Chinese Experimental Architecture Or French Poststructuralist Theory

Different Patches of the Concrete
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-90732-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 296 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Routledge Research in Architecture

Chinese Experimental Architecture Or French Poststructuralist Theory 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.”

This book is for those interested in gaining a different perspective into Chinese architecture, architectural theory, or critical theory in general and those who long for some space where decolonizing architectural and theoretical approaches form beyond Euro-American centrality and oppositional history.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jia, Ruo

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architektur: Allgemeines
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Gestaltung, Darstellung, Bautechnik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architektur: Berufspraxis

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: the Problématique of a Broken Circle

Part I. The Chinese Experimental Architectural Assemblage

I. 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 Architecture

Part Or. Staying Uncomfortably in the Space of the In-between Just a Little Longer

-Symptoms around Construction and Regionalism

-Feminist Possibilities

Part II. Poststructuralist Prehistory

VI. 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

Über Autor(innen)

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, and the Journal of Architectural Education, 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.