ABSTRACT
Before any discussion of the means involved, the necessity for technological transfer and whether it is related to building construction or to materials, services, installations and methods could, and in my opinion should, be debated. Implicit in the phrase is the assumption that the technology of the west (especially Europe and North America) should be passed to cultures and countries of the one-time ‘Third World’, now the ‘Developing World’. In this term is built a further assumption: that ‘development’ is technological, rather than for instance, educational or social. It is important, I believe, that we question our own terms, our sense of priorities and our perception of the ‘need’ for technological transfer. Is the transfer to be oneway only, even though concepts and devices, from the zero to the astrolabe, the wheel and the windmill to the pointed arch and the bungalow, were the inventions of the east transmitted to the west? We may rightly be critical of the arrogance of former attempts at technological transfer made without consideration of the cultures affected. But, we should also be prepared to criticize the presumption that we in the west have the ‘answers’, which we wish to transfer to the ‘primitive’ or ‘retarded’, the ‘backward’ or ‘developing’.
