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Book Review
| Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000. By JEFFREY W. CODY. London: Routledge, 2003. 304 pp. $135.00 (cloth); $48.95 (paper).
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When the International Banking Corporation remodeled its Shanghai branch in 1920, it revealed, according to Jeffrey Cody, "how American architecture was exported both as a set of technological systems and as cultural icons of power" (p. 63). Facing stiff competition, the IBC wanted a showcase modeled on its neoclassic Wall Street headquarters. Yet, the Chinese client either "missed the aesthetic connection" or "remained mute" about the symbolism, but he surely noticed the building's social space, in which Westerner and Chinese were essentially segregated. Meanwhile, communists called the building an "icon of foreign domination" (pp. 70, 72). Not to be limited to its traditional focus of aesthetics, the study of architecture evidently includes many dimensions: culture, society, economy, politics, and technology. |
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In Exporting American Architecture, Cody ambitiously moves beyond the limited scope of his published work on Western influence on early twentieth-century architecture in China. Whetting his reader's appetite, he introduces his narrative with the terrorism of 9/11. Citing a terrorist who claimed that Western-style buildings had desecrated his Egyptian homeland, Cody suggests that they had attacked the symbols of global modernization. Yet, he notes, no scholar so far "has scrutinized the precise, transnational details associated with American architectural exportation" (p. xv). Finding the architectural footings of this globalism in the 1870s, he argues wisely that the complex process of architectural exporting yielded "a hybrid transformation, with a spectrum of results from nearly direct imitation to barely discernible architectural genes" (p. xvii). |
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