Designing Reform Architecture in the People’s Republic of China, 1970–1992 Cole Roskam

Price: £45.00
Pre-order

Share this page:

Format:: Hardback
Publication date:: 23 Nov 2021
ISBN:: 9780300235951
Imprint:: Yale University Press
Dimensions:: 296 pages: 254 x 178mm
Illustrations:: 86 b-w illus.
Sales territories:: World

Categories:

Investigating the rich architecture of post-Mao China and its broad cultural impact

In the years following China’s Cultural Revolution, architecture played an active role in the country’s reintegration into the global economy and capitalist world. Looking at the ways in which political and social reform transformed Chinese architecture and how, in turn, architecture gave structure to the reforms, Cole Roskam underlines architecture’s unique ability to shape space as well as behavior. Roskam traces how foreign influences like postmodernism began to permeate Chinese architectural discourse in the 1970s and 1980s and how figures such as Kevin Lynch, I. M. Pei, and John Portman became key forces in the introduction of Western educational ideologies and new modes of production. Offering important insights into architecture’s relationship to the politics, economics, and diplomacy of post-Mao China, this unprecedented interdisciplinary study examines architecture’s multivalent status as an art, science, and physical manifestation of cultural identity.

Cole Roskam is associate professor of architectural history in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong.

"Impeccably researched, Designing Reform is a groundbreaking study of architecture in contemporary China that provides firm grounds for further scholarship."—Vladimir Kulic, author of Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980

"Cole Roskam's study offers a window into an important transitional period in both Chinese architecture and history, convincingly tying architectural production to shifts and subtleties of policy."—Alan Plattus, Yale University