ABSTRACT
Professional practice in architecture has long had an international component and a cosmopolitan outlook. The international reach of architecture as a profession was established well before World War II by the commissions of leading practitioners such as Albert Kahn and Le Corbusier (Scully 1988; Frampton 1992). It was consolidated by Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock’s promotion of the idea of an ‘International Style’; by the international migration of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and others; by the publication of the Athens Charter developed by CIAM (the Congrés Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne); and by the colonial practices of British, French, and Italian architects. After World War II it was further propagated by the commissions of successive generations of leading practitioners; and, more prosaically, by some large US architecture and engineering (A&E) firms, such as CRS, whose commissions derived from the US government’s foreign aid projects (many of them focused on infrastructure projects and ‘tied’ to the participation of US firms) and from the neocolonial investments of US corporations.
