What is a global history of architecture? There is, of course, no single answer, just as there is no single way to define words like global, history, and architecture. Nonetheless, these words are not completely open-ended, and they serve here as the vectors that have helped us construct the narratives of this volume. With this book, we hope to provoke discussion about these terms and at the same time furnish a framework students can use to begin discussion in the classroom.This book transcends the necessary restrictions of the classroom, where in a semester or even two, the teacher has to limit what is taught based on any number of factors. The reader should understand that there is always something over the horizon. Whereas any such book must inevitably be selective about what it can include, we have attempted to represent a wide swath of the globe, in all its diversity. At the same time,however, the book does not aspire to be an encyclopedia of everything that has been built; nor does it assume a universal principle that governs everything architectural. The buildings included are for us more than just monuments of achievement; we see them as set pieces allowing us to better appreciate the complex intertwining of social, political, religious, and economic contexts in which they are positioned. As much as possible, we emphasize urban contexts as well as materials and surfaces. We have also tried to emphasize quality as much as quantity. From that point of view, the word global in the title is not so much a geographic construct as an eruditional horizon. In that sense, this book is not about the sum of all local histories. Its mission is bound to the discipline of architecture, which requires us to see connections, tensions, and associations that transcend so-called local perspectives. In that respect, ours is only one of many possible narratives.Synchrony has served as a powerful frame for our discussion. For instance, as much as Seoul’s Gyeongbok Palace is today heralded in Korea as an example of traditional Korean architecture, we note that it also belongs to a Eurasian building campaign that stretched from Japan (the Katsura Imperial Villa), through China (Beijing and the Ming Tombs), to Persia (Isfahan), India (the Taj Mahal), Turkey (the Suleymaniye Complex), Italy (St. Peter’s Basilica and the Villa Rotonda), France (Chambord), and Russia (Cathedral of the Assumption). In some cases, one can assume that information flowed from place to place, but such movement is not itself a requirement for the architecture to qualify as “global.” It is enough for us to know, first, that these structures are contemporaneous and that each has a specific history. If there are additional connections that come as a result of trade, war, or other forms of contact, these are for us subsidiary to contemporaneity.This is not to say that our story is exclusively the story of individual buildings and sites, only that there is a give and take between explaining how a building works and how it is positioned in the world of its influences and connections. We have, therefore, tried to be faithful to the specificities of each individual building while acknowledging that every architectural project is always embedded in a larger world—and even a worldview—that affects it directly and indirectly.Our post-19th-century penchant for seeing history through the lens of the nation-state often makes it difficult to apprehend such global pictures. Furthermore, in the face of today’s increasingly hegemonic global economy, the tendency by historians, and often architects, to nationalize, localize, regionalize, and even micro-regionalize history—perhaps as meaningful acts of resistance—can blind us to the historical synchronicity and interconnectivity of global realities that existed long before our present moment of globalization. What would the Turks be today if they had stayed in East Asia? The movement of people, ideas, food, and wealth has bound us to each other since the beginning of history. And so without denying the reality of nation-states and their claims to unique histories and identities, we have resisted the temptation to streamline our narratives to fit nationalistic parameters. Indian architecture, for instance, may have some consistent traits from its beginnings to the present day, but there is less certainty about what those traits might be than one may think. The flow of Indian Buddhism to China, the opening of trade to Southeast Asia, the settling of Mongolians in the north, the arrival of Islam from the east, and the colonization by the English are just some of the more obvious links that bind India, for better or worse, to global events. It is these links, and the resultant architecture, more than the presumed “Indianness” of Indian architecture, that interests us. Furthermore, India has historically been divided into numerous kingdoms that, like Europe, could easily have evolved (and in some cases did evolve) into their own nations. The 10th-century Chola dynasty of peninsular India, for example, was not only an empire but possessed a unique worldview of its own. In writing its history, we have attempted to preserve its distinct identity while marking the ways in which it maps its own global imagination.Broadly speaking, our goal is to help students of architecture develop an understanding of the manner in which architectural production is always triangulated by the exigencies of time and location. More specifically, we have narrated these interdependencies to underscore what we consider to be the inevitable modernity of each period. We often think of the distant past as moving slowly from age to age, dynasty to Ching, F. D. K., Jarzombek, M. M., & Prakash, V. (2017). A global history of architecture. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.Created from udmercy on 2024-08-30 18:52:30.Copyright © 2017. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of polit- ical forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In. fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambi- tious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators. Information bearing on such issues has been pouring in from every quarter of the globe. As a result, researchers around the world have also been examining ethnographic and historical material in a new light. The pieces now exist to create an entirely different world history — but so far, they remain hidden to all but a few privileged experts (and even the experts tend to hesitate before abandoning their own tiny part of the puzzle, to compare notes with others out- side their specific subfield). Our aim in this book is to start putting some of the pieces of the puzzle together, in full awareness that nobody yet has anything like a complete set. The task is immense, and the issues so important, that it will take years of research and debate even to begin to understand the real implications of the pic- ture we're starting to see. But it’s crucial that we set the process in motion. One thing that will quickly become clear is that the preva- lent ‘big picture’ of history — shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike — has almost nothing to do with the g

We have no way of knowing what most of them were. - This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to.

society of true equality today, you’re going to have to figure Out a Way to go back to becoming tiny bands of foragers again with no signifi. cant personal property. Since foragers require a pretty extensive territory to forage in, this would mean having to reduce the world’, population by something like 99.9 per cent. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces; or, perhaps, to wangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can temporarily duck out of its way.

An exam from Latin examinare "to test or try; consider, ponder," literally "to weigh," from examen "ameans of weighing or testing," is intended to review the material we have learned from and test howyou have understood or retained it.