Navigating the World

Below is what I had to turn in for one of my classes on Design Theory and Criticism. It's abour 3x too long for what the prof wanted, but 3x too short for what I could have said. At any rate, go out and read Koolhaas' "Architecture and Globalization" and think about it in terms of the current situation. I think this has gotten as close as I can get to expressing why, on one hand, graduating in 2009 is filled with opportunity and more possibilities than ever before, but on the other, figuring out how to naviagte the world as a "global citizen" seems impossible at times.

Architecture is “being subjected to movements going in absolutely opposite directions: one direction is globalization and the other is…a kind of regionalization. I think it is a wrenching movement, a tension and a torsion between an expansion of perspective on one hand, and an implosion of perspective, on the other hand.” – Rem Koolhaas, “Architecture and Globalization”

Koolhaas hits on a current that seems to run through the discourse in many circles. We seem to live in an increasingly globalized society, as Thomas Friedman’s _The World Is Flat_ and Robert Reich’s _Supercapitalism_, amongst many others, will attest to. At the same time, all over the globe, a renewed interest in all things local has popped up. In Italy, wines and foods are considered more “pure” if they are produced by traditional means and in the same regions that they originated from; locally-grown organic foods and the Slow Food movement have gained popularity in many parts of the industrialized world; and in America, cultural preservation, in the form of interest in ethnic foods, customs, and practices, is particularly important.

Translating this into architectural discourse, postmodernism has produced an attraction toward “regionalist” or “vernacular” architecture in order to give spaces context, but it is also happening at a time when location is becoming increasingly unimportant. Being in San Francisco versus being in Shanghai is not so important as much as being able to communicate and move goods/ideas/resources between these places is. But while the Global North becomes increasingly connected, the gap between the “First” and “Third” worlds seems to be as wide as ever, with billions of people living in poverty. Geographical distance is not so much what defines these distances as do income and consumption power – Tijuana, by many standards, is a Third world city, but San Diego is one of the most rapidly growing areas of California; even within the same city both of these extremes exist (as they do in the critically acclaimed film “Slumdog Millionaire”).

It is no wonder then that Koolhaas was shocked to realize that he had artificially divided the world into areas of architectural possibility and impossibility, because in many instances there seem to be irreconcilable differences between the dialectics of today’s world. However, the ability for Manhattan-esque forms to be built all over the world exists in opposition to these divisions. These differences are reminiscent of Lefebvre’s conception of the “everyday” and its tension between oppressive monotony and the potential for change and revolution within the same framework. The “gulf” between what Koolhaas was teaching and what his students were experiencing, and between the “real Japan” and the “true ambitions of Japanese culture” are further evidence of this tension, which I think is what Sklair is trying to talk about when he says that there are real implications in terms of experience for the “global spaces” that are location-independent. It’s difficult to say that location can be completely taken out of the equation when trying to understand the built environment, because local influences such as politics, economics, and cultural practices do create different experiences and meanings, even if the same shopping mall is built in Singapore and in Texas.