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. 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. Our post-19th-century penchant for seeing history through the lens of the nation-state often makes it difficult to apprehend such global pictures. 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. 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. 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. 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. Peter’s Basilica and the Villa Rotonda), France (Chambord), and Russia (Cathedral of the Assumption). 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. Synchrony has served as a powerful frame for our discussion. In that respect, ours is only one of many possible narratives. 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 sense, this book is not about the sum of all local histories.
From that point of view, the word global in the title is not so much a geographic construct as an eruditional horizon. We have also tried to emphasize quality as much as quantity. As much as possible, we emphasize urban contexts as well as materials and surfaces. 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. 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. 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. The reader should understand that there is always something over the horizon. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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