Of late, much has been written about transnational networks of architecture and planning in the midtwentieth century. Many accounts of the circulation of knowledge and movement of people across politically-bounded territories challenge and expand existing histories of modern architecture, particularly those that equate internationalization with westernization and those that understand localization through nationalist narratives. But with a few exceptions, almost all the transnational actors that are celebrated are expatriate male, white and based in metropolitan centers in Europe or North America. Whiteness refers to a description of the historical legacy of colonialism and contemporary realities of structural power of the white-dominated West in virtually all spheres. Architects like Constantinos Doxiadis and Ieoh Ming Pei — part of the New Commonwealth migration of the “long boom” in the 1950s and 1960s and part of the SinoAmerican elite respectively—fall into this paradigm.

By privileging the expatriate male and white as primary transnational actors, these accounts have mostly overlooked the contributions made by other actors and who are not based in the metropolitan centers of Europe and America. Even when these “local” actors are included, they tend to be relegated to secondary roles as passive local collaborators and informants. They are consigned to being actors with limited cosmopolitanism and highly circumscribed agency in the transnational networks of architecture and planning. However, many of them were educated in the metropole, internationally well-connected, and some practiced beyond the nations in which they held citizenship. Within Asia, we can already identify figures like Minette de Silva, Charles Correa, Balkrishna V. Doshi, Muzharul Islam, Sumet Jumsai, Lim Chong Keat, William Lim, Koichi Nagashima and Wang Chiu-Hwa. We believe that similar marginalized cosmopolitan figures abound in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere in the Global South.

This panel invites papers that explore topics related to these marginalized figures in the Global South to interrogate accounts of transnational networks of architecture and planning in the mid-twentieth century. By rethinking the marginalized subjects in relation to broader questions of race, class, gender and geopolitical circumstance, this panel seeks to deepen our understanding of the contexts and processes of transnational circulation of discourses and practices. Papers may include critical accounts of these figures’ involvement in transnational networks and the architecture they produced as congealment of broader socio-political forces, reflections on the perpetuation of exclusion in narration and/or representation, or address gaps in historiography and/or methodological approaches towards a subject.

Eunice Seng, The University of Hong Kong
Jiat-Hwee Chang, The National University of Singapore

Contact : Eunice Seng, Email : [email protected]