Workshop on spectacle and architecture in China

This interdisciplinary workshop will focus on the role of architecture and urbanism in the production of ideology within contemporary China.

BAVO's introduction is entitled 'Fear and Loathing in China: Architecture, Politics and Ethics in the Age of Globalized Architecture'. For a short description see below.

The conference is an initiative of the Architecture and History departments of the University of Toronto. For more information on the topic, programme and the other speakers, check the conference website.

Short description lecture:

It is no longer a shocking insight that with the onslaught of globalization, also architects are uninhibitedly tapping into the unlimited opportunities of the global market-place. The current operations of foreign architects in China are exemplary in this regard. Today, for instance, Western architects are not at all secretive about the fact that the negative impact of the economic downturn in their own countries is the main impetus for their efforts to enter the booming Chinese architecture market. More interesting is the way foreign architects, such as Rem Koolhaas or Herzog & de Meuron, motivate their work in China in more politically engaged terms such as helping to effect democratic change in China, as well as the way in which they say to achieve this through their architecture. The latter is usually done by having buildings embody radical ideas (such as freedom) by, for instance, making them non-hierarchical, with attention to the human-scale and public space, etc. At the same time, however, the power of architecture to effect change is seriously downplayed by expressing the latter in such weak terms of hope and belief, or by calling its effects marginal or ‘not to be overestimated’. Also the iconic, spectacle value of the ‘radical’ buildings, makes it easy for their social effect to be contained to the merely cultural and therefore limit their effect to accommodating the cultural recognition of a ‘wrong’ regime. Hence the calls in the architectural profession for a renunciatory ethical stance towards China such as was done recently by Daniel Libeskind with his implicit suggestion of a boycott for building in China.

In this lecture, we will focus not so much on the actual building production of Western architects in China, but rather look closer into some of the different presuppositions, motivations, justifications, intentions, doubts and fears that are involved. We will connect these analyses of the subjective economy of global architects operating in China to some key political economic issues at play in China as well as globally, and extrapolate some politico-ideological features and underpinnings of today’s global architectural community.