If you've never known anything other than sandpaper cigarettes, grassing up your neighbours, world-class pollution, paranoia and nylon clothes, then no wonder this precipitous suture didn't occasion the untempered gratitude that the economic miracle-workers of the West might have expected it to. The notion of freedom must have seemed a puzzling chimera to an institutionalised nation released into the community. The citizens of East Germany were suddenly forced to take decisions that had once been taken for them. And what about material choice? Having been used to little, this cardinal point of consumerism was not seen to be the elemental human requirement that we who live in the lands of plenty have been persuaded to consider it.
It was the reaction against the plethora of such choices, as much as political uncertainty, that underpinned Ostalgia in the mid-1990s. By this time, the middle-aged and elderly had had time to see what globalisation could bring them – and had elected with their purses to stick with what they knew. So brands of acceptably low quality and technological redundancy were reintroduced, and produced in such small volumes that they were more expensive than those available from the West.
The choice to have no choice, or a restricted choice of pricey grot, is cultural and broadly nationalistic. Applied to building, it is archaic. In Britain, regional idioms determined by local materials and practices were largely extinguished by the railway's capacity to carry materials across the country and homogenize industrial processes. Sure, houses are still being built in the "traditional" style across the Western world. But which traditional style is this? It is traditional to the artless hack for whom curly tiles mean Andalusia, a candle-snuffer Périgord and shiplap New England. The same interchangeable house wears different clothes as bogusly cosmetic as "national costume". The science parks, the hospitals, the supermarkets and junkfood emporiums are more honest about the fact that they might be anywhere, that national differences have blurred and that buildings are manifestations, if not of global corporations, then at least of architecture's internationalism.
The science parks and junkfood emporiums are more honest about the fact that they might be anywhere
What is merely one of many tributaries in this era will swell to become the next era's mainstream. The trick is to spot which one. What if the tendency for cities such as London to secede economically and culturally from their home countries accelerates? What if linguistically and religiously determined factionalism achieves what it aspires to? What if the exemplary "localism" of Jose Bove spreads and we enter an age of city states and town states, of micro-autonomies? This is, evidently, a prospectus, like all such speculations, based in a hyperbolic present. Not Nostradamus, me.
What buildings would we get should these miniature heavens or, according to taste, parochial hells, come to pass? Young states or would-be separatist states have attempted to define themselves by building in a manner which they believed exclusive to themselves: thus Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, made a big thing of its art nouveau, which differentiated it from Strasbourg, the art nouveau-less capital of adjacent Alsace. It failed to notice that each Baltic state was differentiating itself from its neighbour by the same means. Whoops! But then, 100 years ago you were never quite certain what your neighbour was up to.
