ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses three architects in the firm URBANUS, who went abroad and returned to China, who started their practice in the late 1990s along with the unprecedented urbanisation in the Pearl River Delta. The fluctuating and unclear relationships between the market and the state in the early stage of market transition in China often placed the “Haigui architects” in an uneasy position. Yet in the maturing stage of the market transition, URBANUS’s efforts in anti-market projects show their unique role in working for civil justice, while confronting the commercialisation of space. The diverse influence in the work of Urban Tulou was explored, especially the development of its circular design. From the perspectives of both the translator and reader of Urban Tulou, the URBANUS architects’ travelling life experiences, travel-enhanced professional capacities and wandering imagining of China, a maturing third realm between state and society converges into something epitomised by the “circular” design. The analysis shows that the ideological transformation between private and public sectors creates a psychological shift towards a growing enthusiasm for privatisation, which quickly edged out collectivism in the urban spread. The urban strategies initiated by URBANUS are not an isolated professional experiment but an attempt to reconcile the ideological anxiety between private and public sectors.
