Towards a Critical Globalization

Historically architecture has been the embodiment of cultural, political, and vernacular expressions of societies. As such, buildings have been evolving in tandem with the development of their context. Constructed monuments, such as the pyramids and the Stone Henge, are built testaments of the power of architecture in housing as well as informing a specific society’s understanding of its environment.

The paper will start with a quick catalogue of architectural expression of a specific culture, in this case the UAE and Albania will be analyzed in term of their history and their respective architectural manifestations.

Globalization has facilitated relationships among countries in an efficient and speedy way whereby the developed can influence and profit from the developing efficiently. Along with the transformation of cultures, architecture has undergone its own shifts. The architectural model of progress of powerful countries has been imported as a way to express similar values in the not so powerful ones. Due to digitazion of design and speedy information transfer architectural ideas can be shared virtually from distant sides of the world while the constructed product does not lack in quality.

The effects of instant import in architecture have damaged the natural process of how it functions culturally in its context. If the historical function of architecture has been to express the social values of specific cultures, what is its role today in Dubai and Tirana where it has been inserted as a symbol to which function has been added on after the fact?

One of the architectural thinkers who has affected my position against the loss of vernacular expression in architecture is Kenneth Frampton’s essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism”. Written in 1960 (?) the essay advocates for retention of regional cultural expressions in the midst of the powers of globalization. Because the large scale development of emerging countries is funded and backed mostly by private investments in collaboration with local governments, architects are obligated to respond to agendas outside of the local interests. Since the client is the funding party, the architecture must talk to its programmatic requirements often without much liberty to respond to the historical context. Frampton’s ideas can be used as a formula to marry the fast needs of globalized cultures with the local history of a culture.