Strategies of negation in reflective design as an alternative to critical regionalism: a study of contemporary architecture in China and Japan since 1990

© 2019 Dr. Lu ZhangAfter a long period of westernisation and modernisation, East Asian countries had begun a common effort in regenerating indigenous cultural resources to shape their own versions of modernity in response to a globalising homogenisation in architecture. It firstly emerged in Japan with a rise of Metabolist movement since the 1960s. Benefited from the Chinese market economy and opening-up policy, it happened in China only from the 1990s, amongst some most reflective architects with independent thinking. This situation puts China and Japan into parallel and even comparable positions to examine East Asian approaches to respond the universalizing forces of globalisation. This is often viewed as attempts in ‘critical regionalism’, a concept developed in European and North American academic context using mainly western cases and concepts. This raises an issue as to if this western category is applicable to the cases in East Asia. However, there is no research done that addresses this issue using cases from China and Japan in a regional framework and adopting indigenous aesthetic categories in response to formulations from the west. To fill up this gap, this research conducts a region-based comparative study on the most recent reflective design practices in China and Japan. It explores the use of traditional aesthetic ideas and strategies that – already different in the past – may depart from western categories for contemporary practice. It aims to discover new expressions and new uses of traditional aesthetic categories – conscious or unconscious – in contemporary design practices in China and Japan that may indicate an alternative path to those proposed in the Euro-American context. This thesis tries to position critical regionalism within a larger historic and geographic context. It is neither to critique the details of the former argument, nor to debate the value and significance of this concept in any abstract sense. Rather, it is to seek for an alternative to critical regionalism in the current East Asian circumstances. It aims to test and to find out an alternative approach – discovered as a strategy of negation – to critical regionalism, an approach rooted in the local cultural and aesthetic traditions