The Supreme Formula For Progress

Technology and romance within the global architecture

Seventy years ago, in an exploit long since forgotten, Major Ramon Franco, younger brother of the future Dictator of Spain, flew the South Atlantic from La Rabida to Buenos Aires, linking by air the Hispanic countries of the old and new world for the first time. Franco's feat was greeted in the Spanish-speaking world by the kind of explosion of popular enthusiasm that was to greet Charles Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris the following year, and indeed was still available to greet Yuri Gagarin's pioneer orbits of the earth 30 years later. In his time Franco was compared to Christopher Columbus and his aircraft to the Santa Maria, and the comparisons were not specious. The Spanish historian Don Manuel de Siarot wrote; 'We can see now that Don Quixote has learned science. He can make fantasy into reality by constructing life out of technology and romance. This is indeed the supreme formula for progress.'

Two generations later it is easy for us to understand this 'formula for progress'. Today no one would dispute that wide body jets, global positioning systems and satellite communications links are the direct descendants of the propeller-driven flying boat and morse-key radio that transported and directed Major Franco. Over the years the heady mix of technology and romance has spread further afield. After the great long-distance fliers of the 1920s came the scientists, the surgeons, the astronauts, the athletes and the designers of the modern world. Today the admiration of the world is no longer directed at the pilots of transatlantic airliners: instead our great heroes are global architects, men as singular as Frank Gehry, Cesar Pelli, Sir Norman Foster or Rem Koolhaas. Aerospace and electronic communications have long since solved the problem of linking the five continents into a single interconnected whole: the new task is to create new identities for the patchwork of old and new cities caught up in the one-world network of the globalised future. It is no accident that Frank Gehry's Bilbao gallery has been as lavishly praised as Major Franco's flight, for the new identity that it conferred, like the new identity conferred by the Petronas towers and the Commerzbank, is a priceless gift.

Month by month in the pages of the architectural magazines we see buildings from all over the world that are built according to Manuel de Siarot's supreme formula for progress. If the epic flights of the great aviation pioneers were the symbolic events of the beginning of the age of globalisation, the creations of today's global architects are the symbols of its maturity.

Today global architecture is decentralized; scattered across cities that are linked by the space/time continuum of electronic communications. World architects like Foster, Pelli, Pei, Gehry, Nouvel and Koolhaas may travel the world in high speed aircraft, but they leave behind them back-office technicians working the time zones via satellite links. Their clients are government agencies and multinational corporations whose names are household words. These clients too dwell in a global universe. They make, sell or process products and services on any continent. They are exigent, demand crucial changes overnight. To serve the instantaneous impatience of clients like this the global architect has learned to mobilise an awesome array of brain power. Whatever the challenge, it can bring together an expert task force to meet it; not just a team of experienced architects but structural and service engineers, product designers, constructors, building economists, legal experts, planners, building code analysts, property development strategists, communications experts, negotiators, visualisers, model makers and more. All of them not only available at short notice, but organised to offer their services in a sequence running from pre-design strategy, through outline and detailed design, statutory permissions, finance, construction, completion and post-completion surveys. And just as the latest Boeing airliner is still as much an aeroplane as was Major Franco's primitive flying boat -- so is all this multifarious capability still architecture. Through expertise, experience, organisation and genius it creates the way stations of a new global geography by an old kind of art.

The 1997 World Architecture top 500 survey confirmed the existence of at least sixteen fully globalised architectural firms. All of them bill in excess of US$ 100 million a year, and six of them earn more than 50 per cent of their fees outside their home markets. Although most of them maintain a strong national presence they have long since followed their multinational clients overseas, opening offices wherever prospects have appeared to justify the investment, and increasingly exploited the synergy that a global network of offices can offer for distributing the resultant workload. They have headquarters offices of course, but they also have semi-autonomous satellites, like asteroids in space, each rooted into a gravitational system of its own.

Surprisingly perhaps, at this level of globalisation there is less competition rather than more. All global businesses, not only the key identity-giver of architecture, have been transformed by the accelerating speed of communications heralded by the pioneer aviators of 70 years ago. Today designs that once took three years to develop can now be produced and refined in ten months or less. But at the same time collaboration -- not competition -- has made the formation of expert teams and the subdivision of large contracts easier to manage. Technology and romance may always attend any major architectural project, but both are modulated by the occult connectivity that links all architects.

Today competition is internalised, so that global architects appear to compete when really they are collaborating. Thus while big global firms cruise deep waters in search of monster commissions, smaller local firms, like pilot fish, try to make themselves useful. By way of collaboration and job-sharing each is rewarded. This is indeed the supreme formula for progress of which the Spanish sage spoke so many years ago.