TCAUP CENTENNIAL CONFERENCE

ARTICLES

Global Place and Market Realism

By Liane Lefaivre, professor and chair of history and theory of architecture, University of Applied Art, Austria

Architecture, like many other academic disciplines, has just come through a quarter century of largely formal, "autonomous" pursuits. During this time American architectural schools, in particular Ivy League schools, went from being probably the most well-rounded and balanced in the world into paragons of lopsidedness. Only their urban planning colleagues stayed the course on a more comprehensive approach to the built environment, although they unfortunately lost sight of
physical design.

During this time architecture successfully managed to re-position itself and adapt to the realities of newly dominant supply-side market conditions favoring high-end architectural goods like museums, hotels, corporate headquarters, governmental monuments, and banks. Of which, architects like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas contributed immeasurably in making cities more beautiful places. But, on the other hand, the dominance of aesthetic issues left practically no one in architecture schools to grapple other "real world" issues. As a result, much of the invaluable expertise and know-how, which had developed during the first half of the postwar period, was largely lost in the fog of amnesia and flash of stardom.

Interestingly there were also some notable figures that went against the tide and succeeded in shaping the market themselves by persuasively advancing a more multi-faceted agenda with their clients and constituencies, notably in relation to critical issues of identity, social quality and sustainability. Among these are Jaime Lerner, Shigeru Ban, Dan Solomon, Harrison Fraker, Yung Ho Chang, Charles Correa, to name a few.

There are many moral, environmental, social, and political reasons to go back to the kind of well-balanced architectural education that took shape in the postwar years. However, these motivations don't usually have much of an impact when market forces run in the opposite direction. But now a new market factor has emerged in the equation: globalization. If anything will once more turn architecture into a well-balanced profession, this is it. New concepts of globalization imply that the architecture market place has opened up to include parts of the world that need more than luxury architectural goods, such as India and China, Latin America and Africa. The reality of global practice has placed immense pressure on the need for solutions to both social and environmental problems. Sound large scale and small scale urban planning, housing projects, regional planning, and the minimization of CO2 emissions have become urgent priorities.

In principle, American schools are well positioned to serve these global market forces fuelled by unprecedented economic growth. First, because they tend to be part of good, multidisciplinary universities that include urban planning programs. And second because there are fortunately still some people left after the 25 year hiatus that have not been affected by the pervasive amnesia and myopia. In some cases these people have simply moved out into specialized professional offices that have taken on the task of research and development.

The first school to assume a position of leadership to meet the challenge of globalization head on appears to be the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The Global Place conference, a brainchild of its dean, Doug Kelbaugh and his co-organizers, Professors Robert Fishman and Rahul Mehrotra, and the conference organizing committee (Scott Campbell, Malcolm McCullough, Will Glover, Lan Deng, and Fernando Lara), was an explicit attempt to reverse the trend of the past quarter century and reconnect architecture with other related fields. After two days of discussions, there was a realization of the vital role architects can and must play in the globalized world.

Participants were invited from a large knowledge pool. Emblematic of the scope of the conference was the exceptional figure of Charles Correa (UM B.Arch'53), a "star" architect practicing today who sees no contradiction between building the Indian High Commission in New York on one hand, and working to provide shelter for the poorest of the poor in India on the other. Ken Yeang and Harrison Fraker, two of the leading architects/educators in the world devoted to sustainable design, also presented. Activist architect Teddy Cruz presented his award winning community organizing and architectural projects for the border settlements between San Diego and Tijuana. Michael Sorkin argued for a return to utopian visions of the 1960s.

Saskia Sassen (professor of sociology at the University of Chicago), who coined the term "Global Cities," described how effective bottom up political pressure groups acting in urban environments can be agents of change. Dan Solomon, noted architect/urban and designer/co-founder of Congress for the New Urbanism and author of Global City Blues, talked about the important differences between community and urbanism and showed some New Urbanist projects that are compact, walkable, mixed-use, and transit-friendly. Homi Bhabha, a literary scholar and the director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University, spoke controversially on the issue of identitarianism in a post-colonial world.

John Thackara, director of the Doors of Perception and one of the most notable design and technology gurus of our time, stressed the importance of sustainability and social quality in his own practice. Arguably the most compelling material of the conference was presented by Ed Mazria, who provided a scientifically grounded exposition of the disastrous global warming scenario of the next hundred years unless CO2 emissions are cut. The practicing architect stated that the majority of scientific evidence suggests that unless we make radical changes now we will start hitting potentially irreversible tipping points in the natural environment in nine years!

Among the most productive features of the Global Place conference is that it was conceived not only as an isolated event but as an ongoing series of conferences and actions that will extend the dialogue even further. This is an excellent idea that is bound to have an impact on the research and teaching program not only at Taubman College but in other schools as well.

Liane LeFaivre's work and numerous books are devoted to architectural culture and criticism in the framework of cognitive history, architectural history, and creativity in Western culture.

This article also appeared in the Spring 2007 edition of Portico.