ABSTRACT
In a discussion of recent architecture, a point isreached where it is no longer possible to talk about what has happened; instead, we speak of what is happening and, further, what appears to be emerging as the issues of the architecture of tomorrow; hence, there is a shift from historical summary to critical comment. Compared to what it was a halfcentury ago, architecture now is clearly a global phenomenon, and, as was noted in the preceding chapter, well-known “starchitects” today routinely have commissions around the world. Architects in training, particularly from emerging nations, often seek their formal instruction in countries far from their place of birth. Their particular challenge when returning home is to find ways of bringing together learned modern methods and technologies with their ancestral social traditions, building typologies, and planning strategies. It is no longer possible to have a single universal modern architecture, the “one building for all people everywhere,” as proposed by the European modernist advocates in the 1920s and attempted in the 1950s and ’60s. Instead, there are now multiple regional inflected modernisms.
