AN EXPERIMENT FOR THE MARKET: THE INTERTWINED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ARCHITECTURAL AUTONOMY AND THE MARKET FORCE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA.

• Author: Kang, Kunzhe

1. Introduction

   In contemporary Chinese architecture, the term Experimental Architecture (Shiyan Jianzhu) was first put forward by architecture and art critic Mingxian Wang to characterise the emergence of a group of independent young Chinese architects from 1993 onwards. Through this term, these architects, exemplified by Yung Ho Chang, Jiakun Liu, Wang Shu, Tang Hua, Zhao Lei amongst others, expressed dissatisfaction with the state-sanctioned design institutes and the mainstream architectural production dominated by commercial forces. In response, they began to produce small-scale designs with cubist and minimalistic appearance. Via these designs, they identified themselves as counterforce against the invasion of economics into architectural practices, seeking an autonomous architecture in China.

   This Chinese movement of architectural autonomy, since its birth, quickly drew the attention of the media. From 1999 onward, experimental architects, especially Yung Ho Chang, Jiakun Liu, and Wang Shu, became frequenters of domestic and international architectural and art exhibitions and magazines. Meanwhile, they were also invited to present their works at renowned architectural colleges such as the Architectural Association in the UK, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Cooper Union in the USA. In 2011, Chang became the first Chinese architect to serve as a jury member for the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious award in the architectural profession. In 2012, Wang Shu became the first Chinese architect to win the Pritzker Prize, making them leading Chinese architects and rendering the CEA as a discernible phenomenon in contemporary Chinese architecture.

   The increasing influence of the CEA has also begun to attract the attention of academia, and various scholars have presented fruitful analyses of those experimental architects and their works. In 1998, through the journal Architectural Theory Review, Chinese architectural scholar Jianfei Zhu introduced the Beijing Xishu Bookstore designed by Yung Ho Chang as an attempt of 'breaking from the Beaux Arts paradigm', and oscillating 'between modernist abstraction and regionalist, vernacular representation' (Zhu 1998: 62). Later, through a panoramic presentation of Chang, Jiakun Liu, and Qingyun Ma's works, Zhu labelled the CEA as the 'new criticality in China', opposing 'commercial purposes' (Zhu 2005: 495). For Zhu, he believed that these experimental architects could achieve an autonomous architecture in China through a 'tectonic modernist' approach focusing on 'architecture in itself (Zhu 2008: 118).

   Following Zhu, Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan reviewed Chang and another experimental architect Tang Hua as a new generation of Chinese architecture, who 'willfully deploy modern architecture without feeling a need to confront the burden of tradition' (Row and Kuan 2004: 172). For Rowe and Kuan, Chang and Tang's employment of architectural modernism implies the architects' distance from the real estate industry's abuse of architectural forms. Similarly, by taking the Xiangshan Campus designed by Wang Shu as an instance, Botz Bornstein argued that Wang was conducting critical regionalism, a notion put forward by Kenneth Frampton, as a resistance against the prevailing architectural commodification in Chinese metropolises (Bornstein 2015: 108). Last but not least, by examining coverages of Chang and Liu's works in mainstream Chinese architectural journals, Guanghui Ding labelled the CEA as an 'intermediate criticality', reflecting experimental architects' anxiety when facing the market (Ding 2014: 36).

   While these existing studies significantly enriched our academic understanding of the CEA, the architectural movement's claim of architectural autonomy is accepted as an established fact and is unquestioned by these studies, even though this notion has been proven problematic by recent academic studies.

   To fill this knowledge gap, the current study, in the light of Bourdieu's field theory of cultural production, aims to address questions, including (1) how was the architectural autonomy claimed by the CEA discursively constituted by the symbiotic network of critics, architects and publishers? (2) how did they consecrate specific architects as representatives of the CEA and legitimate their objective narratives as canonical statements through the professional media? (3) what was the relationship between market forces and the notion of architectural autonomy?

2. Literature review: architectural autonomy in controversy

   In the history of architecture, especially contemporary architecture, architectural autonomy has been an influential notion. In 1933, this notion was firstly introduced by the Viennese architectural historian Emil Kaufman. Through the book 'Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier: Ursprung und Entwicklung der autonomen Architektur', Kaufman employed the notion to describe architects Ledoux and Corbusier's break with architectural neo-classicalism (Kaufmann 1985). In the late 1970s, facing the rising wave of 'consumption of sheer commodification' of architectural production (Jameson 1992: 11), the notion was brought up again by a group of architects, exemplified by Peter Eisenman, Aldo Rossi, and Stanford Anderson and so forth. For these architects, architectural autonomy they advocated was a spatial object primarily focuses on its internal issues, including structural, material and most importantly, the formal aspect of a building. By identifying architecture as a purely technical neutrality, they aimed to present their rejection of the capital force's commodification of architectural creations (Scolari 2000: 131). Through the book House of Cards, Eisenman asserted that there could an alternative architecture exempt from external socio-economic influences, and 'exists solely in itself (Eisenman et al. 1987: 181). Similarly, the Italian architect Aldo Rossi also believed that architecture is a cognitive process that in and of itself, in the acknowledge of itself. For Rossi, the way to achieve architectural autonomy is to find forms of ideal types from ancient classic architecture which had not changed over times (Rossi and Eisenman 1984: 127-131). The most straightforward definition of architectural autonomy is by Stanford Anderson, who argued that 'it is still possible for architecture to be other than a mere servant to commercial/capitalist/ideological forces through rediscovering the meaning of material form, space and light' (Anderson 2002: 30-35).

   All these architects' statements, together with Frampton's call for a 'critical regionalist architecture' which rejected the force of commodification (Frampton 2007: 307), constitutes the overarching discourse of architectural autonomy in contemporary architecture. As both Jane Randell and Diane Ghirardo observed, from the mid-1980s onward, this discourse quickly prevailed in the United States academia, and then became exported globally due to the US's dominant publishing industry (Ghirardo 2002: 39, Rendell 2007: 2).

   While enjoying popularity in the architectural profession, architectural autonomy is not exempt from many scholars' criticism. The earliest criticism was made by the Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri. As a scholar influenced by Marxism, Tafuri reviewed the capital force as a totalising system dominating the society and architecture acted as an instrument serving the capital force's production/reproduction of the space (Tafuri 1979: 181-182). For Tafuri, architects are powerless facing the production system as they were mere technicians within the building industry. Based on this diagnosis, Tafuri identified Eisenman and his colleagues' pursuit of an autonomous architecture as nothing but a contemplative game, showing the incapacity, or in his words, 'a crisis of ideology' of the architectural profession when facing the capital force (Tafuri 1979: 181).

   Following Tafuri, the American sociologist Magali Sarfatti Larson and architectural critic Peggy Deamer also deny the credibility of architectural autonomy by unveiling the inseparable entanglement between architecture and the capital force. For Larson, those architects' pursuit of autonomy is an imitation of their artistic counterparts, such as a painters, musicians, and sculptors, who could claim to the only creator of their artwork. However, as Larson states, 'architecture is never, and cannot be, an autonomous field, for buildings cannot be mere drawings... In most cases, architects must design for someone' (Larson 2004: 324). Deamer makes a more straightforward statement, as she says, 'because building a building costs so much money, construction--and within it, architecture--necessarily works for and within the monetary system. One could say that the history of architecture is the history of capital' (Deamer 2014: 2).

   More recent criticism of architectural autonomy comes from architectural theorists Nathaniel Coleman, Tahl Kaminer and Paul Jones. For Coleman, architects' belief in autonomy comes from a blind appropriation of Kant's philosophical narrative of transcendental and universal aesthetic and moral values enjoyed by human-beings. Nevertheless, as Coleman argues,

   Architecture is not philosophy, at least not in the sense that permits the purity of argumentation in isolation from concrete experience and practices on the ground. So while arguments in philosophy might need not be troubled by that way in which the mundane inevitably taints practices, as architects we are so deeply embedded in the world that attempting to claim any such luxury is at best a misapprehension (Coleman 2015: 164). Echoing Coleman, Kaminer argues that architectural autonomy serves as a disputed, exaggerated, and unsubstantiated claim. By taking the Jewish Museum in Berlin designed by Daniel Libeskind and the Guggenheim Bilbao designed by Frank Gehry as examples, Kaminer observes these so-called autonomous practices have deviated from their initial...