Crossed Glances: Architecture and Criticism astride Geographies

The Atlantic Ocean is not simply the large expanse of water that separates the shores of Europe from those of the Americas: it is an area of contact that at once divides and unites, an epistemological sphere that contains knowledge, expertise, ideas, as well as shared or disputed opinions. Transatlantic connections have produced and continue to produce lasting effects on the involved parties; but, in many ways, they have also created a ‘space in-between’, an independent territory that transcends the quality of the transmitted messages and their effects on the receiving culture. Taking the Atlantic Ocean as a metaphorical territory, this text intends to reflect methodologically on the transnational nature of numerous architectural discussions that emerged during the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, architectures are not only the material manifestation of a long-standing discipline and professional culture, but also the outcome of discourses that originate locally but are often disseminated – and evolved – at a global scale. Understood as an instrument of mediation between different actors involved in the conception, construction and use of architecture, criticism is, in fact, a key constituent of the networks of contacts and mechanisms of exchange that define transatlantic dialogues. Propagated by travel, emigration, diffusion of images and translation of words, architecture is a vehicle for the transmission of cultural values, both within small circles of experts and intellectuals and to an extent that affects large segments of the so-called ‘general public’. This essay aims to illuminate the implications of the dissemination of architectural ideas, according to a perspective that goes beyond the transatlantic one and that takes the Atlantic Ocean’s divide as a metaphor for cross-cultural relations. Whether transatlantic, transnational or global, architectural ‘dialogues’ imply the confrontation of different points of view: the history that emerges from them is, therefore, one that is based as much on factual exchanges as it is on crossed glances.