Architecture Goes Global. - Review - book review

Art in America, Feb, 2001 by Tom Mcdonough

ARCHITECTURE GOES GLOBAL 10 x 10, edited by Vivian Constantinopoulos, London, Phaidon Press, 2000; 468 pages, $69.95. Building a New Millennium, by Philip Jodidio, Cologne, Taschen, 2000; 560 pages, $39.99. Architecture Must Burn, by Aaron Betsky, Corte Madera, Calif., Gingko Press, 2000; 144 pages, $35.

The editor of 10 x 10, Phaidon Press's up-to-the-minute compendium of contemporary architecture, describes in the book's brief preface how "varied approaches, investigations and built realities" here "converge in an unconventional, global presentation" and claims that the volume "signals new and exceptional architects from around the world and highlights the richness, diversity and excellence in architecture today." The prolific architectural writer Philip Jodidio, who made the 83 project selections for Building a New Millennium, Taschen's rival survey, strikes a similarly triumphant note in his introduction, announcing that "at the dawn of the 21st century, there is a new way to see architecture," one governed by "an emerging awareness that transcends categories established when the world didn't move so fast"; in this book as well, contemporary architecture is all about a novel "diversity."

10 x 10 presents this supposed diversity by commissioning 10 prominent critics and curators (including Roger Connah, Mohsen Mostafavi, Terence Riley and Neil Spiller) to each choose 10 young architects who they feel best represent the moment. Their 100 selections are each provided with a four-page photographic layout; at the end of the volume, we get brief entries explaining the selectors' criteria, some bibliography (following the format, 10 books or articles chosen by each critic) and a single excerpted text from the preceding lists. The range is much narrower in Building a New Millennium, which centers on stalwarts like Norman Foster, Renzo Piano and Zaha Hadid--the more traditional result of one editor's personal choices. (Taschen, however, promises that this is merely the first installment of a collection of semiannual works, each featuring a different editorial "voice.") But despite these differences in conception, the two volumes share much common ground, not only in their selections but perhaps more significantly in their mutual commitment to an overview that, they assure the reader, is varied, diverse and global in scope.

Lugging these weighty tomes home from the bookstore and paging through their hundreds of glossy color illustrations, one might well expect them to live up to that claim of truly global, comprehensive coverage. Yet how diverse does this new millennium really turn out to be? The answer provided by both collections is rather surprising: the 21st century looks much like its predecessor. European firms account for the vast majority of architects represented, and even within this small continent, the selection is heavily weighted in favor of Western European nations (including Britain). On page after page, we see the French, the ubiquitous Dutch, Germans and Swiss, and London-based firms (no other British city appearing on this map); 10 x 10 provides a somewhat broader coverage, including a sprinkling of Scandinavian architects, but southern Europe (with the exception of Spain) is virtually invisible, and only two Eastern European firms are featured.

When we leave Europe, the biases of selection become even more stark. North American architecture means simply U.S. architecture, and U.S. architecture means, for the most part, that produced in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, with a handful of regional practitioners thrown in (again, primarily in the larger 10 x 10). Central and South America make only occasional appearances, limited basically to cosmopolitan architects based in Mexico City, Santiago and Buenos Aires. In the East, Australia and Japan receive about equal weight, but the vast territories of South Asia and Africa are represented by only one firm each. Such parsing of numbers is important, I believe, for both volumes ostentatiously claim a global coverage while neglecting to map out the geographical distribution of their subjects. Because the surveys present architects in alphabetical order, the reader could easily remain credulous about claims for a diverse, inclusive representation. Yet as even this cursory summary reveals, the world map here constructed is curiously distorted, filled with detail in some areas, a vast blank in others.

Just what are the contours of the architectural world traced in Building a New Millennium and 10 x 10? We might respond by stating that what these books present is less a global accounting of contemporary architecture than an accounting of the contemporary architecture of globalization. Their geographic range is limited to the reach of universalizing markets and expansionist commerce. Where those markets have not yet successfully penetrated, our editors will not tread. The white expanses on their mental maps are seemingly emblazoned not with the warning "there be monsters" but with the architect's equivalent "there be shanties." Building a New Millennium would at first appear altogether more honest on this score; the introduction explicitly links the new architecture with the forces of globalization, but then defines those forces simply as liberatory "flows of information," rather than as, say, the more problematic flows of capital and labor which have thrown many of the world's nation-states into crisis. Equipped with this benign definition of globalization, Jodidio can optimistically describe the present as "a time of unprecedented freedom"--at least for architects.