Being local beyond Architecture

From Kenneth Frampton’s ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’, there are many statements that are very logical and seem to hold relevance in our fast-paced globally connected world today.

“Modern building is now so universally conditioned by optimized technology that the possibility of creating significant urban form has become extremely limited”

Technology has made globalization more affordable, it is more economically viable to be a part of the mass production fabric that characterizes most metropolitan cities today, than to strive to retain the local texture of the place. Can you be local while trying to cope with the ease offered by technology? And secondly, is it possible to strike a balance between a design bearing peculiarities of the place (symbolism, culturally relevant forms or spaces) and location (light, topography, tactile experience, ere) as well as the bland and increasingly common dynamic that is ‘world culture’?

Further Jeremy Till’s article adds another dimension to Frampton’s writing leading me to question whether architecture alone has the power to resist this rise of globalization. Accordingly to Jeremy Till, KF provides a ‘comfort zone’ for architects to operate within and believe that physicality of the built form alone can help towards this goal.

Till’s contention is that beyond the architecture itself it is the people that embody the sense of the place and tie the local culture to itself. The ‘local’ fabric of a place is made of the people themselves, and hence would differs from place to place in terms of the history of the people, how they are rooted to the place, what their aspirations are, ere…. This aspect of local v/s global suddenly adds a whole new set of agencies and networks to in the picture in terms of the physical, social, economic structures that are embedded in fabric of a locality.

“In their concentration on the 1:100 (the composition and making of buildings) architects tend to eschew the dynamics of the other scales and the rich interplay across them. Their main loss is an understanding of buildings and the places between them as the settings for the social and political life. We therefore introduced human experience as the common thread of our urban register, taking the role of people in the understanding and making of cities as a central concern, confronting architecture’s tendency to abstract the human, the social and the political.”

How do we begin to assimilate these factors which go beyond our perceptions of architecture into our design, as we move forward as architects?