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2015 Traveling Fellowship for Architecture, Design, and Urban Design
Global/Local: Intergovernmental Architecture of Africa and Europe

For her research topic, Xiaoxi Chen visited examples of historic and contemporary intergovernmental organization buildings on four continents, using sustainability as an “updated lens for a contemporary look at today’s spatial challenges to unlock the full potential of responsive and responsible design.”

Xiaoxi Chen
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

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Somf 2015 travel fellowship xiaoxi chen laurent final report 01

UN Commission for East Africa, Addis Ababa. © Xiaoxi Chen.

Jury
Leo Chow (Cochair)
Paul Danna (Cochair)
Steven Ehrlich
Sharon Johnston
Alice Kimm

Since the post-WWII creation of the UN, the number of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have spiked from 94 in the nineteenth century to 5,725 in the twentieth century for issues ranging from human rights and military alliances to cybernetics and oceanography. [1] These legal bodies have come to play an ever-increasing role in global governance, the shaping of cultural identities, and the proliferation of new postnational territories and unique architectural typologies.

My research looks at new intergovernmental architecture to investigate contemporary spatial paradoxes such as transparency and control, openness and security. Architecture serves as the site of inquiry and is understood as the physical manifestation of accumulated political and material capital. In this context, sustainability and security are analyzed as not only technical or performative factors, but as primary drivers of design and policy promotion via architecture.

Self-representation, policy promotion, and experimental technologies are often played out through high-profile intergovernmental architecture. For example, the unitized curtain wall and subsequent standardization of perimeter air-conditioning for modern office buildings were developed during the design of the United Nation Secretariat. External shading devices were rejected in favor of perceived openness. Uninterrupted glazing, in addition to glass and steel construction, functioned as a showpiece and propagator for internationalism and accountable governance in the new world order. [2]

When the Secretariat was reclad with new curtain wall units as part of the $2 billion renovation to update the campus to contemporary energy and security standards in 2011, painstaking efforts were made to preserve the collective cultural memory of the original design. The particularly iridescent green glass that was so embedded in the United Nation’s projected image to the city was carefully replicated through the architect’s collaboration of preservationists, curtain wall consultants, and specialized iron workers. [3] The new units are interspersed with photovoltaic glass and are inoperable to withstand as much as ten inches of deflection in case of an explosion. [4]

If postwar modernism promoted ideology through its architecture, pushing social reform, progressivism, and a new global paradigm, then what does today’s international architectural roster signify? How is architecture an effective communicator of social agenda translated via new spatial and architectural products such as building details, mechanical systems, materials, or design strategies?

Notes

[1] Union of International Associations, Yearbook of International Organizations (Brussels: Brill, 2014).

[2] Neil MacFarquhar, “Renovating the UN, With Hints of Green,” New York Times, November 21, 2008.

[3] Peter J. Arsenault, “More Than One Way To Skin A Building,” Architectural Record, May 2013.

[4] David Arnold, “The First Century of Air Conditioning,” ASHRAE Journal (1999): 34.

Africa Hall, Addis Ababa. © Xiaoxi Chen.

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UN Commission for East Africa, Addis Ababa. © Xiaoxi Chen.

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UN Commission for East Africa, Addis Ababa. © Xiaoxi Chen.

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UN Commission for East Africa, Addis Ababa. © Xiaoxi Chen.

Memoranda

I started the SOM Foundation Traveling Fellowship in the summer of 2015. Now, a mere two years later, the world has rapidly changed. From drafting the first research proposals to final edits, the texts and travels made on post-WWII international architectures were produced in the context of these very ideals being challenged like never before, from the European Union embattled from Brexit, austerity measures, and the refugee crisis from Syria, rise of right-wing populism in the US and Europe, to the weaponizing of American technology and social media giants by terrorist groups like ISIS or foreign governments.

“Globalism,” or to be a “globalist,” once an ideal in the aftermath of the trauma of WWII, is now being used locally as an ideological epithet by increasingly divisive forces. Rather than a collection of disjointed “locales,” under one framework of the singular “global,” a reading of global/local hybrids, multiple and simultaneous “globalisms” is more useful in structuring our understanding of the world. In conclusion, findings are fractured into a list of bite-sized memoranda for future use, that in its multiplicity, could be more useful than the single monolith.

Memorandum 1: Material/ Ideological

Intergovernmental architecture is not only the material manifestation of atemporal spatial order but is the temporal ideological manifestation that has been erected from immense concentrations of capital, instrumentalized expertise, and political will.

Memorandum 2: Design by Auteur/Design by Committee

Signatory, avant-garde architecture are often commissioned as a vehicle for a new ruling order, such as the Emperor Haile Selassie’s embrace of Italian modernism, used as an architectural campaign to host the United Nations Economic Commission for East Africa. The line between visionary and despotic is sometimes blurry. However, the rule of power today has evolved from the singular, to the omnipresent and totalizing—and architecture have followed suit. In the case of the EU-fication of Brussels, relentless curtain wall glass facades march down Belgian streets and careen around the corner, dwarfing the scale of the small European capital.

Memorandum 3: Commodification of Climate

Climate, as much as any other building element, can be designed as part of a larger agenda. In a near perfect temperate climate for human habitation, as in Nairobi, the natural environment harnessed by building systems to become fulling passive, relying only on natural ventilation without the need for additional heating and cooling. The pristine and carefully maintained natural environment becomes commodified when it is separated from the local climate at large via urban separation.

Memorandum 4: Conversion of Climate Capital

Through the conversion via investments, what is arguably the least hospitable environment to human habitation—the “desert” is able to be converted into a laboratory for sustainable building systems, “Masdar City,” funded by an economy of fossil fuels. The climate, in its in raw physical relation to the body, is of not necessarily of more intrinsic value in the age of late advanced capital.

Memorandum 5: Architecture as the Medium

More so than any other media, architecture has disciplinary claim over space. Unlike sculpture, fashion, photography, video, and engineering, the crafting and creation of space is something that is relatively unique to architecture proper. What, then, are the methods to inject architectural form with meaning, with content?

Memorandum 6: Twenty-first Century Nationalism

A new breed of Nationalism is erupting across the globe, abetted by social media and political selfies, with a force and swiftness that took by surprise most of the mainstream intelligentsia who thought it was on the way to extinction.

While developing the premise of the trip in 2015, I set out to unpack the international forces on architecture, though often purposefully camouflaged and elusive, I assumed would nonetheless be the dominant force. Localisms, by contrast, I assumed, lie inert, on the receiving end of a world order imposed by globalization.

Instead, the course of the project has led me to identify the phantom third between localisms and globalisms: Nationalism(s). Unlike familiar architectural forms of postwar concrete modernisms and high-tech, curtain-walled neoliberal exports, this renewed ideology has yet to be made sense of, much less captured in architectural form.

Alexandra Heritage Center, Johannesburg. © Xiaoxi Chen.

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How do we represent our environment if we do not want to associate it with representations of the colonial era or the apartheid era?

Ilze and Heinrich Wolff, Wolff Architects

International Renewable Energy Agency, Abu Dhabi. © Xiaoxi Chen.

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International Renewable Energy Agency, Abu Dhabi. © Xiaoxi Chen.

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United States Office at Geneva, Switzerland. © Xiaoxi Chen.

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Itinerary

Geography, or its inscription on the terra firma, serves as the neutral organizational tool to structure a trip across a region with multiple and diverse climates, histories, and peoples. Along this axis, historic and contemporary intergovernmental organization buildings are used as the sites of inquiry to investigate the relationship between the internationalist architecture and identities to local response, context, or initiatives.

The site visits, interviews, photos, and text gathered for this document are gathered from my South to North trip along a longitudinal trajectory, starting from Cape Town, through East Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and ultimately ending in Penzance, the southwestern most tip of England. Juxtaposing the global and the local in a geographical framework searches for new, unexpected hybridities of an architectural survey of the local/ global.

Somf 2015 travel fellowship xiaoxi chen headshot

Xiaoxi Chen
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

Xiaoxi Chen

received her Master of Architecture degree in May 2015 from Columbia University where she was awarded the Total Design Prize for all-around outstanding performance in the design studio and seminar sequences. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology and completed her final year at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette. Chen has worked in diverse and interdisciplinary offices and understands architecture as an inherently collaborative confluence of multiple fields, which allows for a more inventive and relevant process to address contemporary spatial issues. She believes that by pushing the limits of the architectural profession while successfully collaborating with other disciplines, architecture can provoke new social, political, and aesthetic relationships in complex built environments. She is based in New York City, where she is currently working with the office of 2 × 4.

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