Read more
Chinese Experimental Architecture Or
French Poststructuralist Theory: Different Patches of the Concrete starts with a paradox: how the Chinese Cultural Revolution-through its adaptation by French Theory and French Theory's subsequent adaptation by Chinese Experimental Architecture-shaped the Chinese reformative effort to redefine itself, amidst its struggle against colonial dynamics, and against the Cultural Revolution.
Through French Poststructuralist Theory, the project creates a critical narrative to access the Chinese Experimental Architecture movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s and its legacy in contemporary Chinese architecture. At the same time, it provides, in retrospect, an opportunity to approach French Theory in its rich global materiality as a production of Chinese Experimental Architecture. This study thus overcomes simplistic dichotomies of dominant and subjugated, reductive labels of orientalism, self-orientalism, and nationalism, as well as architectural stylistic or operative canons. It opens such borders and enclosed entities in a positive way, exploring collaborative inquiries where new possibilities of different materialist architectural design and socio-eco-political epistemological structure emerge in a field of events, encounters, and connections around the problématique and signifier of the "concrete."
List of contents
List of figuresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Problématique of a Broken CirclePart I. The Chinese Experimental Architectural AssemblageI. Shu Wang and "Fictionalizing City"
- The Chinese Architecture Scene in the 1980s Viewed from Nanjing Institute of Technology
- Theoretical Transformations of "Fictionalizing City"
- Concrete and Abstract Architectural Practice
II. Yungho Chang and Tu Mu
- The Blur of Chinese Experimental Architecture
- Tu Mu as Objective Architecture
III. Bing Zhao and Taiji Theory
IV. Juchuan Li and
Concrete ArchitecturePart Or. Staying Uncomfortably in the Space of the In-between Just a Little Longer-Symptoms around Construction and Regionalism
-Feminist Possibilities
Part II. Poststructuralist PrehistoryVI. French Sinophilia
- The Concrete from Althusser to
Tel Quel- The Mark of Damisch and Barthes
VII. American and Chinese Transformations
- The American Fascination with Theory
- Chinese Cultural Fever
Index
About the author
Ruo Jia is an architect/artist/theorist/historian/educator. She founded and directs the research-based practice IfWorks, which explores art/architecture possibilities individually Or collectively. Her research into constructing a decolonizing postmodern materialist space through the interweaving of "Chinese Experimental Architecture" Or "French Poststructuralist Theory," is being expanded to envision the possibilities of Asian Feminist Architecture and Posthumanist Sustainability. Her work has been published in the
Journal of Architecture,
Representations,
Log,
Brooklyn Rail, the
Journal of Architectural Education, and
e-flux among others. She holds a PhD in Architectural History and Theory from the Princeton University School of Architecture, with an interdisciplinary humanities certificate from Media+Modernity; an M.Arch.II from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; and an M.Arch. and a B.Arch. from the Southeast University School of Architecture. Formerly a tenure-track Assistant Professor in History and Theory of Architecture and affiliated faculty at the Gender Studies Program at Mississippi State University, she has also taught at Pratt, Cornell, Harvard, CUNY, Columbia, and Princeton.
