ESSAY
Mapping the Effects of Globalization on Contemporary Architecture
Globalization is referred to mainly in conjunction with economics, politics, and immigration. But what is its impact on the production of architecture? How have the flow of ideas and images and new technological advancements affected architecture in recent decades? As with fashion and food, contemporary architecture has fallen prey to the in fluence of globalization. High street in London features the same ubiquitous shopping chains and products as Main street in Sydney or Zurich. Contemporary buildings in cities across the globe closely resemble one another and are frequently designed by international architectural offices located on the other side of the world. Architects are influenced by the architecture they see in journals, and, as with music trends, design trends are no longer specific to a locality. It takes a mere split second to access content on the internet making the universe of images and ideas available to nearly all of us, nearly all of the time. The nineteen projects presented in this issue of Swisspearl Architecture Maga zine can be seen as loosely representa-
tive of the current globalized international architectural scene, which features a fluid cross-referencing of forms and an eclectic, architectural border crossing trans-continental language. As holds true for many contemporary buildings, it is difficult to determine where the projects featured in this issue are situated solely by looking at their architectural expression. Global architecture is inextricably linked to global markets, neoliberal economies, and multinational companies; and these forces influence the production of architecture. Over the past few decades many of the norms of the architectural profession have been cast away, thus creating a culture of “anything goes.” As Rem Koolhaas, the doyen of the international architectural
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discourse, wrote in his seminal book, Delirious New York, there is an “Uncontrollable process of association where everything is connected with everything else.” Although he was referring to twentieth-century, avant-garde architecture, I would suggest this process is still in place today. GLOBALIZED LANGUAGE This present magazine features buildings representing a wide variety of typologies and scales, built in an expansive geographic range, from an airport building in Slovakia, to a high school in the United States, a hospital building in Italy to a villa in Israel, to name just a few. In addition to their use of Swisspearl fiber cement cladding, all these disparate buildings likewise share their lack of specificity to a place and the cross pollination of forms. During the 1990s,
