Modern Architectures in Context: Cities in Asia

Abstract

This course investigates how architecture in colonial and postcolonial Asian cities evolved, highlighting the emergence of “Asian modernism” through nuanced processes of adapting, resisting and reinterpreting Western paradigms.

Objective

This course aims to cultivate skills in the formal and historical analysis of architecture while deepening theoretical understanding of the relationship between architecture and cities. It seeks to illuminate how modernity took distinct spatial forms across Asia and to encourage critical reflection on the historiography of modern architecture, exploring ways to broaden its geographical scope.

Content

In the study of architecture, buildings are often regarded as ‘texts’ to be read. Adopting this interpretive angle, what can we learn from an analysis of how cities function as the ‘context’ of buildings, as something that necessarily coexists with (con-) them and gives them meaning? Cities not only form the immediate physical environment of buildings but also embody the discursive force field into which they, once brought into existence, are embedded as articulations of thought, desire and affect. This course, which requires familiarity with the general history of modern architecture, examines how different political and ideological discourses have shaped cities and their architectures in colonial and postcolonial Asia. American philosopher Marshall Berman posited that modernity emerged as a reality in Western Europe but increasingly transformed into a fantasy as it travelled east—how exactly, then, was this fantasy embraced in the ‘east?’ Were there attempts to resist or revise it, and to what extent do such resistance and revisions constitute the specificity of ‘Asian’ modernism? What about the fact that ‘Asia’ is largely a construct, a fictional identity that colonial powers imposed on immensely diverse populations and geographical areas in an attempt to reduce them to an easily graspable—and, by extension, governable—monolith? The course aims to provide preliminary answers to these questions, paying close attention to select cities including Almaty, Baghdad, Beijing, Chandigarh, Dhaka, Colombo, Hanoi, Hiroshima, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Kabul, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, New Delhi, Pyongyang, Phnom Penh, Seoul, Taipei, Tashkent, Tokyo and Yangon. For each city under study, a notable work of architecture will be singled out and subjected to close reading, after which we will consider how it relates to its immediate as well as larger urban and discursive context.

Resources