Modern Traditional Architecture in Contemporary China

• In Event: Traditional Forms, New Identities: Creative Transformations of Chinese Architecture

Abstract

China’s contemporary architecture is seeing a recent trend of appropriating traditional building forms and styles, from literal mimicry to abstract adaptation, in modern technology and material. A slew of constructions of this nature that have appeared in the past two decades has invited critical discussion at many levels, including criticism against superficial application of architectural motifs and decoration patterns of the past, uneasily coexisting and contrasting side by side with other building hallmarks of uncompromising modernity. The growing global tourism in contemporary China and its ongoing economic boom, to many, are the factors to be blamed for the ostensible return to tradition in architecture. In this paper, however, I suggest that the implication of this “modern traditional architecture” actually runs much deeper than expected in contemporary China. In fact, I shall argue that “tradition” in this case is only brought into being by China’s own imagination with reference to its modernity and globalization. In other words, contemporary China delivers new conditions for the re-emergence of this traditional architecture, and it is through the language of imitation and borrowing that the past is given its new expression in the present and embraced as part of the future. Using modern traditional buildings from Xi’an of Shaanxi and Datong of Shanxi as primary examples, this paper will examine two interrelated forms in which this imagination of the past has manifested, namely preservation and recreation, that together both re-historicize and transform the meaning and identity of the traditional Chinese architecture in contemporary China.

Author

• Wei-Cheng Lin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill