Architettura cinese contemporanea / Tradizione e trasformazione Unpacking Chinese Architecture. Tradition and Transformation

This is the first book that introduced in Italy and in Europe the cultural debate within Chinese architects and the work and thought of actual Pritzker Prize Wang Shu, when he was totally unknown. The disintegration of the social fabric, the wonderful territory and scenes of the metropolis in China begun with the economical opening in 1979, on the path of a “socialist economy market”, has reached, at the dawn of the new millennium and with the double target of the Peking Olympic Games (2008) and the Shanghai Expo (2010), that type of sensational visibility defined by recent international press to be like an overwhelming process of modernization but, at the same time, a systematic destruction of a culture and an identity. In reality, demolitions and substitutions are quite constants in the historical evolution of a capital which has been systematically re-founded at every change of dynasty, without damaging, yet, the prescriptive value of historical precedents in Chinese culture: the persistence of only one type-morphological form in the urban culture doesn't correspond, thus it is not confined to the cult of the physical preservation of the constructions. The seduction of a neo import colonialism which sustains now a modernization founded on a actual tabula rasa and a frenetic “wrecking” of all which is perceived as tradition, finds a comparison in the objective difficulty of carrying out such an evolution with the instruments of a discipline which didn’t even exist in China, for thousand of years: right up to the Opium war (1840) the traditional city was renovating itself “unchangingly” on itself, re-proposing the unchanged unique morphological plant type (the fence of the courtyard house in all its territorial articulations) and the catalogue of codified and “standardized” elements. In the absence of a figure comparable to the architect, at least up to the XX century, architecture was never recognized in its specific disciplinary autonomy, not owning neither composition theories nor its own study tradition: the building being completely the putting into execution of a codified manual practice. The determining problem today’s more aware Chinese architects have to deal with is the absence of an autochthonous modern culture to refer to, apart from which it isn’t possible to evaluate the experimentations in the past few years which tried to emancipate from an uncritical tendency towards cultural self-colonization which comes before XX century Chinese architecture. From the beginning of the ’50, in fact, the journey towards modern architecture seems to have stopped at a mere updating of the language, from time to time aiming at perceiving the “styling characters” of soviet architecture, to built an hybrid eclecticism of the national style and, today, once again to self-colonize itself by importing an international style alien to the local and traditional culture. While the majority of the Chinese artists and architects undertake the process of westernization associated with the communist ideology, choosing to adapt to a political and cultural standardization which refuses the contemporary’s hybridization with the historical urban inheritance suggesting visions and urban scenes homologated to the west, in a scattered and still scares manner; nevertheless there are some young Chinese architects who, starting from concrete conditions and from the different scales of professional opportunities, propose a different vision of the construction of the city and a more complex experience of urban space.