Chinese Experimental Architecture Or French Poststructuralist Theory: Different Patches of the Concrete (1) (Routledge Research in Architecture)

By: Ruo Jia

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Synopsis: 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.”