Transcultural Narratives from Modernism to Global Architecture

Pictures can easily represent life situations, both real and artificially recreated while technical drawings hardly describe the way man dwells. The constant increase of architectural images can be considered as part of the general change in society defined by W.J.T. Mitchell as “pictorial turn”. The worldwide diffusion of pictures contributes to the democratization of progress and a standard of living spaces, but it encourages a homogenization of buildings and a loss of places too. If we overcome the dialectic between global and local, we can observe how these images construct narratives that gather in each place the world as a whole creating a collective imaginary capable of transforming specific places starting from global instances. Focusing on three pictures of modernist architectures and analyzing them with an approach taken from the studies of visual culture, this essay explores the ability of architectural images to encourage the birth of transcultural narratives that can overcome local boundaries creating a worldwide collective imaginary.