ABSTRACT
Cui Kai is the deputy president and chief architect of China Architecture Design & Research Group (CAG). This chapter devises two terms in the analysis of Cui Kai’s architecture – “delayed modernism” and “hazy postmodernism”. The combination of modernism and postmodernism was achieved in distinct ways in his early works, and how modernism and postmodernism have become entangled in the later stage is clarified. Cui Kai’s works possess a complexity and richness rooted in the distinctive nourishment of a national institution. The marketisation of CAG, which has been evolving over the past twenty years, has had an influential impact on his designs. Therefore, Cui Kai’s aesthetic contains a sense of the state-owned enterprise’s mission inherited from the collectivist-transmitted culture, yet it is neither a transmitted by politics nor a folk. The unique fluctuations between modernism and postmodernism in his designs vacillate in a circular orbit around rationalism. His designs have become a shared medium or shared atmosphere that tie the diversified, locality-tied, popular cultures accepted by the market and then integrate them into high culture. An architectural language for bureaucratic communication satisfying the state, and communication with Chinese residents in his designs, provided an appropriate way of mediating this conflict around “inside the system”.
