ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship in both construction history and architectural history has experienced an increasingly clear transnational turn in perspective where narratives of the global circulation of expertise, materials and processes are superseding previous discourses that centered on the agency of individual actors, projects or states. Beyond the mere technical and material dimensions of construction, focus on the transnational transfer of construction systems and processes is further demonstrating how the building world is a particularly revealing lens for critical inquiry into the political and economic dimensions of globalization and international development in recent history. Bound by the assumptions of a history of technological progress, however, contributions to this emerging new narrative are still limited in many cases by the epistemic hierarchies that continue to privilege frameworks of power and knowledge transfer from the developed to the developing nations that were framed in earlier colonial-modern processes of economic and cultural imperialism.
