A Chinese critical pragmatism.

详细信息   

• 作者：Yung ; Cecilia Ying Sze.
• 学历：Master
• 年：2011
• 毕业院校：Carleton University
• ISBN：9780494831885
• CBH：MR83188
• Country：Canada
• 语种：English
• FileSize：12487404
• Pages：160

文摘

Over the past decade, there have been increasing interests to redefine the potential of architectural practice in relation to the process of global modernization. Intellectual debate, from the 2004 Harvard Design Magazine Stocktaking symposium, to George Bairds renowned article Criticality and Its Discontents, and followed by Zhu JianFeis Criticality in between China and the West, seems to have polarized academic discussions into the theoretical discourse of criticality and an emerging position: the post-critical interventions. Extracting from pragmatic experience in traditional Chinese architectural developments, would it be possible to articulate an alternative approach to contemporary architectural practice? This thesis sets out to explore criticality and its relevance to the globalizing modernity. Through a series of analytical investigations on traditional Chinese architectural concepts, we intend to resolve a substantial approach with which the architectural profession could attempt to provide solutions, rather than negations, in improving the status quo. Focusing on a design strategy, the thesis would move on to a post-critical pragmatic project to respond to some of the arising challenges. We acknowledge that many of the socio-economical issues we face today stretch far beyond the capacity of architecture, or any single professional disciplines for that matter. Only when architects commit to an accommodative position, and when an open platform---on which architectural explorations could become accessible to external collaborative efforts at the individual level---is established, the potentials in the future of profession may be sustained. If the ultimate question for architects is how to make the world a better place, we must consider how modernization from the previous centuries has left us with irreversible consequences. It is only ethical if architectural profession would, at the very least, attempt possible solutions by taking a pragmatic position critically and responding proactively to the problems we are facing in reality. In preparation of the answers for the inevitable challenges tomorrow, both critical and pragmatic approaches seem to be essential in the post-critical developments of the architectural practice.