Foreign exchange

摘要

Somehow the UK has never properly metabolised its foreign architects. Just as Jan Kaplicky and Zaha Hadid found it difficult to get work in their adopted home countries, there still seems a kind of resistance, an ingrained privilege, that favours and filters for middle-class, middle-of-the-road architectural establishment that congratulates itself on its international work while never quite becoming international itself. As Hadid at her fiery best showed, foreigners bring friction - disdaining convention and British manners and self-satisfaction. We might think of Italian Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, Spanish Felix Candela in Mexico, the German and Italian immigrants who built Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo, or of how Israel-born Eyal Weizman has comprehensively shaken up ideas about what architecture can be in his adopted home city of London.