This is the dean USC’s architecture program, Qingyun Ma: 
The dean is from Xi’an, China, has an office in Shanghai, and a hand in Rem Koolhaas’ big Beijing project.
A new article in Fast Company has this to say about Ma’s architectural approach/agenda:
One of Ma’s core ideas — the impermanence of architecture — has particular appeal for anyone who would be happy to see Los Angeles’ relentless sprawl bulldozed. Ma, 43, views today’s Western architecture as a descendant of the Greco-Roman tradition, which is all about building in stone and erecting things that are intended to last forever. (Which makes it all the more amusing that he’s an occasional collaborator of Koolhaas, creating mind-bending buildings, such as Beijing’s CCTV headquarters, that look as if they might fall down.) Clearly a son of modern China, he questions the West’s preservationist reflex. “Everything has a life cycle, as should buildings,” he says. “Preservation is an action in sacrifice of future possibilities. The future needs its own space.”
This is all very strange. The West is about permanence and the East is about impermanence? The West as a sign of tradition, preservation, and the past; the East as a sign of change, innovation, and the future? The West, remembering; the East, forgetting? If this is so, if Ma is right, then things have changed dramatically. Ma’s coding of the West/East situation is completely new. Until recently, what coded China was the dauntingly long history of its language, culture, architecture, and art. Europe signaled the new; China the ancient. Even the Greeks coded the West/East binary in these terms. In the Politics, Aristotle located the Greeks between stable/intelligent but spiritless Asians and the unstable/instinctual but full of spirit Europeans. The Greeks were perfect.
As long as there has been an idea of the West, there has been the idea that the East is something older and more orderly. When did the complete transformation of this type of coding and decoding happen?
Chuck,
You need to brush up on your Mao. He bulldozed every ancient cultural symbol he could…
Where do you get the impression the east was ever about preservation?…
What used to be where that Manhattan-Chase building went up?
The vast majority of Western buildings have an intended lifespan of a couple of decades. Where’s this guy been? Western architecture hasn’t been about permanence for fifty years.
Sometime in the 70s and 80s when Asia became the manufacturing capital of electronics while the US was discovering its rustbelt.
As evidence for this ill-informed position, I point to 1982’s Blade Runner’s language (the choice of predominantly Chinese over Spanish lingo), 1984’s Neuromancer’s Chiba City “black clinics,” and the name of the shipping company in 1979’s Alien: Weyland-Yutani. (Even 1992’s Aliens III… at the end, when the android comes back to plead that the alien queen should be saved, he is flanked by some slick, Asian super-doctor types.)
@1, yeah, maybe that had something to do with it too.
Go Charles!
@3
Yeah, it seems American buildings have been disposable since WWII, while Europeans have sought preservation.
Perhaps there are 3 parts of the world.
This jibes with some NY Times Magazine article I read about African development, and how the US, EU, and China were each seeking to convince Africa that they had the best way. Of course, it was really about being able to plunder Africa’s resources in exchange for bringing African under their wings. Or something.
Great Wall ring a bell? The Central Committee will decide what is permanent. Forget that and you find yourself permanently behind bars.
Charles, I am in love with your beautiful mind.
Yet China still thinks that anything ever once under its control should still be under its control. Impermanence I think not.
Ma could be wrong. the future can’t afford impermanence. adaptation, sure.
@5, modern building in Europe is even shoddier than ours most of the time. If you visit Paris or Rome you won’t see it, because tourists only visit the historical centers, which are preserved for that very reason. But huge swathes of viable older buildings are being demolished all over Europe and replaced with stuff that makes the tattiest, ugliest Seattle townhomes look like palaces. They are also madly tearing down the first and second generations of godawful postwar housing, too — all those horrible towers built to Will in Seattle’s dream specification.
as former colonial states and spheres of interest have not only come into their own but are now poised to become world leaders, then the west and that ideal of permanance and land based power becomes passe. the east has developed as the west has outsourced. of course it is the model of impermanence, always searching for the most cost effective ways of production as it shifts constantly. it is the model of the east’s success.
did anyone else think he was holding a gun in that photo for like 10 seconds?? his facial expression is all “YOUR MOVE, MON AMI”
This is just another architect spouting off a theoretical justification for poor buildings. His beliefs will no doubt be seized upon by developers trying to sell their cheap-ass buildings as high style. Philip Johnson was actually quoted as saying that Modernism was adopted as the preferred architecture of American capitalism simply because it was cheaper to build than other styles.
chas,
intended to last forever, and looking like it will last forever are two completely different things.
most buildings that look like they’ll last forever have a thin veneer of shit. it’s not that durable.
Ma is a postmodern pimp, and a shameless apologist for the perpetuators of architectural genocide, generations of Chinese rulers who systematically bombed and bulldozed thousands of monasteries, temples and other cultural and historic buildings throughout China, including Tibet, and murdered millions of Tibetans, Mongolians, Uigars and Chinese dissidents in order to ethnically cleanse China of all its non-Han residents. These same brutal destroyers of buildings and indigenous cultures have in recent years spent millions of $$ to rebuild some of these destroyed sites as tourist traps. If you want to see Ma’s philosophy in action, do a Google image search of Lhasa, where almost all of the original Tibetan buildings–many of which were quite beautiful and had stood for hundreds of years–have been leveled to build Ma’s dream buildings: cheesy, ugly, poorly constructed and architecturally monstrous examples of “impermanence.” I’m sure Ma cynically laughs at the people of Chendu who just don’t get the “impermanence” of of the school buildings destroyed during the May 12 earthquake, killing hundreds of kids. People in that town are still living in “impermanent” tents in freezing cold weather. I’m sure in Ma’s world, cold is “cool,” but anyone in Chendu who complains about this in public risks being sent to a reeducation camp, or an even worse fate.
I think #4 has it right.