Baker, Gerard, 86 Jewish Museum, 66, 168, 173
Baku, 164, 176 Kongresshalle, 38
Baldi, Pio, 167 Potsdamer Platz, 139
Bangalore, 132, 134 Berman, Marshall, 129
Banham, Reyner, 46 Berne Convention for the
Bar Mitzvah, 311–312 Protection of Literary and
Barber, Benjamin, 98 Artistic Works, 16
Barcelona, 237, 250 Berry, Wendell, 199
Olympics, 247 Betsky, Aaron, 159–160
Baroque Revival, 17, 18 Bhagwati, Jagdish, 77
Barr, Alfred, 218 Bhangra Pop, 311
Barragán, Luis, 183 Biedermeier, 22
Barth, Fredrik, 204 Bilbao Ria 2000, 161
Bat Mitzvah, 312 Black Monday, 5, 76
Batumi Aquarium, 176 Black Tuesday, 76
Bauhaus School, 21, 25, 34 Blatteau, John, 57
Bauman, Zygmunt, 119, 196, 199, Blaut, James, 306–307
204, 211 Bodenschatz, Harald, 142, 143
Bayley, Stephen, 160 Boeing, 69
Beaux Arts, 18, 22, 45, 250 Bofill, Ricardo, 57, 61
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Beck, Ulrich, 81, 127 Booth, W. James, 205

Behnisch, Gunter, 63 Borja, Jordi, 122, 246
Beijing, 70, 129, 131, 134, 152, Boston, 46, 245
166, 176, 291, 316 City Hall, 46
Airport, 177 Faneuil Hall Marketplace, 245
Bird’s Nest Stadium, 176 Boston Consulting Group,
Capital Planning Guidance 296
Committee, 316 Bové, José, 152
Olympics, 176 Boyer, Christine, 261
Tiananmen Square, 70, 285 BP, 111
Bell, Daniel, 45, 119 Branding, 150–153, 156, 158, 160–
Belluschi, Pietro, 38, 40 163, 166, 176, 179, 181, 184,
Bellvue Art Museum, Washington, 195
301 Brandt, Willy, 51
Benisch, Stefan, 235 Braudel, Fernand, 3, 307
Benjamin Franklin Foundation, 38 Brazil, 41, 85–87, 95, 112, 134,
Berger, Peter L., 81, 98, 205 183, 198, 226, 284, 286, 290
Beriatos, Elias, 163 BRE Environmental Assessment
Method (BREEAM), 225–226

Bretton Woods Agreement, 31, 58, Caterpillar Inc., 284

283, 284 Cavanagh, John, 83
Breuer, Marcel, 34 Chanan, Gabriel, 217
Brewer, Marliynn, 207 Chandigarh, 40
Brezhnev, Leonid, 44, 67 Chang, Yung Ho, 317
Britain, 14–17, 22, 25, 30, 32, 38, Charles, Prince of Wales, 62, 243,
44, 45, 51–53, 55, 60, 62, 92– 247–248, 250, 254, 256
93, 133, 163, 231, 238, 241– Chechnya, 85
242, 251, 254, 286, 292, 302, Chen, Clement, 316
309, 317 Chennai, 131–132
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Chermayeff, Serge, 241
Society, 16, 113 Chiat/Day Building, 162
Brooks, Alison, 222, 236, 239 Chicken Tikka Masala, 309
Brown, Mark Malloch, 292 China, 5, 10, 16, 22, 30, 32–33,
Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 67, 217 45, 50, 68–71, 76, 86–87, 110,
Brutalism, 46, 55, 219 112, 129, 134, 147, 152–153,
Building Research Establishment 167, 198, 213, 215–216, 230,
(BRE), 225–226 281, 283, 286, 288–289, 291,
Bull, Catherin, 138 293–294, 296, 315–317
Burj Khalifa, 167 Cultural Revolution, 45, 70
Burke, Edmund, 199 Down to the Countryside
Burns, Peter, 307 Movement, 50
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Bush, George H. W., 76, 87 Economic Growth, 1, 281, 283–

Byens Fornyelse, 248 285
Emperor Qianlong, 10
Calatrava, Santiago, 161, 224, 301– Four Modernisations, 69
302 Great Leap Forward, 45
Calthorpe, Peter, 254 Chirac, Jacques, 152
Canada, 52, 58–59, 197, 214, 225 Chongqing, 163
Nunavut, 198 Chipperfield, David, 180, 233
Quebec, 59, 197 Chow Mein, 309
Canary Wharf, 139 Christianity, 9–10
CaŸizares, Ana G., 172 CIA, 37
Capital Gate Hotel, 164 CITIC Headquarters, 177
Capitalism, 32, 35, 42, 44, 80, 87, Cioppa, Robert, 91
144 Citymark, 96
Carey, John, 133 Clarke, Terry, 155
Cardinal Newman, 13 Classicism, 14, 21–23, 37, 40, 47,
Carpenter, Juliet, 103 242, 258
Carter, Jimmy, 51 Climate Change, 215–216, 226–
Castells, Manuel, 77, 98, 101, 115, 228
121–122, 132, 197, 210, 246 Clinton, Bill, 79, 88, 225
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
326 The Globalisation of Modern Architecture

CNN, 88, 147 Costa, Lúcio, 41

Coca-Cola, 69, 151–152 Council for European Urbanism
Cold War, 32–34, 41, 49, 68, 75, (CEU), 252, 253
80, 87–88, 109, 195, 253 Council on Tall Buildings and Urban
Cohen, Anthony, 205, 208, 261, Habitat, The (CTBUH), 229
305, 309 Critical Regionalism, 63, 218, 220–
Colonial Revival, 22 222, 224, 232, 236
Commerzbank Headquarters, 229 Crockatt, Richard, 80
Committee of the Regions, EU, Crouch, Colin, 119
198, 202 Cuban Missile Crisis, 44
Communism, 32–33, 38, 40–41, Cubism, 20, 23
44–45, 68–69, 75, 79, 88, 109, Cullen, Gordon, 241, 251
112, 153, 195–196, 263, 291 Cultural Diversity, 82, 150, 202–
Soviet Bloc, 31–33, 35, 50, 67, 203, 217, 251
112 Cultural Lag, 3
Community Architecture, 57 Cyrillic, 289
Comte de Saint-Simon, 13 Czech Republic, 197
Confucius, 291 Czechoslovakia, 35, 50, 197
Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture
Moderne (CIAM), 35 d’Estaing, Valery Giscard, 284
Congress for the New Urbanism, Dassault Systèmes, 170–171
The (CNU), 249–253, 256 Davey, Peter, 254
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Connecticut, 55 Davis Langdon, 96

Connell, Amys, 123 Davis, Mike, 142
Convention on Long-Range Trans- Davis, Robert, 62, 242–243
Boundary Air Pollution, 214 de Condorcet, Nicolas, 12
Consumerism, 33, 41, 44, 49, 59, de Gaulle, Charles, 50
68–69, 100, 110, 123–124, de Montfort, Piers, 93
127, 133–134, 143–144, 147– Death and Life of Great American
150, 166, 195, 240, 263, 286, Cities, The, 241
306 Deconstruction, 65–66, 162, 173,
Constructivism, 20 174
Contextual Urbanism, 240, 246– Declaration on the Rights of Persons
248, 251–255, 260, 293 Belonging to National, Ethnic,
Coop Himmelblau, 168 Religious and Linguistic
Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions Minorities, 202
(M&A), 93 DEGW, 96
Delanty, Gerard, 132
Deleuze, Gilles, 140
Delhi, 131
Deng Xiaoping, 68, 69, 70, 75,
198, 315
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
Index 327

Denmark, 76 European Charter for Regional and

Danish People’s Party, 292 Minority Languages, 202
Denver, 255 European Union (EU), 1, 161, 198,
Derrida, Jacques, 65 202, 281, 283, 292
Deterritorialisation, 140 Expressionism, 20, 23
Detroit, 50
Dewar, Donald, 236–237 Farrell, Terry, 61
Dezalay, Yves, 98 Fathy, Hassan, 123
Dicks, Bella, 155, 245–246, 257 Fauvism, 20
Diffusionism, 306–307 Fawkes, Guy, 312
Digital Modelling, 170–171 Fax Machine, 67
Diogenes of Oenoanda, 9 Featherstone, Mike, 83, 98, 102,
Dior, 181 211, 260, 307
DMJM, 96 Feist, Wolfgang, 226
Doha, 131, 232, 288 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 12
Domain Name System, 289 Fifth Merger Wave, 93
Duany, Andres, 62, 242–243, 247– Filler, Martin, 124
248, 252 Financial Crisis 2008, 5, 86–87,
Dubai, 131, 133, 142–143, 167, 278, 281, 290
255 Finland, 40, 59, 197, 292
Dubēek, Alexander, 50 True Finns party, 292
Dubois, René, 59 Sami, 59, 197
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Dutch style, 137 First World War, 18

Dulles, Eleanor, 38 Fishman, Robert, 134
Flame Towers, 176
Earth Summit 1992, 215, 225–226, Florida, Richard, 98, 101
247 Fontenelle, 12
Eames, Charles, 34 Ford, Henry, 18, 59
East Asian Miracle, 84 Foreign Office Architects, 232–233,
Easterling, Keller, 98 238
EDAW, 96 Foster, Norman, 63, 101–102,
Eisenman, Peter, 55, 65–66, 168, 161–162, 171, 177, 179, 180,
170, 179, 182–183, 300 183, 229, 255, 302
Elkins, Leslie, 224 Frampton, Kenneth, 63, 129, 221–
E-Mail, 60 222, 224
Embassy Buildings, 37 France, 14, 17, 22, 30, 40, 50, 58,
English Civil War, 11 61, 76, 111, 152, 161, 179, 196
English East India Company, 110 Frankfurt, 229
Enlightenment, the, 10–13, 20–21, Free-Market, 5, 58, 60, 68, 70, 75–
32, 71, 82, 221 76, 87, 89, 163, 278, 291, 306
Erskine, Ralph, 57, 219 Freiburg, 255
Ethiopia, 19 French Style, 137
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
328 The Globalisation of Modern Architecture

Friedman, Jonathan, 102 Global Village, 199

Friedman, Milton, 78 Globalisation
Fukayama, Francis, 87–88 Anti-Globalisation, 84, 144, 152
Fundamental Constitutions of Definition Of, 77, 78, 80
Carolina, 11 Fragmentation, 81, 82
Homogeneity, 80–82, 211, 222,
G8 Conference in Genoa 2001, 84 246, 255, 263
G20, 281, 283, 286, 290 New Global Era, 5–7, 71, 75,
Gaidar, Yegor, 76 79–80, 87, 104, 110, 112, 114,
Galicia, 300 116, 119, 123, 129, 142, 144,
Gang of Four, 68 154, 158, 160, 163, 177, 179,
Garden City Movement, 251 183, 198, 200, 209, 224, 229,
Garratt, Charlie, 217 236, 250, 258, 277–279, 285–
Gated Communities, 134 286, 288
Gateshead, 166 Terminology, 59
Gazprom tower, 176 Westernisation, 81, 82, 89
Gehry, Frank, 160–162, 168, 170– Glocalisation, 211–212
171, 174–175, 177, 179, 181– Goldblatt, David, 118, 196
183, 228, 301 Goldfinger, Ernö, 46
General Agreement on Tariffs and Goldman Sachs, 281, 286
Trade (GATT), 112 Goodluck, Akinwale, 297
General Electric, 111 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 67–68
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Gentrification, 103, 142, 243, 245 Gordon-Smith, Thomas, 61

George III, 10 Gospodini, Aspa, 132, 158, 163
Georgia, 176 Gothenburg, 22
Germany, 17–19, 23, 32, 37, 39, Gothic Revival, 14
50–51, 58, 63, 68, 76, 88, 111, Gough, Piers, 239
154, 162, 168, 226, 242, 253, Grana, César, 257
255, 292, 308 Graves, Michael, 61, 220–221
Nazism, 21, 25, 31, 34, 38 Gray, John, 13, 204
Weimar Republic, 20 Great Depression, 1, 25, 29, 33,
Wirtschaftswunde, 44 76, 290
Ghemawat, Pankaj, 80 Great Moderation, 5, 86–87, 279,
Gibson, William, 298 300
Giddens, Anthony, 81–82, 127 Greco-Turkish war, 19
Gieryn, Tom, 211 Greece, 17–18, 312–313
Gimenez, Carmen, 161 Green Building Councils, 225
Glasgow, 241, 304 Greene and Greene, 18
Glendenning, Miles, 172 Greenpeace International, 52, 113
Global Cities, 97, 104 Greenwich, 17
Global Humanity, 9 Griffith-Jones, John, 103
Global Networks, 116, 118, 213 Griffiths, Keith, 95
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
Index 329

Grimshaw, Nicholas, 63 Holl, Steven, 168, 175, 180, 183,

Grollo, Bruno, 166 301
Gropius, Walter, 34–35, 37–38, Hollein, Hans, 61
41, 46, 219 Holt, Douglas, 152
Guangzhou, 129, 131, 164, 230 Homogeneity, See Globalisation
Guattari, Félix, 140 Hong Kong, 90, 92, 94, 129
Guilleard, C. J., 154 Hooson, David, 199
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 160– Hopkins, Michael, 63
163, 167, 170, 177, 300 Hormats, Robert, 281
Guggenheim, Peggy, 161 Hosagrahar, Jyoti, 306
Gunma Museum, 55 Hotel Industriel, 127
House IV, 55
Hadid, Zaha, 66, 164, 167–171, Howard, Judith, 209
175, 179–181, 183, 300, 302, Hu Yaobang, 70
304, 317 Hu Jintao, 153
Halloween, 312 Human Rights in China, 71
Han Empire, 9 Human Rights Watch, 71
Hangzhou, 177 Humm, Jayne, 217
Hannerz, Ulf, 80 Hungary, 35, 44, 68
Hanoi, 131 Hunter, James, 98, 148
Harris, Frederick R, 96 Huntingdon, Samuel, 98
Harrison, Wallace, 46 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 166, 181
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Harvard Graduate School of Design, Hyderabad, 132

34, 102, 183 Hyperspaces, 140
Hatherley, Owen, 126
Heerim, 164 Ibelings, Hans, 125, 132, 138, 167
Held, David, 118, 196 Icons as Magnets of Meaning
Heller, Agnes, 101, 154, 156 Exhibition 1996, 159
Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum Iconic Buildings, 2, 100, 158–159,
(HOK), 90–91, 95, 176 163–164, 167, 170, 172–174,
Heritage Movement, 53 177, 179, 183, 235, 255, 293,
Hernàndez, Gil-Manuel, 140 299–302, 304
Herrero, Julio Fajardo, 180 Identity
Herzog de Meuron, 176 Cultural, 204–205, 235, 258
High Tech, 63, 65, 224 Formation, 208
Hines, Colin, 112 Group, 98, 102, 199–200, 202,
Hilton, Clinton, 38 207–208, 210
Hitler, Adolf, 19 Local, 218, 220, 232–233, 235,
240, 246, 260, 262, 290–291
National, 16–17, 20, 22, 59,
140196, 198–200, 290, 292,
316
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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330 The Globalisation of Modern Architecture

Place, 53, 102, 140, 153, 155– International Non-Governmental

156, 210–211, 233, 236, Organisation (INGO), 113, 115
240–241, 257, 260 International Organization for
Politics, 59, 198–201, 203, 263 Standardization, 113
Social, 206–208 International Style, 21, 35, 40, 42,
Symbolic, 210, 235–238, 240, 218
261, 305 International Style Exhbition, 40
Systematic, 236 International Union of Architects
Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, 179 and AIA conference in 1993, 225
India, 10, 14, 16, 40, 50–51, 71, Internationalism, 18–20, 31, 127,
76, 86–87, 110, 112, 132, 134, 291
147, 198, 213, 225, 281, 284, Internet, 77, 89, 93, 101, 114–116,
286, 288, 298, 306–307, 309 152, 289–290
Economic Growth, 1, 5, 285, Interpol, 113
286 Inuit Circumpolar Council, 201
Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), Iran, 51, 60
286 Iraq, 60
Immovable Cultural Heritage, 52 University City, 41
Indigenization, 201, 305, 308–309, Islam, 9–10
311 Isosaki, Arata, 47, 55, 232
Indonesia, 84, 85, 134, 198, 286 Israel, 51, 312
Information and Communications Italy, 17, 18, 19, 21, 40, 58, 76,
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Technologies (ICTs), 114–116, 197, 292

118 Economic Miracle (Miracolo
Infosys, 132, 286 Economico), 44
Institute of Classical Architecture MAXXI building, 167, 175, 300
(ICA), 256 Ito, Toyo, 180–181
Intergovernmental Organisations
(IGOs), 113, 115, 118 Jacobs, Jane, 241, 254
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Jaguar, 286
Change (IPCC), 215 Jakarta, 134
International Committee of the Red Japan, 10, 15, 16, 19, 44, 46, 55,
Cross, 113 58, 76, 101, 111, 118, 134,
International Maritime 152, 163, 168, 179, 212, 227,
Organisation, 113 278, 291, 308
International Monetary Fund (IMF), Jencks, Charles, 53, 58, 61, 159–
31, 58, 60, 68, 71, 76–77, 79, 160, 172
85–86, 110, 112–113, 282, Jewish Diaspora, 311
284, 288 JFK Airport, 175
International Network for Jiang Xu, 164
Traditional Building Architecture Jiang Zemin, 129
and Urbanism (INTBAU), 248 JiƎiēná, Eva, 239
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
Index 331

John Lewis Store, Leicester, 232, Le Corbusier, 23, 35, 40, 46, 175
238 Leadership in Energy and
Johnson, Philip, 57, 61 Environmental Design (LEED),
Jones, Paul, 132 225, 228
Juniper, Tony, 116 Leach, Neil, 96
Juris, Jeffrey, 84, 116 League of Nations, 19–20, 29, 30
Lees, Loretta, 103
Kahn, Louis, 34 Lefaivre, Liane, 63, 218–219, 221,
Kaletsky, Anatole, 281 224
Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles, Lehman Brothers, 86, 281
46 Lehman, Harvey C., 4
Kant, Immanuel, 12, 20 Lei, Zhang, 317
Katodrytis, George, 143 Levitt, Theodore, 66–67, 146
Kaufmann, Edgar, 37 Lewis, Roger K., 139, 257
Kearney, Michael, 140 Li, C.Y., 167
Kent State University, 50 Li Yingchun, 129
Keynes, John Maynard, 17 Liberal Arts and Sciences Building,
Khan, Louis, 46 232
Khrushchev, Nikita, 41–42, 44 Libeskind, Daniel, 66, 168–171,
King, Anthony, 210, 308 173, 175, 179, 181, 183, 253,
King, Jr., Martin Luther, 50 301
Kodak, 213 Lim, C. J., 235
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), 90–91, Lin Shusen, 164

232, 302 Lippmann, Walter, 33
Koolhaas, Rem, 102, 168–169, Llewellyn Davis Yeang, 236
179–183, 253, 304, 317 Lloyd, Richard, 155
Kraft, 150 Lloyd Wright, Frank, 18, 46, 160,
Krens, Thomas, 160–161 179
Krier, Léon, 57, 61–62, 242–243, Local Government Commission,
247, 253 248–249
Krier, Rob, 242 Localisation, 200, 212, 247, 290–
Krueger, Anne, 77, 83 292
Kuala Lumpur, 167 Locke, John, 11–12
Kubitschek, Juscelino, 41 Loewy, Raymond, 37
Kurshiki City Hall, 46 London, 60, 91, 103, 214
Kyoto Protocol, 227 30 St. Mary Axe, 162, 229, 302
Docklands, 90, 91, 139, 241
Ladakh, 147 Fog, 214
Lamy, Steven, 88 Olympics, 97
Land Rover, 286 One New Exchange, 232
Larson, Henning, 176 Pinnacle Tower, 302
Lash, Scott, 127 Ronan Point, 53
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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332 The Globalisation of Modern Architecture

Stock Exchange, 89 Meier, Richard, 62, 168, 180, 183

The Shard, 229 Melbourne, 166, 231
Trellick Tower, 46 Melnikov, Konstantin, 23
Victoria and Albert Museum, Mendelsohn, Erich, 20, 127
175 Mendes da Rocha, Paulo, 183
LPT, 94 Meridian, 16–17
Lynch, Kevin, 241 Merrill, John, 95
Lyotard, Jean-François, 58, 82 Merrill Lynch, 89
Mexico, 152, 183, 225, 299
Ma Qingyun, 317 Miao Pu, 317
Ma Yansong, 183, 317 Microsoft, 60
MacCannell, Dean, 157 Middlesbrough, 166
MacMillan, Harold, 44 Miller, Daniel, 147
Madge, James, 172 Miller, Jon, 96
Malaysia, 167, 222, 311 Mitterand, Francois, 160
Malevich, Kasimir, 21, 175 Miralles Moya, Enric, 237, 238
Malmö, 255 Mobile Phones, 60
Manassen, 284 Modernism, 2, 18, 20–21, 23, 25,
Manchester Imperial War Museum 29, 34–35, 37–42, 44–47, 53,
North, 175 55, 57–58, 61–63, 65–66, 91,
Manchuria, 19 123–127, 129, 132–133, 137,
Mandela, Nelson, 80 162, 173, 175–176, 218–221,
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Mander, Jerry, 151 224, 228–229, 232, 239, 242–

Mao Zedong, 45, 50, 68, 70, 315 243, 250, 253–254, 256, 258,
Maragall, Pasqual, 237, 250 260, 262, 304, 313, 316–318
Marshall Plan, 33, 35, 112 Morgan Stanley, 286
Martha’s Vinyard House, 175 Morita, Akio, 213
Martin, David, 98 Moore, Charles, 61
Martin, Leslie, 46 Moral Duty, 13
Marx, Karl, 16, 144–145 Morozov, Evgeny, 290
Matthews, Gordon, 210 Morris, Philip, 150
Mayer, Jurgen, 236, 239 Morrison, Graham, 173
McDonalds, 67, 152, 212, 284 Moscow, 131
McGrew, Anthony, 81, 113, 118, Manege Square, 139
196 Mosproject 3, 42
McKinsey Global Institute, 293 Palace of the Soviets, 42
McLeish, Henry, 237 MTV, 67, 88, 212–213
McLuhan, Marshall, 199 Multi-Speed History, 3
Mead, Russell, 291 Mumbai, 97, 131, 297
Meades, Jonathan, 262 Mumford, Lewis, 37, 218–219, 221
Meem, John Gaw, 21 Munsterberg, Hugo, 29
Mega Structures, 316–317 Murcutt, Glen, 222
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
Index 333

Murray, Alan, 89 Newman, Peter, 254

Museum of Liverpool, 300 Niemeyer, Oscar, 2, 41, 183
Mussolini, Benito, 19 Niezen, Ronald, 83–84, 144
MVRDV, 176 Nigeria, 297
Nike, 150, 152
NAFTA (the North American Free Nixon, Richard, 41, 51, 58
Trade Agreement), 225 Non-Governmental Organisation
Nairn, Ian, 241 (NGO), 71, 98, 113, 118
Nairobi, 123, 297 Non-Place, 139, 140, 142
Nation State, 12, 16, 117–121, Norberg-Hodge, Helena, 147
195–196, 198, 208, 215, 287 Nouvel, Jean, 176, 180–181, 232
Nationalism, 18–20, 22–23, 38, Novelli, Porter, 89
292
Nazism, See Germany O’Donnell and Tuomey, 236
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 40 O’Donnell, Sheila, 236, 239
Neolithic revolution, 7 O’Neill, Jim, 286
Neri and Hu, 317 Oborn, Peter, 232
Nervi, Pier Luigi, 46 Ogburn, William, 3
Nestlé, 111 Oldenburg, Claes, 162
Netherlands, 14, 47, 242, 292 Oltmann, Larry, 233
Freedom Party, 292 OMA, 181
Nederlands Dans Theater, 168 Opium Wars, 15
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Neutra, Richard, 219 Organisation for Economic Co-

Neuwrith, Robert, 296–297 operation and Development
Nevarez, Julia, 142, 245 (OECD), 33, 44–45, 67, 75–77,
New Delhi, 297 112–113, 145, 154, 297
New Global Era, See Globalisation Organisation of Islamic
New Urbanism, 62, 252, 254, 293 Cooperation, 113
New World Order, 29, 71 Organisation of Petroleum
New York Exporting Countries (OPEC),
1 Bryant Park Tower, 228 51
Empire State building, 159 Orwell, George, 32
Ground Zero, Manhattan, 175, Otto, Frei, 46
301 Oxfam, 113
Lincoln Center, 46 Ozkan, Suha, 219
PanAm Building, 46
South Street Seaport, 245 Pacific Design Centre, 55
World Trade Center, 97, 131 Pakistan, 50, 95
New York Institute for Palace of Culture and Science, 37
Architectural and Urban Studies, Palestine, 51
183 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 233, 235
New Zealand, 14, 226 Pan Yue, 215
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
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334 The Globalisation of Modern Architecture

Papadakis, Andreas, 242 Postmodernism, 2, 58, 61–63, 66,

Parametricism, 173–174 82, 123–127, 137, 174, 220–
Parin, Claire, 240 222, 242, 256
Paris, 17, 55, 127, 159–160, 165 Poundbury, 62, 243, 254
Eiffel Tower, 159, 165 Prada, 181
Exposition Internationale des Arts Prada Transformer, 181
Décoratifs et Industriels Prairie Style, 18
Modernes, 22 Prescott, John, 251
Parc de la Villette, 66 Pritzker Prize, 125, 159, 180, 183
Triangle Tower, 302 Prix, Wolf, 168
Paris Convention for the Protection Prophet Muhammad, 9
of Industrial Property, 16 Pudong, 70, 129, 166
Passivhaus-Institut, 226 Putin, Vladimir, 85
Pearl Harbour Attack 1941, 30
Pearl River Tower, 230 Qatar, 131, 176, 232, 288
Pearman, Hugh, 175, 304 Quelch, John, 152
Pei, I. M., 124, 316 Quinlan Terry, 57
Pelli, Cesar, 55, 161, 167, 183
Perrault, Dominique, 127 Raeburn, Henry, 238
Perraton, Jonathan, 118, 196 Rayner, Steve, 228
Petronas Towers, 167 Reagan, Ronald, 60, 68, 76, 123,
Persian Empire, 9, 10 281
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Philippines, 84 Reaganomics, 124

Pfaff, William, 88 Reclaim the Streets, 144
Philippines, 84 Redstone, Sumner, 88
Piano, Renzo, 55, 63, 177, 180, Regency Style, 22
224, 229 Regium Museum, 175
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 89 Ren, Xuefie, 316
Piraeus, 284 Rewal, Raj, 222, 224
Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, 62, 242– Ricœur, Paul, 145, 221
243, 247, 248 Rider Levett Bucknall, 317
Player, Gary, 181 River Elegy, 70
Poland, 44, 50 RMJM, 176
Polisano, Lee, 232 Robertson, Roland, 81, 201
Polybius, 9 Rococo, 18
Pompidou Centre, 63 Rogers, Ernesto, 35
Ponti, Gio, 46 Rogers, Richard, 55, 63, 124, 177,
Porritt, Jonathan, 216 180, 183, 239, 250
Porter Novelli, 89 Roman Empire, 9, 312–313
Portoghesi, Paolo, 61 Corinthian Order, 313
Portugal, 14, 76 Doric Order, 312
Postfunctionalism, 55, 66 Ionic Order, 312–313
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
Index 335

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 31 Scottish Parliament building, 236–

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 30 238
Rossi, Aldo, 61 Seaside, Florida, 62, 242–243, 246,
Rouse Company, 245 253
Rousseau, Jacques, 200 Seattle, 301
Rousseff, Dilma, 290 World Trade Organisation 1999,
Royal College of Art, 242 84
Royal Palace of Holyrood, 237 Second World War, 2, 5, 19, 25,
RTKL, 91 29, 30–32, 51, 71, 77, 86–88,
Rui Chenggang, 152 110, 112, 117, 126, 145, 214,
Ruigrok, Winfried, 212 288, 293, 306, 313
Rushdie, Salman, 209 Serlio, Sebastiano, 179
Russell-Hitchcock, Henry, 40 Sert, Josep Luis, 35, 38
Russia, 14, 18–19, 21, 32, 35, 68, Shambaugh, David, 285
71, 76, 84–85, 112, 176, 225, Shanghai, 69–70, 76, 97, 129, 138–
258, 286 139, 166–167, 316
Russo-Byzantine style, 18 Sharjah, 143
Shingle Style, 18
Saadiyat Island, 180, 304 Short, John, 138
Saarinen, Eero, 34, 46, 175 Shoten, Fujita, 212
Sainsbury Centre, 63 Shrybman, Steven, 217
Salthouse, Timothy, 4 Shuttleworth, Ken, 162
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Sami, See Finland Silk Road, 9

Santayana, George, 145 Six Day War, 51
São Paulo, 131, 298 Sixth Merger Wave, 93
Sardar, Ziauddin, 32 Skating Minister, The, 238
Sarkozy, Nicholas, 165 Skidmore Owings and Merrill
Sassen, Saskia, 97–98, 103–104, (SOM), 46, 63, 90–91, 95
243, 247 Sklair, Leslie, 98–101
Satellite Television, 67, 148, 212 Slessor, Catherine, 227–228
Saudi Arabia, 31, 60 Slovakia, 197
Saul of Tarsus, 9 Slum, 40, 142, 296–298
Saunders, Doug, 296 Smithson, Alison, 47
Scholte, Jan Aart, 82, 122, 149, Smithson, Peter, 47, 219
207, 209 Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act 1930, 29
Schorlemmer, Friedrich, 79 Sobel, Andrew, 78
Schumacher, Patrik, 126, 169–171, South Africa, 31
173 South Korea, 84–85, 152, 226
Scott, David, 229 Soviet All-Union Conference for
Scottish National Party, 198, 292 Builders and Architects 1954,
Scottish National Tourist 42
Organisation, 238
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
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336 The Globalisation of Modern Architecture

Spain, 14, 19, 57, 76, 161, 163, Tajfel, Henri, 207
197, 300 Tall Buildings, 39, 165–166, 229,
Basque Region, 161, 197 231–232
Catalan Nationalist Party, 197 Tange, Kenzo, 46
Civil War, 19 Taylor, Earl, 152
St. Louis, 53, 90 Taylor, Lance, 317
St. Petersburg, 37, 176 Taylor, Peter, 134
Stadtraum, 242 Taylor, Stephanie, 210
Stalin, Joseph, 20–21, 38, 41, 42, Tea Party Movement, 291
69 Telegraph, 16
Stanislaw, Joseph, 147 Telephone, 114
Star Architect, 177, 180–183, 237, Television, 67, 70, 114, 147–148,
253, 255, 302, 304 150–151, 155, 212–213, 305
Starbucks, 152 Temple of Artemis, 159
Stiglitz, Joseph, 75, 83–84, 86, Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens,
112–113, 281 313
Stimmann, Hans, 253 Thailand, 84, 85
Stirling and Wilford, 161 Thatcher, Margaret, 60, 76, 123,
Stirling, James, 57, 161, 242 281
Stockholm Exhibition 1930, 25 The Public, West Bromwich 302
Stone, Edward Durrell, 38 Thiruvananthapuram, 132
Strassoldo, Raimondo, 203 Thompson, John B., 205
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

Stubbins. Jr., Hugh, 38 3XN, 300

Style Moderne, 23–34, 40 Tiebout, Charles, 120
Suburban Development, 133–135 Tokyo, 91, 97, 129, 179, 181
Sudan, 198 Tomorrow Square, 167
Sudjic, Dejan, 172 Touraine, Alain, 201
Sustainability, 67, 214, 216–217, Tourism, 148, 153–158, 245–246,
224–230, 233, 248–249, 254– 257, 316
255, 286 Towards an Urban Renaissance,
Swarovski Crystals, 181 250, 253
Sweden, 22, 196, 255 Townscape, 241
Swedish Grace, 22 Tradition, 21, 201, 205–206, 208–
Sydney, 166, 174 209, 224, 235, 248, 256–258,
UTS building, 174 260–263
Sydney Opera House, 47, 159–160, Traditional Architecture, 21–22, 42,
171, 175 45, 137, 255–258, 263
Syrkus, Helena, 35 Transnational Capitalist Class
(TCC), 98–99, 101–103, 121
Tagliabue, Benedetta, 237, 238 Transnational Corporations (TNCs),
Taipei 101, 167 99, 110–112, 115, 117, 119–
Taiwan, 167 121, 129, 131, 153, 195, 200
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
Architecture and Urban Design since 1990, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/queen
Created from queen-ebooks on 2020-09-20 14:18:18.
Index 337

Treaties of Westphalia, 11, 116 279–281, 283–286, 290, 301,

Treaty of Versailles, 19 312–313, 315
Truman Show, The, 253 USSR, 18, 20–21, 23, 30, 32, 33,
Tschumi, Bernard, 66, 181, 183 41, 44–45, 50, 67, 195
Tunisia, 277 Utzon, Jørn, 47, 159, 175
Turgot, A. R. J., 12
Turim, Maureen, 317 van der Rohe, Mies, 34, 37, 46, 222
Turner, Ted, 88 van Eyck, Aldo, 47
Tzonis, Alexander, 63, 218–219, van Tulder, Rob, 212
221, 224 Venturi, Robert, 47, 55, 61–62
Viacom, 88, 212
Uganda, 198 Vienna Declaration on Human
Unité d’Habitation, 46 Rights, 202
United Kingdom, 111 Vietnam War, 49
United Nations, 12, 30–31, 34, 59, Vision of Britain, A, 247
67, 110–113, 117, 202, 214– Vision of Europe, A, 247–248, 253,
215, 287, 292, 296 256
United Nations Conference on the Vitra, 162, 168
Human Environment, 59 Volkswagen, 111
United Nations Declaration, 30 Völkisch Movement, 21
United Nations Development Volvo, 284
Programme, 292 Vorticism, 20
Copyright © 2012. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.

United Nations Education, Scientific

and Cultural Organisation Wall Street, 129
(UNESCO), 52, 100, 123, 150, Wallerstein, Immanuel, 11
202–203 Wal-Mart, 89. 111
United Nations World Tourist Warsaw, 37–38
Organisation (UNWTO), 154 Washington Consensus, 60, 86, 109
Universal Declaration of Human Waterfront City, 255
Rights, 31, 34, 71, 117 Watergate scandal, 51
United States Information Agency Watt, Dominic, 292
(USIA), 37, 41 We’re Building a Better Life
Universal Declaration on Cultural Exhibition (Wir bauen ein besseres
Diversity, 203 Leben), 37, 41
Urban Sprawl, 33 Weatherford, McIver, 200
Urry, John, 154–156 Weil, Simone, 199
USA, 1, 16, 18, 22, 25, 29–34, 37, Wellington College, 288
41–42, 44–45, 49, 51–52, 55, Wen Jiabao, 216
57–60, 62, 67–69, 71, 76–77, West Midlands, England, 214
85–88, 92–93, 95–96, 100, West, Alison, 217
110–112, 118, 126, 133, 136, Westernisation, See Globalisation
147, 149, 151, 154, 163, 212, Wheeler, Stephen, 254
Adam, Robert. The Globalisation of Modern Architecture : The Impact of Politics, Economics and Social Change on
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338 The Globalisation of Modern Architecture

Wieland, Christopher Martin, 12

Wieviorka, Michel, 203 Xinhua News Agency, 283
Willets, Peter, 117 Xue, Charlie Qiuli, 129, 316
Wilson, Woodrow, 19
Wolf, Martin, 78, 113, 120 Yale School of Architecture, 34,
Wood, Anthony, 229 183
Woon, Eden, 153 Yan Yunxiang, 315
World Bank, 31, 58, 60, 68, 70– Yamasaki, Minoru, 46
71, 76, 79, 83, 85–86, 288 Yates, Joshua, 148
World Commission on Yeang, Ken, 222, 232, 236, 239
Environment and Development, Yeh, Anthony G.O., 164
The (WCED), 67 Yeltsin, Boris, 68, 85
World Council of Indigenous Yergin, Daniel, 147
Peoples, 201 Yom Kippur War, 51
World Exhibition 1923, 22
World Trade Centers Association, Zapatista, 119
131 Zaera-Polo, Alejandro, 233, 235–
World Trade Organisation (WTO), 236, 238–239
112–113 Zhang Lei, 317
World Wide Web, 77 Zhu Pei, 181
Wright, Tom, 302 Zukin, Sharon, 143, 163
WS Atkins, 302
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