Transnational Architecture

Reviewing “Architecture in the Antipodes” in 1984, RIBA journal editor Peter Murray, put Peter Corrigan in a van of Australian architects searching for an architecture that was positively, proudly and distinctively Australian. Besides through his completion of a postgraduate programme at Yale under Charles Moore, and his work experience in the offices of Paul Rudolph, Victor Gruen Associates, and Philip Johnson, Corrigan played a crucial role as an attractor and translator of a postmodernist model of regionalism in Melbourne and Australia in the latter half of the 1970s and well into the 1990s, through various media: journals in which he published or that he co-founded like Smudges, discussion groups like Half-Time, conferences such as the “Pleasures of Architecture”(1980) conference, and most importantly university lectures and his legendary studio training at RMIT.
While the current literature on Corrigan points especially to his familiarity with the ideas of Venturi and Scott-Brown as the main source for the way in which he a celebrates the unique ordinariness of suburbia in his architecture, his long-standing engagement with stage design since his student years seems to have been even more important. Australian identity was also one of the main themes that The New Wave theatre explored, in particular the Australian Performing Group (APG) in which Corrigan was deeply involved intellectually. Following Caspar Neher, he adopted as a stage designer the Brechtian technique of unveiling the constructed nature of the theatrical stage, which rhymed well with the self-parodic stereotyping of larrikinism through performance and gesture in the APG plays. Transferring carnivalesque, grotesque and burlesque design experiments from theatre to the field of architecture, Corrigan forged a unique brand of regionalism that challenged the dualistic centre-periphery model accepted by modernists such as Robin Boyd who assessed Australian suburbia as inhabited by a public that “knows no better, has seen no better design.” Corrigan’s anti-authoritarianism led him to a subversive postmodernist stance that found in the suburban ‘periphery’ the material to find a way out of the casting of Australian architecture as peripheral.

"Nato nel 1919 da una famiglia torinese piccolo borghese e antifascista, Soleri a ventisei anni ha una laurea in architettura al Politecnico di Torino, un grande talento artistico, e un temperamento febbrile e sperimentale che l’Italia impoverita dal fascismo non sembra poter nutrire.
Trasferitosi in Arizona, Soleri, come un tumbleweed – l’arbusto che per chilometri rotola in quei deserti – passa la sua esistenza in un perenne “movimento seminativo” nel corso del quale prende forma una concezione filosofico-architettonica coerente, dove pratica architettonica e filosofia di vita non sono più distinguibili, dove l’impegno politico e le scelte formali diventano la stessa cosa. La scelta del deserto, dunque, non è casuale. “La sfida di un arido altopiano è la premessa coerente per il fiorire di vita multiforme”e Soleri lo adotta come laboratorio di sperimentazione, usando le avversità per elaborare creativamente forme di adattamento materiale, organizzativo e professionale.
Se è vero che “non c’è eredità senza erranza”, Soleri è, a suo modo, un autentico erede del pensiero novecentesco europeo e americano. "

This paper reviews China's foreign aid architecture in a transitional period, from 1964 to 1976. After Zhou Enlai's 1964 trip to Africa and Asia, China's foreign aid architecture was increasingly used as an important diplomatic tool, echoing with the shift of China's foreign policy from the export of revolution to the export of peaceful development. In these years before Chairman Mao Zedong died in 1976, both a "Maoist pragmatism" in foreign policy and a "Chinese modernism" in architectural design matured in relation to each other. This paper examines the evolution of China's foreign policy, foreign aid architecture, and the associated multidirectional knowledge exchange between China and other countries in this period. Tanzania-Zambia Railway (TAZARA) Terminus in Dar es Salaam built in 1976 is selected for an in-depth case study to demonstrate the presence of a Chinese modernism in architecture as an alternative approach to the Western postwar modernist trends.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)  is the first large-scale globalization project launched in China and is generating infrastructure and logistics hubs to support Chinese State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in cities along its lines. These spaces are in fact free trade zones (Free Trade Zones, FTZ) for companies active in global trade. Following intergovernmental agreements, some SOE giants such as China Merchant Group, COSCO, China Communication Construction Company and China National Machinery Industry Corporation are investing overseas in the development of free trade zones identified within the BRI with economic agreements that stipulate that percentages between 60 and 90% of the shares belong to the investors of the SOEs, while the remaining shares belong to the local government authorities.

The development of Chinese FTZs in the world today is proceeding in a differentiated way, although all have passed the initial phase corresponding to the creation of Business centers equipped with fully infrastructured hospitality and office spaces . The subsequent phases usually involve the establishment of companies active in the most diverse sectors, which generates the revenue for the investors of the SOEs who had financed the start-up of the FTZ with funds ranging between 150 and 400 million dollars.

On an organizational level, all FTZs are set up around a multifunctional main building called the Business Center or, sometimes, the Office Complex, and includes spaces for catering, conference rooms, offices and rooms for night hospitality. The FTZ settlement models also develop from the experience of State-Owned Enterprise as China Merchant which, for example, is working on the growth of Shenzhen Shekou.

The Belt and Road Initiative is considered a political project with implications and implications still unknown on the contexts that host them.

On a formal level, the designers of the new architectures try to use local and inclusive vocabularies as much as possible , indicative of a particularly “soft” approach on the part of China. The eclectic "local pastiche" reinterpreted in a modern key of the new Business centres recurs for example in indigenous architectural elements such as domes, arches, courtyards, clock towers, pitched roofs proposed in an anomalous way to escape the label of "neo-colonialism" and also to calm any local discontent.