Ching Francis D.K - A global history of architecture

A Global History of Architecture
Second Edition

Afterword

AFTERWORD

In the last decade, architectural educators have been asking for a textbook that looks beyond the Eurocentric approaches of the past. Ironically, recent decades have also seen the rising specter of nationalism, which has become a global phenomenon in its own right, as countries seek to establish their credentials in global historical narratives. This new nationalism, though it has played some role in awakening an awareness about local realities, has had, and continues to have, a dampening effect on learning about what lies over the horizon. The tension between the global and the national is the fundamental paradox of our age.

Today we live in a world that is significantly more static than centuries beforeboundaries are controlled by international law and political alliances, UNESCO protects architectural and urban marvels of the past, and local and national regulations govern what can and cannot be built. We control our actions for the sake of global tranquility. But inequities and injustices about the location of boundaries persist, and so, too, do the tensions that result from inward-looking ideologies. In this environment, the maxim know your neighbor is all the more important, but at the same time all the more elusive, since we can all, no matter what country we are from, easily revel in our singularityin the presumed uniqueness of our history.

This is something we need to guard against. A global history is not the history of all the modern nations added up like beads on an abacus. But neither is it a history that assumes a universal aspect to mankind and its productions. For a global history to be more than just dates and facts, it has to be rooted in the principle that each of us learns how he or she is indeed different in the eyes of others.

Copyright 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ching, Frank, 1943
A global history of architecture / Francis D.K. Ching, Mark M. Jarzombek, Vikramaditya Prakash. 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-470-40257-3 (hardback)
1. ArchitectureHistory. I. Jarzombek, Mark. II. Prakash, Vikramaditya. III. Title.
NA200.C493 2010
720.9dc22
2010040984