A little local difficulty

This analysis of globalisation versus regionalism is a conundrum, revealing conditions which are at once opposed and symbiotic, both flattening and diversifying culture, says Murray Fraser

Asked for an example of intellectual consistency in architectural academia, it is hard to resist Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis. They first identified their interest in regionalism in the late-1970s and were among the first to spot the emergence of those processes, networks and conditions we now call globalisation.

What worries Lefaivre and Tzonis now is the potential universalisation and homogenisation they fear from globalisation – which they describe as ‘flattening’ the world in cultural terms. They see regionalism as a force that counters centralisation and hegemony, and promotes the value of difference. Their latest book continues to push the globalisation versus regionalism debate way back into ‘deep history’.

It has fascinating essays about the lack of regional consistency in Ancient Greek architecture, whether Vitruvius was a regionalist, the pull between Papal Rome and the buildings built by Holy Roman Emperors in the wake of Charlemagne. The authors use the same dialectic to rethink Ancien Regime and French Revolutionary architecture, 18th-century English picturesque landscapes, and German romanticism. The most successful section is on the wrangles within post-war American modernism, for example the simmering warfare between pro-regionalists like Lewis Mumford and ‘International Style’ universalists like Hitchcock and Johnson.

Lefaivre and Tzonis’s book is full of thoughtful and erudite material, and is well worth reading. Curiously the weakest section is on regionalism since the 1970s, which one would expect to be the authors’ specialist subject. Their examples swirl around like fish in the sea and never settle long enough for analysis.

In the end, however, regionalism remains a slippery concept. As they point out so lucidly, the aspiration towards regionalism in the 19th century was tied to nationalist politics, whereas today it is infused with ecological concerns. But that still doesn’t get round the obvious problems: how large or small does a region have to be, who gets to decide what constitutes a region or what does not, and how one can get over the fact that any region will contain many contradictory architectural ideas and styles all at once?

Where I part company with Lefaivre and Tzonis is in their essentially negative conceptualisation of globalisation, as if it is just one thing, and not a complex mixture of positive and negative aspects. All places are now combinations of the local and global, and so cannot be separated. Globalisation, if anything, is producing vital messy difference, not control and homogenisation. British architecture, for instance, has never been so diverse, and that pattern seems set to increase further.

Murray Fraser is professor of architecture and global culture at the Bartlett, UCL

Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World
Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis
Routledge, £29.99

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