“Each crisis hastened and magnified the inevitable”, says English architect Norman Foster. Undoubtedly, in the field of architecture, every paradigm shift seems to have been driven by certain unprecedented crises: in London, the 1666 Great Fire that destroyed 80% of the city prompted the introduction of the London Building Act in the following year, which effectively banned timber facades and thatched roofs in favour of fire-proof bricks and stones. In Europe and North America, the tuberculosis epidemic during the 18th and 19th century brought about some of the most distinctive architectural features that are associated with “Modern Movement”: flat roofs, balconies, and terraces. And more recently in Japan, the 1978 Miyagi Earthquake which caused over 1,300 injuries led to a major revision of the country’s Building Code from “kyu taishin”, meaning “old seismic-resistant”, to “shin taishin”, namely “new seismic-resistant”. The new building code requires a building to withstand and not collapse with a seismic intensity scale of upper 6, as opposed to upper 5 in the old code. This policy change turned out to be life-saving as the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake that generated a seismic intensity scale of lower to upper 6 resulted in a large number of kyu taishin buildings being seriously damaged, while buildings that were built under the new code were mostly left intact.
According to Foster, while these architectural changes seem to have all occurred in times of crises, they were not exactly caused by those disasters. Rather, they had already been the trends architecture as a discipline was adhering to—each crisis merely accelerated the speed at which “the inevitable” happened. Hence, when asked whether the Covid crisis was going to transform the ways in which people live, Foster responded confidently by saying that the pandemic was only going to make the future of living space more resilient to potential diseases. Such an optimistic assessment of the future of human habitat made me wonder if the same could be said about that of international relations. If we are currently going through an unprecedented crisis and such a crisis is going to hasten the unfolding of the general trend of world politics, what exactly is this “trend”? In other words, what is “the inevitable” in international relations?
Comments