From Local to Global: Reconsidering Material Experience in the Age of Global Regionalism

Abstract

Abstract: Global design tends to simplify and homogenize the discourse of architectural practice. Global practices typically avoid concrete solutions addressing the specific needs of the local. Global production is concerned with solving not a single problem but the same problem at high volume. Global design leads to an estrangement of local tradition and material history, delivering unfitting contextual insertions that progressively impoverish local memory in material, cultural, and ultimately, social terms. The global is not context antagonistic; it is acontextual by definition, because its concerns are related to abstract systems of economic value and the demands of industrial production. Conversely, the local celebrates the idiosyncrasies that relate to a specific location. Local architectural strategies promote a connection between material work and sensory experience, providing an architectural framework for the collective memory that avoids compromising contextual responses with uprooted designs. The tactile experience of materials over time contributes to construct the memory of places, ultimately building up its identity. Material memory opposes the homogenizing and alienating dimension of generic global design. The associations between material perception and collective memory facilitate a foundation for contemporary architectural production through sensory experience, while incorporating regional idiosyncrasies that embody contextual continuities. The connections between material memory and tactility can in fact reveal pathways to productive models of responsible globalism. The qualities embodied in the material memory of a place speak to a common history that embodies the very traces of how and why a place is what it is. Material memory and the direct experience of tactility oppose many of the homogenizing and alienating conditions of generic global design, providing a model that provides continuity between the local and the global, between past and future. This essay reflects on local techniques and material tactility as a potential path to grounding interventions that oppose the homogenizing discourses implemented by global trends. In proposing a model based on Global Regionalism, materials are considered the canvas upon which the intimacy of contextual traces connects memory with innovation, incorporating experience and tradition into the global mainstream.