Chinese Experimental Architecture or French Poststructuralist Theory: Different Patches of the Concrete

Chinese Experimental Architecture Or French Poststructuralist Theory: Different Patches of the Concrete starts with a paradox: how the Chinese Cultural Revolution--through its adaptation by French Theory and French Theory’s subsequent adaptation by Chinese Experimental Architecture--shaped the Chinese reformative effort to redefine itself, amidst its struggle against colonial dynamics, and against the Cultural Revolution.

Through French Poststructuralist Theory, the project creates a critical narrative to access the Chinese Experimental Architecture movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s and its legacy in contemporary Chinese architecture. At the same time, it provides, in retrospect, an opportunity to approach French Theory in its rich global materiality as a production of Chinese Experimental Architecture. This study thus overcomes simplistic dichotomies of dominant and subjugated, reductive labels of orientalism, self-orientalism, and nationalism, as well as architectural stylistic or operative canons. It opens such borders and enclosed entities in a positive way, exploring collaborative inquiries where new possibilities of different materialist architectural design and socio-eco-political epistemological structure emerge in a field of events, encounters, and connections around the problématique and signifier of the ＂concrete.＂

Ruo Jia is an architect/artist/theorist/historian/educator. She founded and directs the research-based practice IfWorks, which explores art/architecture possibilities individually Or collectively. Her research into constructing a decolonizing postmodern materialist space through the interweaving of ＂Chinese Experimental Architecture＂ Or ＂French Poststructuralist Theory,＂ is being expanded to envision the possibilities of Asian Feminist Architecture and Posthumanist Sustainability. Her work has been published in the Journal of Architecture, Representations, Log, Brooklyn Rail, and the Journal of Architectural Education, among others. She holds a PhD in Architectural History and Theory from the Princeton University School of Architecture, with an interdisciplinary humanities certificate from Media+Modernity; an M.Arch.II from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; and an M.Arch. and a B.Arch. from the Southeast University School of Architecture. Formerly a tenure-track Assistant Professor in History and Theory of Architecture and affiliated faculty at the Gender Studies Program at Mississippi State University, she has also taught at Pratt, Cornell, Harvard, CUNY, Columbia, and Princeton.