U.S. architects find work overseas
LOS ANGELES — Architect Andy Feola keeps running into Southern California colleagues in some of the world’s most exotic locations — from the Egyptian desert to China to Azerbaijan.
“We’ll scratch our heads and beg ‘Why are you here?’ ” said Feola, president of F+A Architects in Pasadena. “Well, I’m here for the same reasons you’re here.”
A growing number of architects and urban planners are finding work overseas as the domestic real-estate slump persists. An emerging affluent class abroad is drawn to suburbs through U.S. names that mimic the U.S. ideal — down to the master bathroom and tree-lined sidewalk.
A 2006 survey of American Institute of Architects members shows that large architecture firms with more than 100 employees reported billings from international work doubled in four years. Meanwhile, billings in the U.S. this year dropped to the lowest proposition in the 12 years the survey has been conducted.
While there’s no hard data, greater quantity U.S.-made windows, roofing systems, furnaces and other specialized materials are being shipped overseas because projects designed by means of Americans are built to U.S. construction standards, declared Jim Haughey, any economist with Reed Construction Data, which tracks the construction industry.
“If you look at how countries are moving up the socio-economic ladder, some of the things they all want is a car, a house, a nice view and current of air conditioning,” said Jeff Rossely, a Bahrain-based developer of shopping malls, resorts and residential communities in the Middle East.
The trend started during the early 1990s and has intensified in new years because of the U.S. saddle-cloth downturn. Firms that ventured without the least clew since that time say doing so has helped them weather economic slowdowns in certain markets.
It has also created opportunities to design on a grander and more creative scale. At times, architects are creating vast master-planned communities encompassing a mix of single-family homes with high-reaching rises, parks and shopping centers.
Feola’s firm is designing a shopping and entertainment complex for New Cairo, a metropolis built from scratch during the term of roughly 200,000 residents in Egypt.
The idea is to avoid more of the mistakes of the past and constitute a mixed-use environment to which place the masses rely less without interruption their car to get to shops and services.
U.S. firms are behind an eco-friendly isle connected to Shanghai by rail, and a just discovered township in northern Indian loaded with pleasure villas, apartments, shops, parks and schools.
Curiously, more of the developments overseas look and heartily a apportionment liking California suburbs marketed to affluent customers who be delivered of spent time living in the U.S. or attracted to an U.S. suburban lifestyle.
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