Report

The World as an Architectural Project



Spring 2020
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Authors
  • Hashim Sarkis
  • Roi Salgueiro Barrio
  • Gabriel Kozlowski

Published by
  • MIT Press

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 The World as an Architectural Project reconnects contemporary archi­tectural inquiries on the relation between architecture and planetarization to a broader disciplinary history that has shaped the ways in which we live and think about our present. The book exposes a profound, but still little-known relation between architecture and the global scale, which starts, roughly, in the late nineteenth century. Today, we need to address a plan­et that has been intensely shaped by the spatial logics of modernity and that continues to be produced through systems of geospatial control and technical rationality that are a direct continuation of them. And yet, we have an in­sufficient understanding of the many ways in which architectural modernity has addressed the world as a scale of reflection or intervention. In an effort to fill this historiographic gap, this book describes how architects have his­torically thought and imagined at the world scale well before the advent of contemporary globalization. It unpacks the complex and contested relation ar­chitecture maintained with these sociospatial processes; the ways in which the discipline sometimes anticipated, sometimes contributed to, sometimes reacted against the emergence of global systems. It presents how architects embraced and helped formulate globalizing ideologies, at times uncritically accepting or reinforcing associated projects of domination, discrimination, and inequality, while sometimes profoundly challenging them. It shows how some proposals were critical of the inequalities these ideologies might generate, and how some predicted global risks, including the environmental crisis and the morass of ur­banization. By extending these histories into the present, the book shows how modern interest in the planetary scale is being recovered as well as reconsidered and challenged today.
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