Peter Raisbeck - Architecture as a Global System: Scavengers, Tribes, Warlords and Megafirms

Architecture is a global system. This book describes the system, its ecologies of practice, and how those ecologies interact. This global system is the context in which all architects operate regardless of the size of their practice. Whilst there have been numerous studies on globalisation in the twenty-first century, the changes that globalisation has wrought on architecture, an increasingly global industry, have mostly gone undocumented (). In describing the global system, this book asks: to what degree is architectural design a domain of knowledge that is in crisis? The related question is: to what extent are the territory and agency of architecture eroding? An institutional logics framework, as described later in this chapter, informs these overarching questions.

This framework allows the global system to be described through different types of architectural firms. In employing institutional logics, these firms are designated as scavengers, tribes, warlords and megafirms. This book follows on from ten years of research in the areas of architecture and construction management and teaching architectural design and practice, as well as writing a popular blog for some years.

The words written here aim to look beyond the surface spectacle of iconic projects, celebrity architects, media channels full of architectural fragments and TED Talk thought leaders, and a panoply of minor stars and influencers. In describing architecture as a global system, this book explores the degree to which architecture remains a distinct field of knowledge. In writing in this fashion, there is no illusion of presenting a complete or totalising picture of architecture. The approach pursued here is more subtle, and the aim is to employ a structure that illuminates key territories, archipelagos, moments, and conflicts. This depiction highlights the edges at which it is being, and has been, eroded over time. It seeks to explore and map the discipline without recourse to naive rhetorics, which surround celebrity architects, design technologies, design activism, and notions of future practice. The effect of globalisation, driven by neoliberalism, on architecture in social democracies has been insidious. In this context merely bemoaning the erosion of the traditional markets and services for architects is perhaps not enough.

The ecologies of practice that constitute architecture as a global system have come to condition the very types of firms that operate within them. The heroic architect of modernism morphed into the coteries of star architects that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s (.

This chapter introduces the overall themes of this book and sets out the framework of institutional logics which enables architecture to be described as a global system. summarises this system and discusses to what degree it might be in crisis.

The Venice Architecture Biennale is a useful starting point in the next section to consider the global system of architecture. As this chapter suggests, the Architecture Biennale at Venice and its trajectories point to the various polemics, controversies and enthusiasms that exist within this system. The prelude that follows in this chapter, beginning with Venice, presents a mosaic of phenomena that begins to illustrate architectures recent past. Firstly, the Biennale polemics of the architects Aldo Rossi and Patrik Schumacher, whilst separated in time, suggest the range of architectural theories present in the global system. Rossis embrace of memory versus Schumachers faith in technology highlights a recurring context in the chapters that follow. Architectural memory against the onslaught of the new design technologies haunts many of the pages of this book. Following this apparent polarity inevitably leads to the architectural critic Kenneth Framptons concept of critical regionalism which is discussed later in this chapter. It is a theme evident in the curation of the 2018 Venice . But, crowded into these milieu are the evangelical gospels of digital transformation, sustainability, and design strategy. However, as suggested in what follows, the background noise that has arisen out of these gospels has tended to privilege the singular auteur and arguably blinded architects to the politics of architecture as a global system.

Table 1. Institutional Logics Describing Architecture as a Global System.