Spanning cultural difference.

One of the drawbacks of globalisation is the tendency towards homogenisation--in that witty post-modernist phrase, 'the same difference everywhere'. This issue of The Architectural Review focuses on Japan, a country with a culture which has managed to remain distinctive architecturally without resorting to historicist copying (which raises problems of the degree of skill and commitment required to do it properly, quite apart from the lack of precedent for contemporary building types like airports). Asking what it is about Japanese architecture that makes it Japanese (apart from its authors) is to raise profound issues of history, geography, geology and an empathy for what it means to be part of a particular culture. To considerable degree, globalisation represents a threat to that distinctiveness, washing over it with the worst commercial ethos of internationalism--that one size should fit all. The legacy of an earlier incarnation, International Modernism, across too many parts of the globe is a depressing one of wrong building, wrong place, wrong time.

That is a warning for those clients who demand landmark icons from today's architectural giants, under the impression that the built results will provide a profoundly rooted identity. This may be true sometimes, but there is no guarantee. In a world with the same distinctive icons everywhere, then none of them will be distinctive in any meaningful way, instead becoming icons in the old sense of the word, that is to say similar representations of the same thing, the same thing being architecture itself. There is also a warning for architects. Attracted to the new breed of global client like moths to a flame, there is every danger of ignoring fundamental tenets of architecture in favour of show-off designs which lack the integrity of work by Hadid or Koolhaas, for example, where engineering experimentation is part of an extraordinary new architectural story.

The development of technology, particularly in relation to design and communications, has made it inevitable that architects operate in a more global way, not least because they can look at the work of almost any practice at the press of a key. However, it is just as true that an architectural education gives people a certain commonality of outlook, with or without the internet; there is also a recognition of shared values, or at least shared ways of looking at things, which amount to a common language. An element of that language is the way one thinks about a possible new building, for it is at this moment that architectural intelligence is applied to the specific, not the general. It is the moment where the architect can say: 'One world, my site'.