ABSTRACT
As China becomes the largest construction site in the world today, three issues are arising in relation to this development. One concerns a ‘symmetrical’ exchange between China and the West as I have identified. It seems important to develop this observation further, to capture a larger picture of design practice in China and a growing international discourse on China. Both historical and geo-global perspectives must be employed. It is an ongoing reading that I should like to pursue further. The second issue concerns the position of ‘critical architecture’ for China and elsewhere. China and other parts of Asia have certainly provided cases for an instrumentalist viewpoint that can lend its support to a post-critical argument as Koolhaas’s studies have already attested. Yet this ‘China’ and ‘Asia’ refer to a pragmatic practice in these countries, not the new critical ‘avant-garde’ I have also identified. There are both critical and instrumental practices overlapping and interrelating here. A crucial question therefore remains. Do we need critical architecture in China and elsewhere, in the face of a generic contemporary instrumentalism in these countries, and in the world at large with a neo-liberal ideology of globalization? If the answer is yes, and if post-critical thinking is also persuasive in transcending a negative criticality in the West, then what kind of new critical architecture should we adopt? Are there signs we can identify in China today which are relevant for the search of this different criticality? This will be explored as a continuation of my observations on the ‘symmetry’ and the Chinese ‘avant-garde’.
