Ai Weiweis structure built out of antique Chinese doors collapsed not long after it was erected in 2007. Both forms seemed apt for the artist, whose work has also documented shoddy government buildings that collapsed on schoolchildren in the Sichuan earthquake. What is Chinese architecture in 2016?
Ai Weiwei's structure built out of antique Chinese doors collapsed not long after it was erected in 2007. Both forms seemed apt for the artist, whose work has also documented shoddy government buildings that collapsed on schoolchildren in the Sichuan earthquake. What is Chinese architecture in 2016?

I am smitten with China's official announcement that "weird" architecture shall hereby be forbidden. Governments so rarely get in the business of making aesthetic pronouncements these days. Gone are those charming times when Shostakovich embedded into his music the sound of the knocks of Stalin's KGB at his door.

From the New York Times:

A directive issued on Sunday by the State Council, China’s cabinet, and the Communist Party’s Central Committee says no to architecture that is “oversized, xenocentric, weird” and devoid of cultural tradition. Instead, buildings should be “suitable, economic, green and pleasing to the eye.”

Now that the stock market in China is taking a dive, anxiety is bound to cause various types of retrenchment, and this is probably one of them. What kinds of new architectures is Chinese government looking to promote—do they exist already or will a new Chinese postmodernism emerge? Can a postmodernism, by nature a pastiche, be Chinese? A Chinese modernism, then?