My question is: so where is Chinese culture and Chinese architectural Identity? We have not lost them, but we have been denying them. By denying what have led to those faults, we have also denied the virtues…. I see a country in identity crisis, with almost no confidence left in its traditional culture. Thus some random experts begin to compare China with other countries in strange ways: e.g. “China has surpassed US in its living standards” “China is becoming the biggest country in consuming luxury goods”…. All these B.S. came out of the mind and the mouth of people who are highly insecure about the country’s status in comparing with the world. Funny that China used to be a country that would only compare to itself.
Poeple lost the ability to judge for themselves… Why do you need all that extravagance to prove that you are better? Because there seemed to be no other way to secure that sense of supiriority. Why do you need to feel supirior than others? I do not have an answer….

The architecture field has been through several phases since the Cultural Revolution: destruction of all the old (it’s practical value lies in the renewal of urban infrastructure…..), builidng new architecture in traditional styles (perhaps not in a very Post-Modernist way), thriving for the New,Strange,Rare (a.k.a. Beijing Olympic era, with short construction period….), and currently another wave of re-thinking: getting some of the old back….It is bizzare to see quite a number of architects in Beijingare asked to design architecture with traditional “touch” or large scale Chinese gardens that incoporates “north and south of China, from the new to the old; combining the eastern philosophy and the western architectural methodology….” One architect said to me: “I call this Karma. In our school days we skipped all the traditional Chinese architecture lectures, we used to consider those lectures useless….Now I have to study all that because this is the project I am getting
…”
What I get out of this situation, is the realization that the denial of one’s culture can really lead to disasters. The denial of one’s true identity is even worse…..

There is a very famous Tang Dynasty poem called “Lou Shi Ming” that almost every Chinese Junior high student are tested on in their exams.
Here I quote its English translation from a website: http://en.v.wenguo.com

[An Epigraph in Praise of My Humble Home] by Liu Yuxi

A mountain needn’t be high;
It is famous so long as there is a deity on it.

A lake needn’t be deep;
It has supernatural power so long as there is a dragon in it.

My home is humble,
But it enjoys the fame of virtue so long as I am living in it.

The moss creeping onto the doorsteps turns them green.
The color of the grass reflected through the bamboo curtains turns the room blue.
Erudite scholars come in good spirits to talk with me,
And among my guests there is no unlearned common man.
In this humble room, I can enjoy playing my plainly decorated qin,
or read the Buddhist Scriptures quietly,
Without the disturbance of the noisy that jar on the ears,
or the solemn burden of reading official documents.
My humble home is like the thatched hut of Zhuge Liang of Nanyang,
or the Pavilion Ziyun of Xishu.

Confucius once said:

“How could we call a room humble as long as there is a virtuous man in it?” ////

I used to wonder is this Epigraph should be considered an antithesis to architecture, since if we all have such powerful minds, then there seems to be no need for any architectural gestures beyond a simple shelter.
Now I am looking at some of the architecture in China, I wonder if one needs to re-assert the notion of Humble Home before thinking about anything extravagant??

Eventually Chinese preservationists will replace all that ETFE cladding with something more durable

-this is a partialy induced Chimay response, not a Coors Light wide mouth blue lable tells me the beer is cold gimmick in a aluminum bottle (?) to get you to drink colored mountain water.

Composition Qoutes:
—-
“Real architecture is, then, architecture in which the quality of realness is paramount. And here, with realness, is how the idea of reality can best enter the realm of architectural discourse. Like “proportion” or “scale,” like any number of qualities ascribable to architecture good and bad, “realness” becomes an attribute of buildings that can be pointed out and discussed, can be found lacking here, present in greater degree there…and so on; in short, realness becomes an observable quality amenable to some level of conceptual formulation” (1)
—-
“It then became clear to me that it was not the task of architecture to invent form. I tried to understand what that task was….Truth is the significance of fact…The structure is the whole from top to bottom, to the last detail – with the same ideas.”(2)
—-
“Mies’s work is developed not out of images but out of materials – materials in the strongest sense of the word; that is, the matter from which objects are constructed. This matter is abstract, general, geometrically cut, smooth, and polished, but it is also material that is substantial, tangible and solid.”(3)
—-
“Among the characteristics of physics (and probably of any other science) we find one additional feature which is rarely emphasized but which is absorbed naturally into the flesh and blood of every scientist. We mean the necessity of abstraction, that is the necessity to find and single out among innumerable relationships only those which affect the relevant phenomenon to the maximum extent.” (4)
—-

Opinion and Conclusion:

It’s pretty clear to me, by this third post of your guest China writer, that the disappoitment in this cutting edge “experimental” architecture in China is due to the lack in quality in truth of material. By material I mean more than the actual material, I also mean the design and labor that forced the ideas into creation in material.

I finalize the composition of qoutes above with a physicist’s opinion on the importance of abstraction. The majority of todays experimental architectural creations, although claiming great (abstract) conceptual importance are no where close to defining the “relevant phenomenon to the maximum extent.”.

“Realness, I think, can be divided into four components, the last one of which has two aspects: presence, significance, materiality, and emptiness (emptiness, emptiness).” (5)

Experiments should further prove the truth and the significance of fact.

Lebbeus, does the experimental architecture of today really further the proof and discovery of truth in architecture?

References:
(1)(5) “For an Architecture of Reality” – Michael Benedikt
(2) “Modern Architecture: A Critical History” – Kenneth Frampton qouting Mies
(3) ‘Differences” – Ignasi de Sola-Morales
(4) “Electrons, Phonons, Magnons” – M. I. Kaganov

But…the projects being discussed above are experiments, no developer in new york does anything remotely close.

So this chinese architecture is kind of forgivable, this pavilion architecture…these aren’t buildings they are experiments.

Experimental architecture is the best architecture one can do as an architect if you ask the magazines and academia.

Who needs master builders right?

“One last little complaint: the renderings of Water Cube were so beautiful that disappointments were inevitable when comparing them with the actual project. It is unfortunate that most architecture publications lie. They do not show what an ordinary visitor actually sees.”

We live in a world of image.