East Asia, Rethinking the Region and its Architectural Culture

摘要

In recent years, talks of local characteristics in architecture and urbanism had occupied considerable part of theoretical debates among the so-called, non-Western architects and academics.For the latter half of the twenty century, when countries in East Asia saw their dramatic industrialization and the rapid expansion of urban space, many local architects had consistently brought forth the concerns for regional tradition in architecture that reflected global modernity on the one hand, and aspirations for local distinction on the other.Most notably, this attitude has been augmented by the discourse of "Critical Regionalism".Being pervasive in the thinking of non-Western architecture since the 1980s, this discourse emphasized a particular design attitude that found notable design examples in various parts of the world while assigning them to the celebrated exemplars with universal denominators.This paper will look at this condition very carefully and reconsider this dominant architectural view from the standpoint of post-colonial critical theory.Starting from the formation of nation-state in Europe, elaborated here is a historiography of globalized nationhood that results in cultural conditions within strictly divided national borders.In conclusion,this paper fosters an alternative path of thinking the contemporary architectural discourse of Critical Regionalism that is often bounded in a misleadingly narrow scope of cultural readings.