January « 2012 « constructedenvironment

The Impact of Globalisation on Architecture and Architectural Ethics by Faida Noori Salim is now available as part of The Constructed Environment series.

The development of globalisation, both economically and financially, has promoted the flow of both information and people. Globalisation is seen as an outcome of advancing communication technology and the development of the Internet, which subsequently encouraged international interdependence and the compression of time and space. This book is devoted to answering the question: In what way does the impact of globalisation affect the role of architecture, and how should it be interpreted ethically? This book argues that the ethical evaluation of the role of architecture should be linked to architecture’s natural ethical responsibility to form a relationship with a culture. Today, iconic architectural forms and celebrity architects lead the innovation/transformation process, while the “ordinary” practice of architecture leads the innovation/stabilization process using the differentiation/integration dynamic. Architectural theory advances the use of the interpretation/reinterpretation dynamic in architecture, which helps to destabilise meaning in architectural language. When this theory is transcribed to real world architecture, it can result in the alienation of the physical horizons of cities and thus in the alienation of its citizens.

Faida Noori Salim is an Assistant Professor. She graduated from the University of Baghdad in June 1975 and obtained her Master’s Degree in Architectural Studies at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in May 1984. She has taught in three Departments of Architecture in Iraq: The University of Baghdad, The University of Mosul, and the University of Technology. She studied for her Doctoral degree at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and graduated in March 2011.

From The Economist…

Imagine that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?

The answer is almost certainly to the right. Replay the same scene in many parts of Asia, however, and you would probably move to the left. It is not obvious why. There is no instruction to head in a specific direction (South Korea, where there is a campaign to get people to walk on the right, is an exception). There is no simple correlation with the side of the road on which people drive: Londoners funnel to the right on pavements, for example.

Instead, says Mehdi Moussaid of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, this is a behaviour brought about by probabilities. If two opposing people guess each other’s intentions correctly, each moving to one side and allowing the other past, then they are likely to choose to move the same way the next time they need to avoid a collision. The probability of a successful manoeuvre increases as more and more people adopt a bias in one direction, until the tendency sticks. Whether it’s right or left does not matter; what does is that it is the unspoken will of the majority. More…

Monthly Archive for January, 2012

The Impact of Globalisation on Architecture and Architectural Ethics

The wisdom of crowds: The strange but extremely valuable science of how pedestrians behave