Description
Book SynopsisSince the 1980s the architectural profession across the world has been driven by globalisation. The factors shaping this globalisation include neo-liberal economics, digital transformation and the rise of social media against the background of the profession’s entrenched labour practices. In describing architecture as a global system, this book outlines how globalisation has shaped architecture and explores the degree to which architecture remains a distinct field of knowledge.
The book identifies four categories of architects in this global system: scavengers, tribes, warlords and megafirms. By employing this institutional-logics approach, the author looks beyond the surface spectacle of iconic projects, celebrity architects and cycles of urban focused media outrage. From this perspective, the book illuminates the archipelagos and outposts of disciplinary knowledge that architectural actors traverse and highlights the frontiers at which architectural knowledge is both created and eroded.
The author argues that to retain their future agency, architects must understand the contours and ecologies of practice that constitute this global system of architectural production. This book provides a clear-sighted analysis to suggest the points that need reconfiguring in this global system so that architects may yet shape and order the future of cities.
Trade ReviewDeclaring architecture to be a global system, Raisbeck describes the system, its ecologies of practice, and how those ecologies interact. The global system is the context in which all architects operate, regardless of the size of their practice, he says, and while there have been many studies on globalization during the 21st century, the changes that globalization has wrought on architecture, an increasingly global industry, have mostly gone undocumented. Within an institutional logics framework, he investigates the degree to which architectural design is a domain of knowledge that is in crisis, and the extent to which the territory and agency of architecture are eroding. Distributed in North America by Turpin Distribution. -- Annotation ©2019 * (protoview.com) *
Table of ContentsChapter 1. Architecture as a Global System: An Introduction Chapter 2. Scavengers Chapter 3. Tribes Chapter 4. Warlords Chapter 5. Megafirms Chapter 6. The Global System in Crisis
