Alternative Modernity, Rural Rediscovery and What Next: The Ongoing Debate on the Modern in China

摘要

Over the last three decades the breakneck speed of urbanisation in China has transformed it into an architectural melting pot. This has had far-reaching consequences, challenging the magnitude of late 20th-century Chinese Modernist technocracy, which built upon short-lived Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) beliefs, while also triggering a plethora of cynical and backward-looking commentaries. The ubiquitous bigness and newness of Chinese new towns, which are overwhelmingly associated with an equally ubiquitous ugliness, has proved an underlying trajectory for these theories of anxious or desperate modernity. This issue of , in its keenness to identify traces of independent experimentation and research, can be viewed if not as a retaliation, at least as an effective response to these negative theories - regardless of how few and far between this experimental work is in the vast standardised Chinese urban landscape.