The Global Architect : Firms, Fame and Urban Form

Architects have always been avid travellers. In 1665, Bernini was invited to Paris by Louis XIV to work on the Louvre, his fame travelling before him, in one of the earliest examples of an architectural star system (Filler 2007: xvi). In 1754, the Scottish neo-classical architect Robert Adam made a tour of the most famous buildings and sites of antiquity of France, Italy and Dalmatia, combining 'the attributes of student, well-to-do traveler, explorer, collector, and scientific observer' (Ockman 2005:161). In 1929, Le Corbusier visited South America, his return voyage enlivened by a meeting with Josephine Baker; he would even impersonate the dancer at an on-board costume ball (Bacon 2001). In the 1940s, the advent of Nazism drove some of the leading proponents of the Bauhaus" Gropius, Breuer, Mies van der Rohe" into exile in America, where they would help to redefine commercial architecture. American design and construction firms have been operating internationally for over a century, driven partly by US foreign policy initiatives, but partly too by an early export-consciousness on the part of construction firms (Cody 2003). And over several centuries, colonial adventurism has seen the systematic, state-aided export of architects, engineers and building systems, leaving behind a fascinating set of architectural trails around the world (see, for example, Cohen 1995; King 2004; Nasr and Volait 2003). This book describes the rapid intensification of these travels, to a point where overseas work is a routine aspect of contemporary architectural practice. The territorial boundaries that had kept most architects tied to a small set of national markets no longer make much sense for design firms capable of operating in the dynamic economies of the Gulf and China. This is a moment in which architectural studios have suddenly been flooded with graduates of unprecedented technological literacy, able to manipulate the shape, structure and function of a building without recourse to pencil or model.