Rafael Vinoly Grant

They rejected the best grant proposal they are going to get in a long time. I think so, anyway, and since I wrote the thing, why wouldn't I think that? But still, the fact that they didn't pick this as one of the five grantees makes me wonder. What are they afraid of? A real Ph.D. candidate? One who isn't getting a Ph.D. in architecture, where they don't know real research if it bit them on the you-know-where, but in a field where architecture requires knowing other disciplines. Fields. An undergraduate degree that isn't primarily a skilled trade degree?

So here it is:

Despite all recent press, a close reading of China’s urbanization has not been performed by those trained in its history, language, culture, historiography or epistemology. Western, Orientalist discourses privilege the “Nest,” the “Egg,” CCTV or hutongs as the sole relevant examples of Chinese urbanization. They exemplify China’s modernity and its failings, along with superior Western design. Presumably China cannot attain true modernity, producing grotesque imitations plagued by uniquely Chinese problems: alienation, exploitation and the spectacle amidst indiscriminate demolition.

"This project transforms the entire discourse on Chinese urbanization, transcending narrow studies on “hutong preservation” or “migrant housing”. It frames context: Western discourses portray projects as decontextualized icons. We investigate an entire area of all formal, informal, small and medium-scale projects and spaces. Most importantly, we situate them in their larger context. We study Beijing because it has become the proxy for China’s failed modernization and has been so grossly misrepresented.

At stake is fundamentally changing strategies and policies for urbanizing China—not just Beijing—to prevent what Westerners lament and yet replicate: designs disassociated from China’s cultural and historical context. By documenting how architects, China’s government, residents and the Western gaze construct Beijing, this project will shape advanced strategies and policies."

My guess that the post-Orientalist, and anti-Orientalist approach was too much for their rather narrow, dare I even suggest racist? minds. I think so. They'd rather have some Chinese person from China, who doesn't question basic American epistemology about China, to make a proposal about China.

This was a grant about emerging economies, the BRIC economies, and I think it is just too threatening for conventional people not educated outside of the architectural field to contemplate something different. I guarantee none of them has ever read Edward Said. Or, dare I suggest a woman? Chandra Talpade Mohanty?

I await the de-Orientalizing of the architecture field

The Underexposed City 2

Upon reading Henri Lefebvre's chapter on "Spatial Architectonics" in his book, The Production of Space, it becomes clear that architecture has been mistaken for a visual system of objective containment. Or, that architecture somehow exists in an objective realm that transcends coding. Architecture is more accurately the subjective sequencing of boundaries. Its importance lies not merely in how it shelters and protects from the elements but in how it communicates inward and outward thresholds, transitions, changes in physical, psychological, intellectual and spiritual states. Architecture is therefore a transformative orchestration of boundary maintenance or transgression for very specific and culturally-defined subjectivities.

As Lefebvre notes, monuments are distinct from mere buildings. because they represent the nodes, or the "strong points" in the web of meaning--or as he relates monuments to music, they possess a "horizon of meaning." They stand out in the fields; they are the significant knots in the fabric.

In reference to Beijing, the monuments are perhaps not what they appear to be. Rather, those buildings designated as monuments may in fact not perform as true monuments in all senses. They may serve as such in the visual realm or in the realm of spatio-historical tourism, but in terms of new cultural forms they are merely buildings. Where, then, are the true monuments of present-day Beijing?

The Underexposed City

In his book Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Ackbar Abbas considers the challenges of photographing the spaces of Hong Kong. He describes the post-colonial city as so "overexposed" as to be impossible to capture in photographs. Attempts to capture the city in photographs loop back and reference the flood of images already contained in the West's cultural imaginary of the "Orient" or "Hong Kong."

Most recently, Beijing has been subjected to a similar sort of overexposure, leading up to the Olympics. The term "Beijing fatigue" was noted in a recent Architectural Record commentary. The condition Abbas reveals, however, is in fact the underexposure that occurs due to the limitations of a Western gaze, overly laden with colonial and Orientalist history. The anonymous spatial conditions of such historically-charged cities are overlooked in favor of nearly ready-made Asian spectacles, whether so-called "traditional" or the spatial upheaval of new modernities.

As Abbas notes, photography can serve to evoke the city even though it may fail to define it. By photographing the anonymous, the banal, the everyday buildings that make up most of a city such as Beijing, the city begins to reappear from the spectacle of large spatial systems. The specificity of place begins to replace the totalizing assumptions of "foreign" or "exotic" space.