"A Research Agenda for the AndAnd" paper to be published in Aga Khan book The End of Architecture: Homogenisation or Difference?
excerpt from paper:
When I show people images of Thames Town China, the inevitable response is laughter. Not rolling, side-clutching laughter but the tentative, dry, nervous sort. I have shown Thames Town to a wide range of colleagues, friends and family and it’s always the same: nervous laughter. I am interested in this laughter and its deeper implications. Since the gradual privatization of the market starting in the mid-1990’s, developers in China have been experimenting with new forms of urban development. Through my own research of the various forms private real estate development has and is taking place in China. I have become particularly interested in what are known as “themed housing developments:” Beijing’s Orange County, Upper East Side and Vancouver Forest, Thames Town in Songjiang, Venice Aquatic City in Hangzhou, Anting, a ‘German town’ designed by Albert Speer Jr. … the list goes on. These developments are typically received with horror in the press, horror in academia, and delight by new buyers eager to invest. Faux. Ersatz. Copy. Farcical fantasyland. Simulate a simulacrum. Self-Colonization. These are some of the words that have been used to describe the new developments in the press and beyond. ...
... My paper will challenge both the either-or framework and the symmetrical construction of built form to ideas through a series of observations on the phenomenon of Thames Town, Songjiang City, China. While these are parallel processes, I believe that they work in tandem to produce, at best: nervous laughter, and at worst: impoverished readings of the development and others of its kind. At the root of my paper is the belief that our socio-historic bias for categorization, for bounding, for demarcation and for assuming a static place-ness [urban form as noun] produces a limiting reading and representation of space, experience, and urban subjectivity. As both the either-or framework and the symmetrical construction of built form to ideas are embedded within this bias, I will suggest an alternative: the AndAnd as a research agenda for reading and representing our contemporary built form. This formidable challenge of doing so has already been recognized by Frederic Jameson, “The problem [of contemporary mapping] is still one of representation, and also of representability: we know that we are caught within these more complex global networks … yet we have no way of thinking about them, of modeling them, however abstractly in our mind’s eye.” The key to the AndAnd research agenda is the synthesis of the noun and verb: the relationship of the bounded, static and scenographic, to the fluid, enmeshed and multi-scalar. From such a framework, a reading and representation of plurality can emerge. ...
When I show people images of Thames Town China, the inevitable response is laughter. Not rolling, side-clutching laughter but the tentative, dry, nervous sort. I have shown Thames Town to a wide range of colleagues, friends and family and it’s always the same: nervous laughter. I am interested in this laughter and its deeper implications. Since the gradual privatization of the market starting in the mid-1990’s, developers in China have been experimenting with new forms of urban development. Through my own research of the various forms private real estate development has and is taking place in China. I have become particularly interested in what are known as “themed housing developments:” Beijing’s Orange County, Upper East Side and Vancouver Forest, Thames Town in Songjiang, Venice Aquatic City in Hangzhou, Anting, a ‘German town’ designed by Albert Speer Jr. … the list goes on. These developments are typically received with horror in the press, horror in academia, and delight by new buyers eager to invest. Faux. Ersatz. Copy. Farcical fantasyland. Simulate a simulacrum. Self-Colonization. These are some of the words that have been used to describe the new developments in the press and beyond. ...
... My paper will challenge both the either-or framework and the symmetrical construction of built form to ideas through a series of observations on the phenomenon of Thames Town, Songjiang City, China. While these are parallel processes, I believe that they work in tandem to produce, at best: nervous laughter, and at worst: impoverished readings of the development and others of its kind. At the root of my paper is the belief that our socio-historic bias for categorization, for bounding, for demarcation and for assuming a static place-ness [urban form as noun] produces a limiting reading and representation of space, experience, and urban subjectivity. As both the either-or framework and the symmetrical construction of built form to ideas are embedded within this bias, I will suggest an alternative: the AndAnd as a research agenda for reading and representing our contemporary built form. This formidable challenge of doing so has already been recognized by Frederic Jameson, “The problem [of contemporary mapping] is still one of representation, and also of representability: we know that we are caught within these more complex global networks … yet we have no way of thinking about them, of modeling them, however abstractly in our mind’s eye.” The key to the AndAnd research agenda is the synthesis of the noun and verb: the relationship of the bounded, static and scenographic, to the fluid, enmeshed and multi-scalar. From such a framework, a reading and representation of plurality can emerge. ...
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- Mari Fujita's blog
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