A critical debate has been out there for a while, usually posed under the sign of opposition: should architecture respond to contextualized differences or should design practice address and communicate the values of universal rationality? To put it differently: how design can fill the gap in-between the local and the global?

Last week at Spring House, a lecture by Gianni Botsford has shown how antagonisms are often too static to inform any creative process. Under the title “Local Adaptations”, nine or ten projects were presented: in all of them architecture is conceptualized as being part of a local milieu, albeit one which is always understood in relation to an ecological system that encompass variations at the scale of the globe. Casa Kike, RIBA International Award winner of 2008, is perhaps the most expressive example of Gianni’s philosophy: the answer to the hot temperatures and high humidity levels of Costa Rica’s seashore latitudes was given by translating local constructive traditions and materials into a sophisticated design language, without appealing to any “culturalist” mimicry of the vernacular.

For Gianni, every one of us, rooted in our everyday localities, are the small pieces that integrate a vast cosmology. Local differences thus matter, but as the first statement of his lecture reveals - “When I stand still, I am moving” – what matters most is that we are the inhabitants of Spaceship Earth, evolving altogether around the Sun.