Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization

Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World

Liane Lefaivre, Alexander Tzonis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000221060
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

This book remains the definitive introductory text on the theory and history of regionalist architecture in the context of globalization. It addresses issues of identity, diversity, community, inequality, geopolitics, and sustainability. From the authors who coined the concept of Critical Regionalism, this new edition enhances the understanding of the complex evolution of regionalism and its rival, unchecked globalization.

Covering a rich selection of the most outstanding examples of design from all over the world, Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, who introduced the concept of Critical Regionalism to architecture, present an enlightening, concise historical analysis of the endurance of regionalism and the ceaseless drive for globalization. New case studies include current cutting-edge projects in Japan, Africa, China, and the United States.

Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization offers undergraduate and graduate students of architecture, geography, history, environmental studies, and other related fields an accessible, vivid, and scholarly perspective of this major conflict as it relates to the design and to the future of the human-made environment.

Chapter 1

The Origins

Regional Architecture and the Dawn of Classical Architecture

In times of crisis and change such as ours, when identity, diversity, inequality, and ecology appear as burning issues, exploring the roots of the regionalist movement in architecture together with its adversary movement, globalization, is a gripping subject.

To understand better how these two conflicting trends were born, how and why they evolved, and their impact on buildings, cities, and landscapes that shape our life now, we have chosen the rise of so-called Classical Architecture emerging out of the regional architectures of the eastern Mediterranean mega-region.

In this respect, to echo what the literary scholar Jan Kott wrote about Shakespeare, the Parthenon is our contemporary.¹ [Kott 1964]

The Alleged Purity of the Classical

What ‘regional’ architecture is, along with what its environmental aspects and political implications are, first appear as questions in Vitruvius's De Architectura, the most read source about the architecture of antiquity. Vitruvius was engineer, architect, and writer. He wrote at the beginning of the first century BCE, at the time of Augustus, the first Emperor of the Roman Empire. His text clearly mentions ‘regional’ buildings which, in his view, were inferior to the Graeco-Roman ones, ones that today we call ‘classical.’ ‘Classical’ was not a word Vitruvius used because for Romans; it referred to people belonging to a high rank of power – political, economic, social, and cultural. Neither, parenthetically, was ‘classical’ much in use before the 17th century, when it referred to a style of literature, music, art, and architecture inherited from antiquity, a style which was thought to possess an inherent, everlasting, global superiority.

Vitruvius dedicated his book to the imperator, the Supreme Ruler, Caesar Augustus, because he had ‘gained the empire of the world.’ Vitruvius praised him for having ‘Rome gloried in [his] triumph and victory’ and, to quote the Roman historian Suetonius, for having found ‘Rome a city of brick and leaving it a city of marble.’² From what we know, and from the tone of his book, Vitruvius aspired to be part of the leading Roman intellectuals of his time, busy constructing a political ideology that legitimized global domination with Rome as the global ruler. His book was practical and pressing: the new Empire needed – next to the universal economic, legal, and cultural order – a global toolbox of design and construction, a standard set of rules capable of serving a huge-scale construction program, the first major step in what we may call making the world ‘flat,’ in forcing it to conform to a single hegemonic rule.

Vitruvius was a follower of the materialist philosopher Lucretius. Vitruvius adapted the approach of Lucretius's (99–55 BCE) De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things)³ to almost all aspects of design – from materials, buildings, and cities to machines and fortifications, as these related to philosophy, natural science, astronomy, physiology, acoustics, and medicine.

Lucretius had asserted that the diversity of living organisms was the result of natural environmental causes. In other words, organisms adapted in order to survive. Inspired by this materialist argument, Vitruvius claimed that architectural types also adapted to their regional environment, thus laying the foundations for an environmentally deterministic approach to architecture. In the Fourth Book of his book, he proceeded to declare his intention of reducing architectural knowledge to ‘a perfect order,’ a perfectam ordinationem, a universal classification system in which everything had a reason, rationem. In this spirit, he presented Graeco-Roman architecture as divided into ‘kinds' – he called them genera – that is, the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian– defined by their particular ‘parts,’ ‘members,’ and rules of proportion and symmetry.

Then Vitruvius turned to regional architecture, which he viewed as another ‘kind’ of building, one not subject to the above rules. As a Lucretian materialist, he tried to describe and explain its characteristics. He contrasted the regional ‘kinds' of buildings (genera aedificiorum), the ones that belonged to a region (regionum), to the Greek and Roman ones. In his view, the difference between regional architectures was ‘ordained by Nature’ (ab natura rerum). In other words, he posited that the physical environment of the regions to which the buildings belonged accounted for their variety.

In addition to environmental issues, Vitruvius was concerned with the political implications of a world divided into fundamentally different regions. He stated that, just as climate and physical conditions influenced buildings, so the climate shaped human beings. Continuing along the same line of thought, he believed that, just as the extreme physical conditions (that is, the nature of things) of the rainy northern region dictated that buildings must have pitched roofs, and the extreme heat of the South led to buildings with flat roofs, so they also created different kinds of people – dull in the North and excitable in the South (see Figure 1.01).

Figure 1.01 Four regional houses: two Northern ones with pitched roofs, and two Southern ones with flat roofs, and four classical temples. Illustration for Vitruvius's text, Giovan Antonio Rusconi, Dell’ Architettura, 1590.

But there was also, Vitruvius continued, a ‘temperate’ environment, one that produced not only a temperate architecture but also a temperate people. This was the environment of the Romans. Just as the temperate environment was superior to the two extreme ones, so it was with the temperate buildings and people. Temperate architecture and people were more balanced, in keeping with their own region.

Vitruvius probably derived this racial theory from The Histories of Herodotus, who wrote in the fifth century BCE, a time of confrontation between a globalizing Persian Empire and a region of regions inhabited by Greeks. Herodotus had argued that the climate of Greece was ‘ideal,’ being temperate in contrast to the very cold climate of Scythia and the very hot one of Egypt. In the same vein, the treatise by Hippocrates (460–370 BCE), On Airs, Waters, and Places, a text that dealt with the relation between man and environment, claimed that Europeans were more industrious than what he called the ‘Asians' (meaning the Persians) because of the temperate climate of the European region. This racist view returned in the 19th century with colonialism and persists today. The Hippocratic treatise also argued that, because of their environment and climate, those we know as Europeans were not inclined to yield to despotic authority, as opposed to the Asians, who were.⁴

From these observations, Vitruvius drew a geopolitical conclusion: thanks to their temperate region (temperatamque regionem), the Romans had a special courage and strength as opposed to the people of the northern or southern regions, presumably Germans and Africans. In fact, since the Romans, he went so far as to claim, had been given an ‘excellent and temperate region,’ it was ‘in order to rule the world’ (terrarium imperii).⁵ The architectural implication of this determinism was that, by nature, Roman architecture must also be imposed globally.

It is obvious that Vitruvius's reasoning was inconsistent. On one hand, derived from nature, natura, and based on rationality, disciplinae rationes, it asserted that buildings, like people, adapted to the environment of their regions, resulting in regional variety and diversity; on the other, he supported the doctrine of ‘imperial’ globalization, where Roman (‘classical’) buildings, like the ruling Romans, ought to be imposed on a region regardless of environmental conditions, thus creating a standard, classical, global world. In other words, while upholding a theory of hills and valleys, he called for their flattening.

History might have helped Vitruvius come to different conclusions and understand that e...