Reconsidering Material Experience in the Age of Global Regionalism

Global design tends to simplify and homogenize the discourse of architectural practice. Global practices typically avoid concrete solutions addressing the specific needs of the local. Global production is concerned with solving not a single problem but the same problem at high volume. Global design leads to an estrangement of local tradition and material history, delivering unfitting contextual insertions that progressively impoverish local memory in material, cultural, and ultimately, social terms. The global is not context antagonistic; it is acontextual by definition, because its concerns are related to abstract systems of economic value and the demands of industrial production. Conversely, the local celebrates the idiosyncrasies that relate to a specific location. Local architectural strategies promote a connection between material work and sensory experience, providing an architectural framework for the collective memory that avoids compromising contextual responses with uprooted designs. The tactile experience of materials over time contributes to construct the memory of places, ultimately building up its identity. Material memory opposes the homogenizing and alienating dimension of generic global design. The associations between material perception and collective memory facilitate a foundation for contemporary architectural production through sensory experience, while incorporating regional idiosyncrasies that embody contextual continuities. The connections between material memory and tactility can in fact reveal pathways to productive models of responsible globalism. The qualities embodied in the material memory of a place speak to a common history that embodies the very traces of how and why a place is what it is. Material memory and the direct experience of tactility oppose many of the homogenizing and alienating conditions of generic global design, providing a model that provides continuity between the local and the global, between past and future. This essay reflects on local techniques and material tactility as a potential path to grounding interventions that oppose the homogenizing discourses implemented by global trends. In proposing a model based on Global Regionalism, materials are considered the canvas upon which the intimacy of contextual traces connects memory with innovation, incorporating experience and tradition into the global mainstream.

Intimate Resistance: From Global Simplification to Local Heterogeneity

The homogenization of space debilitates the experience of being and erases the sense of place. Juhani Pallasmaa^[i]

The exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932,[ii] reflected a time of active confrontation between the driving forces behind MoMA, figures such as the Rockefeller brothers and Lewis Mumford, who claimed for a new way to understand regionalism in what Liane Lefaivre has called “the regionalist rebellion.”[iii] Positions favorable to regionalism were again confronted in the form of another exhibition at MoMA.[iv] “The most forceful counterattack against the regionalist point of view and in favor of a resurrection of the International Style was once more through an exhibition on Mies van der Rohe, in 1953 at MoMA.[v] The curator was Philip Johnson. The next year, Mies received the commission for the building of his life, the Seagram Tower (1954–1958), with Philip Johnson as his collaborator.”[vi] Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis explain that the impact of the exhibition was “tremendous, inside the United States and all over the world.”[vii] The International Style responded to forces that had, in many cases, a direct interest in “selling the image of a powerful, modern, free American nation to a growing global audience of consumers.”^[viii] Lefaivre and Tzonis describe the longtime antagonism between globalization and regionalism: “Globalization has tended to ‘flatten’ obstacles to the interaction between places, transforming a world of barriers and insular regions into a ‘flat world.’ . . . Regionalism . . . has supported the singularity, autonomy, and distinct identity of regions, enhancing differences between them, nurturing diversity.”^[ix]

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^[i] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 48.

^[ii] The exhibition was held from February 9 to March 23, 1932.

^[iii] “Lewis Mumford’s and [J. B.] Jackson’s writings of the 1940s and early ’50s are the first manifestations of what might be called the American ‘Regionalist Rebellion,’ against the ideas of pre-war CIAM. The regionalist tendency would not really flourish in the US until the 1960s, in the wake of books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects, with works like Edward Larrabee Barnes’s Haystack Mountain School and Charles Moore’s Sea Ranch.” Liane Lefaivre, “Critical Regionalism: A Facet of Modern Architecture since 1945,” in Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, ed. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (New York: Prestel, 2003), 31.

^[iv] Along with Mumford (1895–1990), the rising interest in regionalism had other significant voices, such as Paul Zucker (1888–1971), Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968), and Pietro Belluschi (1899–1994), who were a counterpart to the massive admiration and acceptance that the MoMA exhibitions enjoyed.

^[v] The exhibition Built in USA: Post-war Architecture was held from January 20 to March 15, 1953, and was curated by Philip Johnson. “Ludwig worked at MoMA from about 1947 to 1950 as designer, installer, and competition judge. He has been in 39 exhibitions at MoMA, between 1932 and 1986.” “Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,” MOMA Exhibition Spelunker, accessed March 2022, https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2016/spelunker/constituents/232/.

^[vi] Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World (New York: Routledge, 2012), 128.

^[vii] Ibid., 128.

^[viii] Ibid., 124. “The MoMA meant business. Understandably, as the stakes were high. Among other things, the United Nations Headquarters building, the most prestigious commission of the immediate post-war period internationally, was hanging in the balance. Niemeyer had been one of the competitors and posed a serious threat to International Style–architects Harrison and Abramovitz, the MoMA’s first choice, who wound up getting the job in 1947. The credibility of both the MoMA and the International Style hinged on the success of the UN building.” Lefaivre and Tzonis, Critical Regionalism, 27.

^[ix] Lefaivre and Tzonis, Architecture of Regionalism, 1.

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