Architecture and Globalization, a very intimate relationship

Abstract

The invitation to write this article gave rise to a review of my studies and writings produced in the last twenty-five years about the approximation between architecture and globalization. If in the 1990s the texts referred to the dissemination of Brazilian modern architecture in different parts of the world, by the turn of 1990s to the 2000s, they focused on the popular dissemination of elements of modernism in Brazil, with an interest in expanding the architectural scholarship limits in two directions: 1) vertically, discussing high-low relationships unfiltered or controlled by trained architects; and 2) horizontally by challenging the North Atlantic canon to debate the global reach of the Brazilian case. Reviewing these studies today allowed us to dialogue with contemporary reflections that involve an effort at epistemic decolonization, starting from the understanding that the understanding of globalization was closely related to the emergence of abstraction in the 16th century, a phenomenon that killed relational processes themselves, but which should be urgently recovered nowadays, making us unlearn the intimate relationship between architecture and globalization.

Keywords

• Architecture and globalization
• Modernity and coloniality
• Epistemic decolonization